Richard Meltzer, part 4

By Scott Woods

Scott:   You call 1981 a "cutoff point," for the reason being that you "turned a corner in figuring out how to write." I wonder if you could elaborate on that a bit -- was it in the endless rewriting?
Richard:    Yeah, I mean, basically, the sequence of events was a couple things. One, I got a column in this paper called the L.A. Reader, which no longer exists. Every other week I wrote whatever I wanted, and I had an invitation to do a poetry reading. I had a punk show on KPFK in L.A., from '79 to '81 ["Hepcats From Hell"], and just from being on that show, people hearing me on the show, this woman who ran shows at Al's Bar -- mostly punk shows; it was in an artist loft part of downtown -- she asked me if I'd like to do a poetry reading, and I said, "I don't have any poems," and she said, "Well, write some." And so I started writing poems, and I found in doing that it really affected the way I wrote prose. It got to where I had -- every SYLLABLE had to be making music. It wasn't MEANING, it was rhythm, cadence, y'know, SOUND. It couldn't be conky. And at the same time, and going back to prose from that, I found that I really was thinking about that all the time, as opposed to laying down ten million miles of asphalt and just GO! it slowed down the process. But the main thing was that in doing the column for this paper, I started thinking, well, maybe I would like to be more CLEAR; I'm tired of being misunderstood, I have to articulate the stuff so people get what I mean. I have to take my time to listen to what's in my head and GET IT RIGHT. And so I found myself writing and rewriting and rewriting and all of that, and I went from doing no rewrites to doing many. And etc. etc. etc.
     I'd say the next thing that affected me was about '84 or so, I was in my late thirties, and I started READING, I never used to read. And I thought, well, let's go for the most difficult stuff right away -- I'm gonna read Faulkner, and so I read Light in August and Sound and the Fury, and after that I read Joyce and Dostoyevsky and all this business, and I read Robbes-Grillet, this French guy who did Last Year at Marienbad. It was just like intentionally very elusive stuff. And so it got to where -- I wouldn't say any of these people influenced me directly, just the idea of, I oughta take my time and come up with a prose; the time had come for me to really think about my narrative voice, think about a prose that is my own. And at the same time, from '81 to '84 or so, was the absolute dwindling and final collapse of the L.A. punk scene, and I stopped going to shows. You'd get these bands that would trash a club, and that's all it was about -- goodbye. And so I stopped going to shows, and I stayed at home and read books. And basically, I lived in L.A., which was a horrible place. My girlfriend wouldn't leave town, she wouldn't move, and so my feeling was, what was L.A. for? It was a place I could WORK; it was not my home, it was my office. And I found myself getting deadly serious about writing, at a time when I was really, I would say -- in those years, I really liked the Minutemen, and they were probably the last band, in L.A. at least, that mattered to me.

Scott:   What currently interests you enough that you'd want to write about it?
Richard:    Well, I don't know. Somebody offered me a piece -- I did a piece at the end of the year for the San Diego Reader and the Chicago Reader, they asked me to do my take on the 20th century as it was ending, so I wrote this 35-page piece, I called it "My Century, Your Century, Bobo Olson's Century" -- Bobo was a middle-weight champion in the early '50s -- this is when I looked up his record online and it was wrong. But basically, I tried to say as many things in as few pages as I had about how the century had gone to hell, how all these things happened only to un-happen. I talk about how when I was three days old Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded "Soul Peanuts" in the city where I lived -- what a time to be born! And I talked about Jayne Mansfield in the tit mags in 1956 as being a high point for the century, and this and that and the other. But I basically don't find a lot of joy from what is THRUST at us on web pages and TV and movies and so forth. And I don't listen to the radio. For sound I play CDs that I wanna hear.

Scott:   Did the classical stuff tick with you at all?
Richard:    Oh, you know. I basically went through it just to see what it was, because I felt I was 50 years old, I wanna listen to the stuff. So I went through it, and there's some stuff -- I know what I like. I wanted to know: who was Bach? who was Mozart? who was Beethoven? And I found out, and I know what pieces I like by these people. I like some Wagner, and I like Schoenberg -- I did a piece on Schoenberg that almost made it into the book, where I talked about all the monster movies I saw, and the soundtracks from most '50s monster movies were lifted from Schoenberg. So his music was very easy for me to listen to -- I had NO problem listening to Schoenberg. I don't think Stravinsky's too much of a big deal after 1912.

Scott:   In the closing section of your book, you talk about how you were actually moved by a Joan Osborne song called "Right Hand Man," which I've never heard...
Richard:    It's just very lude...

Scott:   You call it the greatest rock song in 15-18 years...
Richard:    Of what I've heard.

Scott:   I actually thought it was kind of a funny comment, just assuming that you hadn't really listened to too much music in that period. But you say it's proof that "accidents still happen." Do they happen very often?
Richard:    I don't think so -- that's why you call them accidents. One of the things that I do, for kicks, my social life and my cultural life in Portland, is mostly sitting on a bar stool, drinking micro-brews, and drinking ales as bitter as life itself on a cold, rainy day, and talking to strangers about who knows what. And I've met lots and lots of people -- I'd say most of the people who I see in these places who are regulars, are, like, 32 years old or less, and I'm surprised how many of them know early Stones albums and so forth. And I can talk to these people about it, and once in a while they'll play me something. I got to know about the Replacements -- one of my friends, Ed, a dishwasher in some place where I hang out, lent me some Replacements records. He told me I should really listen to Alex Chilton. I knew Alex Chilton -- I KNEW Alex Chilton in 1972, he lived in New York -- or '71 -- and hung out with him, but I never really listened to Big Star, so he says, "Oh, you should listen to Big Star." Big Star is the cypher, is the means, through which most bands today who are influenced by the Beatles get their dose of the British Invasion -- they get it from Alex. So people tell me, listen to this, listen to this -- I never heard NIRVANA until Kurt Cobain was dead.

Scott:   And what did you think?
Richard:    I liked some cuts. I think the ones that sound the most inarticulate, where he just has lines that don't really work as sung, I like that -- it just feels like he's struggling to enunciate things, that sounds fine. But some of the stuff sounds like matinee-idol music: look at the pretty boy. And where I live, they used to play, and Courtney Love used to give blow jobs in the parking lot of this club Satyricon, and so people talk about Kurt, and will tell me things like there were 15, 20 bands as good as Nirvana, but they didn't have the pretty boy. And I believe it. And so my feeling is that things happen, but they don't happen as often, and they don't, what's the word? -- the whole CONTEXT isn't the same. Half of why it's there is -- I mean, Frank Kogan picks on me [in The Voice] for using the term "crowd control," but I mean it seems like it's ALLOWABLE night frolic, and maybe it was better when it WASN'T allowed, and -- I don't know. And when you had Sunset Strip riots -- I don't know. But I just think that the danger is out of it, for one thing.

Scott:   And obviously, hip-hop...
Richard:    Well, hip-hop I have no objection to, I just don't know or understand it, I can't differentiate the sound of one thing from another. I actually have one -- I mean, maybe you wouldn't even call it a hip-hop record -- I have Sister Souljah's record on Columbia, the one that Clinton got her kicked off the label for doing. But you know, whatever -- I have no objections to these things being, y'know, the source of kicks for people, but they're not MY kicks, and it's not as if I'm too old to have kicks, I just -- I find joy in whatever, and my quota of joys as high as it ever was, I just don't look to contemporary bands for it. If it should happen, dandy.

Scott:   Your book is getting unanimously glowing reviews.
Richard:    I wouldn't say unanimously. Yes, I got more good reviews on this than in all my other books put together. But this guy Chris Morris, who I used to work with at the L.A. Reader -- he was their rock writer, and we never really got along -- the day that Lester Bangs died, I actually was the one who told him about it, but he never liked me, and so his review of my book, he says, "Well not only is Meltzer not a rock writer now, he NEVER was a rock writer." Okay.

Scott:   So I wonder if, ironically, uh -- you use the last chapter of the book as a bowing out of the whole thing. But now you might start getting a lot of offers from magazine editors to start writing about rock again.
Richard:    I don't know about that. There are some pieces I would still write. For instance, I would like to do a piece about the music that was playing during each of my major relationships: the girlfriends and the music that accompanied our dance, going back to the Beatles. I could go for 50, 70 pages on that. But basically when I did that "Vinyl Reckoning" piece, that was my way of dealing with weeding down my record collection again. I mean, there are certain ways I can revisit the whole thing. But I don't think there's anything that's gonna make me pay attention to uh, what's the word, uh, the whole FOREground of what's going on today.

Scott:   So when you wrote that piece did it just kind of detour off into all the stuff about Christgau and Marcus?
Richard:    Yeah, I mean, really, I didn't expect to be doing that, it just came out, I'd see a record and, "oh, I wanted to review this for him and he wouldn't let me," and so on. And it was also about that time I heard the Harry Smith folk box, and I played the damn thing, and before reading the booklet and seeing, "Oh -- Greil is in here -- oh, isn't that great?" And it made me -- it was a piece about "Why is Greil neglecting Alan Lomax in favour of Harry Smith?" And it just struck me that there was something about both Greil and Christgau that remained oppressive in the world, and I just couldn't contain it, and it just spilled out.

Scott:   All right. I think that's pretty much it. I don't know if you have anything YOU want to talk about?
Richard:    Oh, just simply, it's like, basically I find it hard to be, I don't want to seem like the old curmudgeon, because I'm not even a curMUDgeon, but I mean, I don't feel like I'm out of things just because I'm out of this one limited loop. (pause) I don't know. I mean I even recently I went and got a CD of Bobby Darin because I remembered that I actually, y'know, what's the word? -- I mentioned that I had one Bobby Darin album in "Vinyl Reckoning," I got a greatest hits thing. And I remembered that he was, I would say, probably the major white figure after Elvis went in the army, even more than Buddy Holly, and that he really was imPORtant for about ten seconds. And yet, it doesn't add up to ANYthing, really, in retrospect. It's like, there are so many DEAD points in -- I mean, Christgau could -- anyone who's listened to it continuously could probably point out dead points since 1972 or something -- whatever. But really, the '50s were 1956 to 1958 -- that's not ten years. The '60s were '65 to '67, you know -- '64 to '67. And so, to me the '70s were a couple years of punk, and so I just think I have no idea what the '80s and '90s were. (laughs) But I just feel like it doesn't MATTER, really, if nothing happened, even if something DID happen. But even if nothing HAPPENED, there was enough otherwise. It doesn't have to be -- I think I say in the piece "Vinyl Reckoning" that there are days when it occurs to me that it doesn't matter anymore that there'd be new rock records than that there'd be new brands of meatless lasagna. I just -- I don't think it matters.

Back to part 1 of Richard Meltzer interview