R Meltzer (Re) Considered
If Richard Meltzer didn’t invent the post-grammatical mode of discourse utilized on the internet, then he prefigured it to a degree that’s uncanny.
I’m living for giving the devil his due
— Blue Oyster Cult, “Burnin’ For You” (lyrics by Richard Meltzer)
Today the mainstream media covers pop music so extensively — exhaustively? — that it’s impossible to imagine the situation during the swinging late Sixties. When monolith media ruled there was an informal consensus: big-city daily newspapers, weekly newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek, three television networks — all the major outlets — barely deigned to acknowledge rock and roll during its purported heyday. The young folks’ music was handled gingerly if at all, regarded from a lofty height, treated with disdain or condescension or both. Until the emergence of the underground press, and eventually Rolling Stone, anyone interested in learning more about the songs and singers they encountered on radio and records had to swallow their pride and peruse teenage-focused fan magazines such as 16 and Tiger Beat.
As the hippie counterculture flourished, new periodicals arose that were, in varying degrees, dedicated to the new music, covering it in relative depth. Filling these pages were writers and editors such as Jon Landau, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, Jann Wenner, Paul Nelson: they proudly pursed a self-consciously cerebral or anyway a more considered approach than the breathless teenybopper gazettes.
And then there was Richard Meltzer.
From the start, he was sui generis: never a thoughtful essayist, user-friendly consumer advocate or conscientious record-rating reviewer. Publishing in pre-Rolling Stone journals such as Fusion and Crawdaddy, Meltzer practiced criticism as Beat poetry, performance art, juvenile prank, standup comedy — all at once. His first book, The Aesthetics Of Rock was almost impenetrable on purpose. Published in 1970, Aesthetics had been largely composed several years before, as Meltzer’s college thesis in philosophy (rejected). It stands as both an academic parody, and a boldly convoluted statement of purpose.
My thesis here is straightforward: Richard Meltzer is the most influential writer to arise out of the boomer rock and roll cognoscenti. Reviled by many of his peers and respected by few even at his zenith (forget about now), Richard Meltzer nevertheless stands as the sole cultural critic of his generation with any sustained contemporary relevance. Because, this: If Meltzer didn’t flat-out invent the post-grammatical mode of discourse utilized on the internet over the last couple decades, in both form and to a lesser degree content, then he for damn sure prefigured it to a degree that’s uncanny.
Let’s get the big claim out of the way: Richard Meltzer, born in 1945 and thankfully still with us, pioneered the way people write online. Many of the prose tricks ‘n tics that millions of people utilize daily, in text messages and social media posts, originated with Meltzer’s groundbreaking writing on popular music and other cultural detritus during the Sixties and Seventies. (He kept on writing until very recently, in an expanded yet still “difficult” style on a wider range of subjects — more about that later.) Meltzer was part of the aforementioned first wave of writers who addressed rock and roll on its own terms, as opposed to pandering to or patronizing its fan base. Yet he disrupted the nascent field of rock criticism. You want creative destruction? In the anything-goes Sixties, Richard Meltzer regularly went too far. Even hippies thought he was too much.
From the start, he displayed a tactile, physical sense of letters and words. The clunky old typewriter was his painter’s palette. His artistic practice came to include:
*CAPITALIZATION and italics used as emphatic and rhythmic devices
*playful deployment of “punctuation”
*misspelling on porpoise
*strategic and/or tactical abbrv & contr’t’n
*puns and the lowest of low humor — gross dirty jokes! — plus oodles of SMUT
*embarrassing self-disclosure employed as both true confession and assault weapon
Alarmingly prolific from the start, he also published as R Meltzer and under pseudonyms such as Borneo Jimmy, Lar Tsub, Ozzard Dobbs, Audie Murphy Jr.
“Everybody picked his own little niche,” Meltzer said of the Sixties in a late Nineties interview. “I remember doing a piece at the time of [The Rolling Stones LP] Between the Buttons and “Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane” [Beatles 45 rpm single] that was 20 pages long, talking about just those two events. At the very least, it didn’t feel anything like journalism. If anything, it was like ringside coverage of the sun coming up.”
Before his irreverence about rock tipped into cynicism (around 1972), Meltzer could connect with the right subject on an essential, nearly spiritual level. The mere titles of these two reviews speak volumes: “Pythagoras The Cave Painter” (Axis: Bold As Love by The Jimi Hendrix Experience) and “Getting It On And Taking It Off With Iggy & The Stooges” (Iggy Pop live at Ungano’s during the summer of 1970). Almost equal to his love for The Beatles was his deep affection for The Grateful Dead.
By his own admission he fell out of love with rock music early in the Seventies (The Dead were never the same after Pigpen died), though perversely his output of music writing increased exponentially as the Me Decade lumbered on. Even his overstuffed anthology, A Whore Just Like The Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer (2000), doesn’t capture everything he published during the Seventies. Generous to a fault, AWJLTR manages to simultaneously skim the surface and scrape the barrel-bottom.
Rolling Stone’s short-lived book division Straight Arrow Press published a Meltzer anthology titled Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America (1972). It’s a hastily assembled clearance sale, by the author’s own admission, and most readers will agree. It’s bizarre, and also funny. Gulcher corrals discursive discourse on records, movies and TV, plus bottle caps (“The Cap Collector’s Handbook”), cigarettes from a non-smoker’s perspective (“Luckies Vs Camels: Who Will Win?”) and sports (“Grappling’s Cascade of Blood,” “Hot Times From Wrestling’s Golden Quarter Century 1945–70”).
Straight Arrow Press folded not long after, due to mismanagement, and Meltzer’s relationship with Rolling Stone soured around the same time, as his increasingly ah eclectic approach didn’t gibe with the magazine’s increasingly earnest music coverage. Meltzer’s confreres and fellow travelers-on-the-edge Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches were also cut loose from the soon-to-be-mainstream biweekly in the early Seventies.
But the baby-boomer music business boomed at least until 1979; more records released every year meant more music magazine pages to fill with ads — and reviews.
During the Watergate era, Meltzer published in august rags such as Creem, New Haven Rock Press, Phonograph Record Magazine, Zoo World, Rock, Changes, Waxpaper, Coast. That’s a mere sample, culled from A Whore Just Like The Rest.
“So I reviewed albums I didn’t listen to,” Meltzer told Andrea Juno of REsearch in 1987, describing his work routine in the preceding decade. “I reviewed the cover; I reviewed one album as if it were another one. I reviewed concerts I never went to…for example I reviewed a big Neil Young concert in Carnegie Hall that I didn’t go to. I said that in the middle of the show he brought out a stool, sat down and read poems that were really good. Then I quoted three of my poems. That appeared in a New York newspaper.”
Richard Meltzer really did write poetry, not so much out of the Beat tradition like his prose, closer in spirit and affect to the New York School: Frank O’Hara boiled down to a rancid concentrate. Representative title, from a 1980s chapbook: 17 Insects Can Die In Your Heart. His blank verse would be perfectly suited to song lyrics and what do you know, he contributed to a dozen or more tunes by the cerebral heavy metal band Blue Oyster Cult. Meltzer became acquainted with the nucleus of that band, and their producer/manager Sandy Pearlman, as an undergraduate at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island during the mid-to-late sixties.
You can have my autograph
I think I’ll sign it good health to you
Upon the cast, your broken arm
— Blue Oyster Cult, “Stairway to the Stars”
“Burnin’ For You” reached Number 40 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1981. It was Blue Oyster Cult’s second biggest hit (the cowbell-clanging “Don’t Fear The Reaper” hit Number 12 in 1976) and stuck in Meltzer’s craw for decades afterwards. He eventually ended his relationship with the band over disputed royalties. Other Blue Oyster Cult songs co-credited to Richard Meltzer include: “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot,” “Stairway to the Stars,” “Teen Archer,” “Cagey Cretins,” “Harvester of Eyes,” “Death Valley Nights,” “Dr. Music,” “Lips in the Hills,” “Burnin’ for You,” “Veins,” “Spy in the House of Night,” “Stone of Love, ” “The Return of St. Cecilia.”
Another sign of Meltzer’s compulsive productivity during the Seventies is the relatively scant handful of his many contributions to The Village Voice appearing in A Whore Just Like The Rest. Under the exacting editorial eyes of Robert Christgau at the downtown weekly, Meltzer’s freewheeling style may have been slightly reigned in. But the imposed discipline sharpened his attack, whether he was violating the opera house (“Meltzer at the Met”) or trailing free jazz to the heavens (“Dolphy Was Some ‘Weird’ Cat”).
In a typically inexplicable move, Richard Meltzer relocated from New York to Los Angeles just as punk rock reared its brutally shorn head at CBGB in 1975. Once ensconced in LA, Meltzer fronted his own (mercifully short-lived) punk unit Vom, bellowing ditties such as “I’m In Love With Your Mom” and “Electrocute Your Cock.” His cryptic Blue Oyster Cult lyrics and post-beatnik poetry sound Shakespearean in comparison. Though in Los Angeles, his printed-page practice found a more-or-less sympathetic audience. At first. The heavy metal-flaked sound and (barely) post-adolescent stance of much Southern California punk rock was right up Meltzer Alley. Quite possibly he felt more comfortable amid these young suburban rebels than the arty bohemians back on The Bowery.
More importantly, Vom’s handful of gigs inspired Meltzer’s equally short-lived and possibly more infamous radio show. Hepcats From Hell only lasted about one year (1980) on listener-supported KPFK, until Meltzer managed to get dropped (for using curse words without the preceding language disclaimer), despite being on the air between 2:00 and 6:00 on Sunday morning. And as the extended hangover also known as the Eighties rolled in like a marine layer of Pacific Ocean fog over Santa Monica, Richard Meltzer, along with many Sixties survivors, felt compelled to reinvent himself.
So he did. As a lifestyle writer? In authentic Meltzerian fashion he was closer to an anti-lifestyle writer, or a (semi) lovable misanthrope at large, everybody’s favorite curmudgeon about town.
LA Is The Capital of Kansas: Painful Lessons in Post New York Living ably sums up his Eighties output, primarily drawing from the “alt-weeklies” LA Reader and LA Weekly. This is Richard Meltzer at his most consistently readable.
The two-part dining guide “Burgers I Have ET” is, though far from mouth-watering, an incisive and predictive satire of the nascent foodie phenomenon. Though it’s worth noting that the late and lamented virtuoso LA restaurant critic Jonathan Gold was a vocal Meltzer fan. The dystopian “A Guide to The Ugliest Buildings In LA” is self-explanatory, vividly detailed and revelatory — even or especially if you’ve never been west of the Rockies.
The problem with Richard Meltzer — his Achilles Heel, his soft underbelly — is sexism, possibly tipping into misogyny. He’s guilty as charged, unrepentant at times, beyond what can be expected from a man of his generation. I’ll quietly suggest he’s not an absolute CREEP but I can’t argue if you choose to see him as such. As evidence we’ll examine two pieces from LA Is The Capital of Kansas. One is damning and the other, maybe, just maybe, partially explanatory though far from exonerating. Consider them a pair of personal essays, or a pair of two-person too-personal essays.
“The Girl Who Never Ate Pizza” is frankly appalling. This is Richard Meltzer the Neanderthal Man. Even if we give him the benefit of doubt, and believe this doomed encounter was as mutually consensual as the author claims, his behavior (fully detailed) falls somewhere between misread signals, unwanted physical attention, and narrowly thwarted date rape. The fact that he finally accepts “no” as an answer is cold comfort. As their one-on-one poetry seminar ends in ashes, the younger (by twenty years) woman shows her would-be mentor to the door.
“‘Mainly, I don’t think I could handle showing up in somebody’s poem.’ I forgot to tell her I also write prose.”
Full disclosure: I’m disgusted, I don’t approve, but I laughed at that last line anyway.
“A Bookstore Story” flips the script. Meltzer journeys across town to a bookstore “specializing in HOMOSEXUAL — authored lit” in search of obscure William Burroughs titles. He finds the books he’s looking for, and more. A pimply late teenage male who’s “showing signs of experimental razoring” on his face follows Meltzer to his car, bumming a ride with the bemused (but not for long) author. He deflects the kid’s verbal advances as gently as possible, displaying unexpected patience, even understanding.
“This guy is worse than me with the ladies… at last I know how females feel. I know how they feel when even verbal is too much to parry, when these persistent S.O.B.’s are just so … annoying. (I learned my lesson — GALS TAKE NOTE — & will never persist with ’em, uninvited, again.)”
I didn’t have the heart to check if “A Bookstore Story” was published after “The Girl Who Never Ate Pizza.”
Richard Meltzer reached his Nineties apotheosis early in the decade, writing about the Rodney King decision and ensuing riots. The San Diego Reader published “One White Man’s Opinion” in 1992 and after that howl of righteous pain and outrage there wasn’t much left for Meltzer to consider in the Land of Sunshine. Prescient ain’t the word; this white man’s opinion will resonate and sound horribly familiar to many people today.
“L.A. TV’s vilest hour (every channel, every newsperson, no exceptions) from naked live to edited fake in no time flat…running bullshit graphics like The L.A. Riots and Violence In The Streets instead of Travesty of Justice or Racism ’92…airing The Cosby Show for ratings and social control…the most rightwing major town in America — the goddam Bible Belt had nothing on this place.”
It’s easy to understand why Meltzer moved north to not-yet-trendy Portland Oregon around 1995. It’s also easy to understand why the returns on satirical alt-weekly essay writing diminished, aesthetically and emotionally if not financially, for Meltzer as the decade wound down. I recoiled with the acute paranoia of a new parent when I read a late-period Meltzer piece of “stunt journalism” in the LA Reader where the author gamely donned a Santa Claus suit and worked the malls at Christmas time.
Published in 1995, The Night Alone: A Novel was no doubt intended to lift Meltzer to a new level. All too predictably, once again, that didn’t happen. “The best thing I ever wrote, and [publisher Little, Brown] dropped it off a cliff,” he complained to an online interviewer early in the next century. For my money, well honestly I borrowed a copy from the public library, it failed to live up to the A Novel promise in its title. Hey I wasn’t expecting Madame Bovary but The Night (Alone) disappoints even considered on the loose criteria of contemporary autofiction. When the “novelist” wheeled out his anecdote about starting a snowball fight with the New York Dolls on a Manhattan street, for the third or fourth time, I hung my head in despair. In Meltzerian terms: A real crisis of IMAGINATION in an original stylist who previously never lacked “I” — is a bummer.
The ravages of aging are unavoidable so why not write about them? Hence Autumn Rhythm (2003) a collection of essays focused on “Time, Tide, Aging, Dying And Such Biz” and the last (so far) bound volume by Richard Meltzer. His bloody-minded humor and indomitable spirit are unbowed, but speaking as a certified geezer and Medicare recipient, this subject matter is tough if not impossible to render in an interesting or original way. Sympathetic? Sure. The tribute to his ailing cat made this lifelong non-pet-owner feel sad, though his guide to flirting with young barmaids was sad in a less sympathetic sense. Meanwhile complaints about the internet (in 2002, who knew) or being snubbed by initially friendly young folks (OK boomer) were cliched right out of the starting gate.
When he finally gets around to er music, recounting that time he first heard The Beatles (aka the White Album) with a roomful of rapt (wasted) hippies, recommending scratchy old country blues records and a honking Coleman Hawkins saxophone solo, Autumn Rhythm comes full circle. Here Richard Meltzer achieves something akin to closure. No wonder he’s since retired from writing, though a new (or unearthed) “novel” is threatened.
I’ll conclude by paying tribute to the most culturally significant (unintentionally!) piece of writing by Richard Meltzer, possibly his funniest, and surely the most potent distillation of his renegade prose style.
“Buy A VTR And Rule The World” first appeared in the November 13, 1978 issue of The Village Voice and is collected in the long out of print The Village Voice Anthology 1956–1980. Here Meltzer embraces an emergent technology — the video tape recorder — and celebrates the liberation of TV viewing from the “tyranny” of scheduling. After the introduction of video taping came the deluge, the tide of all-conquering acronyms: VCR, CD, DVD, PC. (And I guess AI.) Without knowing what would occur over the decades to come (because nobody did!), Meltzer heralded the bright new dawn of interactive pop culture: from audio taping to digital file sharing and beyond. It’s hard to explain to anyone born after say, 1975, exactly why TV Guide was the best-selling magazine in the United States for decades. But if you get past the dated references, “Buy A VTR And Rule The World” provides a full measure of old world flavor. Not to mention the kind of lead paragraph you can’t learn to write in journalism school.
“Network television’s been shit for years now, I mean name me a goddam current televised anything — exclusive of sporting events — that can even remotely compete with ‘Leave It To Beaver’ or ‘The Night Stalker’. ‘Laverne and Shirley’ is about it, the ‘$1.98 Beauty Show’ is a BIG disappointment. If you said ‘Rhoda’ or ‘Taxi’ or one of them y’might as well be reading something charming like Louisa May Alcott or James Thurber or one of them: y’know, charming literature. TV’s always supposed to’ve been BIG & CRASS which is just jake with me but all it’s become lately is small & bland unto death. I mean you ever try dealing with ‘The Waverly Wonders’? Bland worthless on a FRIDAY NIGHT. Or ‘Dallas’? B.w. on a SATURDAY NIGHT (is worse than cancer).”
Richard Meltzer not only foreshadowed our brave new 21st Century digital existence, he helped pave the way. So remember him the next time you post a meme or drop an emoji. But hey, don’t blame him.
“S’over, so make your own world.”
