Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  Over the next few years I lost touch with Janis, and then she was dead. I can easily imagine the struggle she must have waged to do her thing again and again on ever more impersonal stages, to enact the spectacle of need that she was known for while maintaining the tangibility of her art, which involved a self-exposure so intense that it impelled everyone in the audience to do the same. That was the essential rock experience of my youth, and she will always represent it. For me, Janis was the promise of the sixties—and the tragedy.

  I Was a Teenage Marcel Proust

  The essay was called “Learning from the Beatles,” and the author was the eminent literary critic Richard Poirier. I perused it anxiously—maybe he’d proven once and for all that a bona fide thinker could understand the Fab Four better than a fan like me. Sure enough, I found myself criticized by Poirier for my negative review of Sgt. Pepper. I felt immensely flattered to be bashed in the Partisan Review, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Rock had entered the realm of high discourse, and my work was being noticed, at least in passing, by the literati. Nineteen sixty-seven was when intellectuals began to move among people like me. I wanted in.

  I’d always thought of intellectuals as the Real Thing—classy but open, a bulwark against political brutality, the guardians of humanism; they wrote books with words you had to look up, and they read journals without pictures of celebrities on the cover. I regarded these “little magazines” as an alternative to the predations of the slicks, and I was determined to break into their pages. But I had mixed feelings about the new attitude toward rock. On the one hand, it affirmed my belief that hierarchies of taste were bullshit. But I thought the anything-is-art sensibility was bullshit, too. Pop culture had its own standards, and many older critics had no idea what they might be. They gobbled up whatever seemed vital, like the voracious guests at a Luis Buñuel dinner party. Poirier was among the most discerning of his kind, and he made a pretty good case for Sgt. Pepper, but I remember feeling that he’d missed the larger point about the Beatles. They were merely the most visible sign of a counterculture that the academy hadn’t yet noticed. Where were the learned essays on underground comix, psychedelic posters, or any pop music that wasn’t made by JohnPaulGeorge&Ringo? I thought I saw an opening.

  But I no longer had a patent on rock criticism. There was a lot of competition, not just from young writers, which I expected, but also from well-credentialed scholars, some of them far less honorable than Poirier. A professor named Albert Goldman would make a career, and a lot of money, out of attacking rock icons. But that was later in the decade. At first he went with the flow, and in 1967 he wrote a piece for New American Review on “The Emergence of Rock.” It was a lush setting of conventional wisdom, perfectly pitched to people who didn’t understand the music but desperately wanted to. I remember Goldman’s description of Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger: “He opens up visions of an artificial bird singing in the gardens of a Byzantine emperor.” Not even at my most pompous could I have written such gilded prose. I resented Goldman—he was another cat eating out of my bowl—but I also hated his knee-jerk response to youth culture, and I couldn’t bear the fact that we were often confused with each other because of our similar names. I preferred being mistaken for Al Goldstein, the bad-boy publisher of a weekly sex paper called Screw.

  To the extent that I had real ideas about pop culture, they were much more radical than what I wrote about rock. I was fascinated by supermarkets and private swimming pools. I didn’t grow up around such emblems of suburban banality, and they aroused a wondrous feeling in me. So did anything Disney. I cherished a small plastic statue of Mickey Mouse. It was blue, its baby’s head and cute belly protruding over a body that seemed all hands and feet. This was a very complex piece, calling up unconscious associations with the infantile, and it was sensuous to the touch. Also mass-produced, and about as ordinary a souvenir as you could buy. If I could find a way to describe my feelings for that blue Mickey I might produce a new kind of criticism, one that had less to do with my crusades against the music industry than with the possibility that show business was an arena in which our deepest desires were exercised. Any major pop phenomenon captured a social moment, which meant that you could read the hidden currents of the present in entertainment. That simple word was very complicated.

  But I didn’t have the intellectual chops for such a project at the age of twenty-three, or the ability to focus for more than the time it took to meet a weekly deadline. And even if I acquired those skills, where would I publish? The demand for my work only applied to my expertise on youth culture, not to my views on frozen food and sitcoms. My greedy heart soared when I received a commission from the American Scholar. The subject was rock lyrics, but I figured that I could broaden my base once I published there. This journal had been founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson—I was, like, so impressed. It didn’t occur to me that by 1967 it was a sclerotic remnant of itself, running safe pieces for settled minds. In the course of my career I would often find myself called upon to juice up high-toned periodicals that had sunk into a well-worn rut, only for the editors to discover that my writing was too vulgar. Something like that happened at the American Scholar. After struggling to fit the sensibility of rock into the very different tradition of written poetry, I ended up with a jumble of ideas papered over with sparkling prose. “Felicitous” was the word the editors used in the letter I received in response—but no thanks.

  The revelation that I fit into neither the academy nor the mainstream caused the most severe of my media depressions, and it got even worse when a publisher looking to branch out from textbooks offered to print a collection of my articles. There was one problem: they didn’t want to use the word rock in the title. They worried that the book would be displayed in the geology section. By then I was used to such outrageous reasoning, and frankly I was lucky that the anthology ended up being called Goldstein’s Greatest Hits instead of the title I preferred: A Rock Cosmology. But that didn’t answer the question nagging at me. Where did I belong?

  The answer was the Village Voice. It was the only place where I was welcome to pursue my version of a hybrid sensibility. Fortunately, this was a profitable fit. The new flexibility, the growing interest in radical ideas, and the slippery question of who and what was hip all drew readers to the vivid journalism that was practiced at the paper. And by 1967, the audience was much larger than the ragtag tribes of hippies in the parks. In addition to the Nehru-collared art-and-party crowd, there were a quarter of a million students in the city, as well as God knows how many unhappy souls in the advertising and communications industries. This was our readership, and it now numbered around 150,000, an astonishing circulation for a bohemian weekly. We were no longer an underground paper; we were a journal of perception on a deadline—and the field itself was now a hot literary form.

  From the perch that was my column I railed against hype. The word didn’t just apply to the marketing of entertainment. It signified any kind of undue promotion, such as the media hype surrounding the war in Vietnam. I regarded this scourge as a virus that had inserted itself into the marrow of even the most radical culture. Hype was everywhere, and there was no way to cure the disease—I think I knew that, but it was such a handy target, and it lent itself to a hyper style. If I was going to publicize the evils of publicity, I had to be fierce and flashy, to load up on metaphors and alliteration. Deep down I suspected that flash was all I had.

  Plastic! That was my epithet of choice. It didn’t refer to the shape-shifting substance, but to the attitude produced by marketing strategies so supple that they could transform any idea into a product. By now young people have devised a whole set of defenses to deal with the machinations of commerce, or else they don’t think it’s an issue. But in 1967 we did. There were many attempts to set up an alternative entrepreneurial system, and it worked pretty well as far as it went. But only some things could be handmade, and only so many artisans had the talent and patience to create filigree jewelry or tie-dyes.
For most kids, especially those who didn’t live in major cities, everything that signified a hip identity, from bell-bottoms to protest music, was mass-produced. There had to be a word for all that ersatz stuff. It was plastic.

  Today, plastic is the stuff of life, and it’s hard to believe that the p-word was once an indictment. But in 1967, when tribes weren’t yet market niches and rock festivals weren’t festooned with corporate logos, the phenomenon we called “hip capitalism” was new. It presented itself as doing more than pushing product. Consciousness was the buzzword, and the narrative was about using the system in order to subvert it. But it seemed to me that the artist was always the one who ended up subverted. And publicity was what made the transition from authenticity to plastic seem as inevitable as the season or the tides. Hence, the need to fight the power that was hype.

  But it wasn’t so easy. Hip New York was an engine of promo and profit, and I was an enabler despite my efforts to resist making a buck from it. New records arrived at my home at the rate of several dozen a week. Most of them had white labels that said “not for resale.” I sold them anyway, for a pittance, but I couldn’t imagine that someday a white label on vinyl from the sixties would spike its value on eBay, only because of its rarity. Nor could I have guessed that a complete run of Fillmore posters would be worth a fortune. I owned such a set—Bill Graham, who ran the Fillmore, gave it to me—and I glued the posters onto the walls of my apartment. They livened up the corridors, but when I moved I couldn’t get them off the walls. Another missed opportunity to cash in, but at the time I didn’t believe in clinging to possessions. If it’s beautiful, hang it up. But don’t hang on.

  It was much easier to let go of possessions than to free myself from the tightening grip of hype. I felt like I was stuck to a tar baby; the more I struggled against it, the more it stuck. I had no one to mentor me—no writer had ever occupied a position quite like mine—but a few performers were willing to share their wisdom. One of them was Paul Simon. I met him in 1966, not long after my column began. He hadn’t yet developed the acuity that shows in his most memorable songs (and there are many). In those days he was still making heartfelt folk rock, and his lyrics seemed portentous to me even as they mocked portentousness. But he knew all about the music business, since he and Art Garfunkel had started out as a rock ’n’ roll duo called Tom and Jerry. And he was echt New York, someone who knew how to find a good, cheap Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side.

  That was where we got together, up a flight of linoleum-covered stairs. I was struck by how much he looked like me. We were two short Jewish guys who’d let their hair grow for other than religious reasons, two outer-borough kids who’d turned a love of rock ’n’ roll into a career. We could sense each other’s lives from the way we scooped up pork fried rice and chomped on egg rolls. (All New York Jews of our generation know that Chinese food is exempt from the kosher laws.) I understood immediately that Paul was not one of the fragile souls he sang about. He was a pro, a veteran of the payola era, and he talked about the record industry as if it was just a conduit for his music—no big deal, ignore the hustle and make your own way. The conversation was too personal for me to write about without making myself the story, which I was still loath to do. But it was one of the few times when I left an interview feeling reassured. Paul would still remember me a year after that dinner, when I ran into him backstage at Monterey Pop; there’s a photo of him chatting with Judith and me. I wish I’d kept his advice in mind as I descended into the maelstrom of promo that was the rock explosion. I would have saved myself a lot of tsuris. But there was no bridge over troubled water for me. Just the leaking boat of my ego.

  I was haunted by the specter of the Monkees, the faux-Beatles act that had been put together in Hollywood and thrust into the prime-time spotlight. Their songs were pseudo-countercultural, irresistibly catchy, and bouncy to the beat. As musicians they weren’t untalented, but they were merchandise—and they were huge on TV. I thought of groups like them as the rock equivalent of the robotic false messiah in Metropolis. But pop culture was more complex than that. It sponsored the revolutionary and the trite with the same that’s-entertainment attitude. The raw and the cooked were two sides of a shtick to the producers of chat shows, which thrived on celebrity freaks. These were entertainers who knew how to dress and act the part of misfits. Not that they were necessarily faking it. The problem for me as a critic was distinguishing between Monkee wannabes and artists who had wrung a vision from their torment. Both could be successful.

  How to parse the relationship between Johnny Carson, the essence of mainstream, and his frequent guest, a tall, gangly freak named Tiny Tim? With his giant nose and dishrag hair, he was the ugliest man in pop music. Carson made jokes about him entering the Miss America pageant representing Death Valley. But Tiny Tim had put everything that didn’t show on his body into his voice. He sang in an ungainly falsetto, accompanying himself on a ukulele, and his repertoire consisted of old-time tunes such as “Tiptoe through the Tulips.” These relics of a forgotten innocence were keys to the kingdom where he yearned to reside.

  His real name was Herbert Buckingham Khaury, and he’d grown up in a stretch of upper Manhattan where it wasn’t cool for a guy to wear makeup. The other kids called him “Crazy Herbie.” He was the scapegoat every working-class neighborhood needs, which meant that he endured a hail of abuse. But he lived for his old records, and he gravitated toward any theater that showed films from the thirties or even the twenties. “I had to be alone in the dark,” he told me, “because then I could feel like I was alone with the performers, feeling their voices inside me.” It was a lot like the way I’d felt about great writers when I was a boy—their voices were inside me, too—and I understood why he had put so much energy into creating an alter ego. In that persona he was a wind chime vibrating to the breezes of memory. It was touching to watch this lug transform himself into such a wistful creature. Like a great clown, he could cast his audience into a realm of childlike purity. The same quality made him one of the first camp superstars, because, in the end, his delicate pose of androgyny skirted failure.

  That may explain why his first gig was at Hubert’s Flea Circus in the old Times Square, where, for a nickel, you could see a parade of performing freaks among the trained insects doing tricks. Tim also worked the subways for pocket cash. But his favorite dive was a bar in the Village where, as he put it, “the ladies liked each other.” He must have seemed like just another gender bender in cosmetics to them. But he wasn’t trying to be a woman, he explained. He wanted to imbibe the feminine aura. In makeup, he said, “I feel that I’m in a garden of paradise, alone with beautiful ladies. They are the essence of my soul.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was giving me sincerity or feeding me good copy, and I decided that it was both. His act was a pretense, but it had been born of real suffering, and I wondered what would happen once the ordeal was replaced by stardom. Especially since he was straight; straight as a yardstick and just as inflexible. Sex, for him—and he would only spell the word—was something that must be redeemed in marriage, and he couldn’t get married until he saw a sign from heaven. Meanwhile, he told me, “I try never to be alone with a beautiful woman, because then the devil in me becomes dangerous.” In short, he was destined to play Las Vegas.

  That was where I saw him in 1967. It was my first trip there, and I felt like I was in a ring of hell reserved for pop critics. The entrance to Caesar’s Palace, with its 150 feet of floodlit fountains and its garden of pseudo-classical statues, was beyond even my mother’s decorative schemes. A Cinerama billboard proclaimed Tiny Tim’s name in letters seven feet high. What was a denizen of the flea circus and the dyke bar doing in this feather-and-pastie fantasia? As soon as I unpacked, I headed for the Circus Maximus room to find out.

  I stood in the wings among the showgirls grabbing a smoke while he warmed up. There was no trace of the fey troubadour he played onstage. He was more like a baseball player, trotting in place and
swatting the air with his hands—here comes the windup and then the pitch … a wicked spitball. The look on his face took me by surprise. It was intent and thoroughly butch. So there was a jock inside him, cohabiting with the angelic faerie. How would this marriage of convenience fare in the face of fame? I was always looking for the story that hadn’t been told, the part left out of the press bio, and now I sensed what it was. I’d heard reports about parties in his hotel room, bacchanals where he rolled in rich desserts ordered from room service. Yes, he would admit to me, he’d had a few drunken bouts, spent too much money, and, yes, he’d slipped a few times and given himself to women. But then he had to “cut the cancer out.” It sounded like the rap of a married man who cheats and then consults a priest. But this was someone who had devised an elaborate system of fantasies to cushion him from life. What would happen to the tenuous balance between art and desperation once the freak succeeded? It was a question I would ask myself many times; in fact, it was a theme of my writing on rock stars. In Tiny Tim I saw an extreme version of the answer.