In this “ultra-rare recording,” Richard Meltzer “reads some stuff, in his living room (1990) & at the Lhasa Club in L. A. (198?).” I’m wading through this slowly (it’s almost two hours), but it’s great. Continue reading ““Rhymes with Seltzer””
A formidable question, posed by Mark Sinker at Freaky Trigger, and a fetching/daunting examination of its many contours and contradictions. The surgery begins with a complaint (from a friend of Mark’s) about Nick Tosches’ review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in Rolling Stone, I think because Tosches seems to not address the record itself. Which leads to a trail of thought that includes Flaubert, the Grotesque (not the Fall album), Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the dread NoiseBoysism. Sinker on the latter:
Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches: when James Wolcott dubbed them the Noiseboys, he did everyone (as so often) a disservice, including them, by collapsing them into just one wild-style jerk-store project and mislabelling it to match. They were friends in mischief, to be sure, but they were none of them particularly like one another in style or even tactic. What they did in fact share was a perverse attitude towards deep cultural knowledge, a feel for how to write and how to play and what was out there besides just rock. Elsewhere rockwrite was already sleepwalking uneasily — so they felt — towards a narrow pedantry, autodidact learning as a mode of borrowed bad authority. One escape route: knowledge as all-purpose bust-it-wide toolkit, as weaponry on behalf of the militant mutant grotesque that was rockthink’s earliest best contribution.
Richard Meltzer, rockcritics.com interview, 2000
This PDF version of a fanzine called Osmotic Tongue Pressure (dated… 1999, maybe?) features a very lengthy interview with Richard Meltzer.
“I want to make a case that ‘Surfin’ Bird’ is the most important single that I’ve ever dove into. And lived inside of.” (I can’t wait to read the rest of this.)
A nicely detailed profile of Meltzer by Mitch Meyers (originally from Magnet — circa 2000?), with lots of dish re: Christgau, Marsh, Marcus, et al. Note: you’ll be asked to “agree” to enter the blog because of possible adult material, but it’s Relatively Safe for Work, far as I can tell (there are a couple semi-nudes on the sidebar).
Toying with the idea of creating a podcast about The Aesthetics of Rock — a tribute, I suppose you could say, but really, more of an exploration. I have a few ideas in mind, but the likelihood of me pursuing such a thing would increase tenfold if I can find a couple or a few other people to share some of their thoughts with me on the subject (and no, none of this is being done in collusion with the book’s author; for now, I’m primarily interested in talking to readers of the book). I’m leaving this vague on purpose, but If the idea sparks your interest, or you have any questions about what I have in mind, email me. (I suppose you could use the comments box as well, though I may prefer to answer inquiries privately. I’m not saying for sure that this thing will even happen. Though I’d like it to, obviously.)
Okay, so I figure this won’t be the venue for soliciting reactions (I have no strong reaction myself, frankly, beyond mouthing what a few others have already said), but here’s a bit of what’s out there:
But this is all part of a nastier trend in writing about music, one that resembles a dying yawp of a certain type of white dude who still believes in Real Rock And Roll and who is genuinely unnerved by the idea of women fashioning pop culture in their own image.
Often seems to me that an unacknowledged subtext of this kind of dispute connects to how seriously and literally the commenter takes romantic love. I don’t know anything about Moody’s personal life and have never wanted to read his fiction, but from what I can gather he makes a great deal of the dysfunctional family. For all her celebrity bubble etc., Swift takes these matters seriously — more than many in the celebrity bubble. This in itself excites Moody’s contempt.
[note: Christgau’s words are comments he posted at his Expert Witness page. Might be worth pointing that out, comments being something different than an actual essay, and truthfully, if it were anyone other than someone famous like Christgau, I’d probably think twice about re-posting this.]
The Twitter search “Rick Moody” is currently pulling up a few gems.
And by the way, did you know that Rick Moody interviewed Richard Meltzer in 2012?
My August 2000 chat with Richard Meltzer. I don’t think I got much out of Meltzer here that he hadn’t already written about or conveyed to other interviewers, but I’m glad I gave it a shot anyway. I mean, truthfully, if I’d accomplished nothing else with rockcritics.com other than the chance to talk to the author of The Aesthetics of Rock for a couple hours, I’d have been okay with that. Whether that tells you more about the scale of my ambitions here or the size and scope of Meltzer’s influence — I’ll leave that for you to figure out.
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Kicks just keep getting harder to find: Interview with Richard Meltzer
By Scott Woods (2000)
Technically, Richard Meltzer may not have invented rock criticism–he wasn’t necessarily “there first”–but with The Aesthetics of Rock (published in ’70, written a few years before that), he took music writing on a wild philosophical goose chase (“Vast generalizations, lots of empirical meat”) that 30 years later no one’s really caught up to (or fully understood–least of all myself). The four consecutive pages (199 to 202) Meltzer devotes to Herman’s Hermits alone (a probe into the “contextually evil” “I’m Into Something Good”; citing “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” as “an analogue to Oedipus”; etc.) constitute the sort of thought processes that any curious and critical mind would be thrilled to stumble upon, and probably a little scared if they did so. I’m pretty sure I’d rather be stranded on a desert island with The Aesthetics of Rock than just about any piece of music I can think of; I know for sure I’d never get to the bottom of it regardless.
Meltzer’s new book, A Whore Just Like the Rest, is a superb, 600-page anthology of his music writing, from an early, wigged-out piece on Jimi Hendrix in 1967, to 1998’s monumental-in-every-way “Vinyl Reckoning,” a huge up-yours to some former colleagues, and a passionate where-the-hell-am-I personal statement: “A tougher question than Am I a rockwriter? Was I ever a rockwriter? (Do I even really qualify?) (Am I ‘overqualified’?).” Um, probably?
Wednesday, July 12, two thousand zero-zero, I talked to Richard Meltzer on the phone, he in Portland, me in Toronto, 11:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. (Aside from the cheaper Bell charge after 11:00, it only seemed right to talk to Meltzer at night.) My prepared questions weren’t that interesting, but he was gracious and kind (dare I say, surprisingly so?) and put up with me anyway.
Scott: I wanted to start by asking you what you were like in high school?
Richard: What I was like in high school? Uh, I was a four-eyed shorty with a flat-top…
Scott: Talk about it in terms of social groups –did you fit in? Did you have many friends?
Richard: Uh, I didn’t fit in, but I wouldn’t say that anybody — uh, there was probably a small elite that had what you would call a successful social life, but they were clearly a minority. I mean, I would say that most people I knew were thoroughly miserable. But there was no bonding in that — everybody was sort of un-AFFILIATEDLY miserable.
Continue reading “From the Archives: Richard Meltzer (2000)”
I can’t say I’m familiar with the writing of Montreal Gazette rock critic, Juan Rodriguez, but the paper is currently giving him more-than-ample space to reflect on his life as a rock writer, for which, in the shrinking-word-count world in which we live in, they should certainly be commended. Juan Rodriguez’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Life is a seven-part series running in the Gazette between now and March. Along with Rodriguez’s essays, the series includes playlists and archived photos. The first instalment was a good read mostly for Rodriguez’s musings on early rock radio, the second goes up sometime today, and the fourth instalment (still a couple weeks away) is titled, “The Critic Must Die”–so there’s more to look forward to.
This recent musing by Rodriguez*, what do you know, contains excellent bits on Sgt. Pepper, plus a great quote from Meltzer:
“A lot of what happened in the ’60s felt very miraculous, like it was coming out of nowhere. You didn’t have ‘rock-surround’ yet. There was no full map, but it was certainly in massive discontinuity (with) what had been encouraged before, in terms of artistic output. It wasn’t even like anyone was making art — it was just an emanation of self, like breathing, sweating.”
* from part 2
You may have heard that Richard Meltzer has a new album out, a collaboration with Mike Watt and Japanese avant-pop ensemble Cornelius, called Spielgusher. A few items of note here:
– a cool podcast interview with Meltzer at IconFetch.com (about Spielgusher, but also about Richard Meltzer and rock criticism generally).
– Mike Watt on his own site has posted “meltzer lyrics for planned minutemen collaboration” (the idea for Spielgusher dates back to ’85).
– More info on the project at Blurt Online, along with a soundclip.
– profile on Meltzer and Spielgusher (“Sixty-three tracks of scatology and skronk“) at the Guardian.
You know, if I’d taken more time to think of better questions when I interviewed Richard Meltzer back in 2000, I’d almost certainly have asked him, “Why did you open The Aesthetics of Rock with the lyrics of ‘Surfin’ Bird’?” I’ve since, and often, hypothesized about this very thing:
1) he liked the song
2) it came on the radio one evening while he was stoned out of his gourd and working on the text, and — hey, why the hell not?
3) it was his way of insisting on the relevance-equivalence of crudity-profundity (i.e., you’ll understand Bob Dylan much better if you also understand the Trashmen, and vice versa) (though I think what Meltzer does is take it further than Trashmen-Dylan, he goes Trashmen-Plato)
4) it’s a (p)review of what follows, “Well-a everybody’s heard” suggesting the already past-tenseness of the moment Meltzer’s trying to summon forth, and providing a nice setup for his own first self-penned sentence in the book, “This is a sequel…”
Today, I can add a fifth “what-if” to the pile. In “Along Comes Maybe,” his editorial in the fourth (1966, month unknown) issue of Crawdaddy!*, Paul Williams writes: “Nobody used to take rock ‘n’ roll very seriously. The newsmagazines would get a kick out of printing the lyrics to ‘Surfin’ Bird,’ the fans would debate over who was greater, Elvis or Fabian (who?), the deejays would play any record that was backed up by the old payola, and the listeners would be only too happy to run out and buy it…” Hmm, was RM’s printing of the lyrics to “Surfin’ Bird” perhaps his way of turning the tables on Williams’s words, to begin to collapse altogether the distinctions Williams is (implicitly) insisting on (i.e., setting up a serious vs. trivial divide rather than collusion)? In other words, to set up a counter-argument with Williams (his first publisher) by suggesting that those “newsmagazines” were pointing to something worth taking seriously — inadvertently, of course, maybe even counter-intuitively, which makes it no less true — by splashing Trashmen lyrics across their pages? Maybe, maybe not. Coming across that sentence, though, in the very least, it struck me as a highly interesting coincidence (and my instincts tell me it wasn’t one, hence my reason for this babble in the first place).
* Highly recommended: The Crawdaddy! Book, a compendium of the earliest issues of that ‘zine.
In this brief review of the Ellen Willis anthology, Brian Joseph Davis writes:
“When Richard Meltzer, a one-time student of Allan Krapow, invented rock criticism as an art prank — applying the jargon of aesthetics usually reserved for the Met Opera to a review of The White Album –— he was only half joking. The serious part of his game, that pop music was a legitimate art, had enough legs to move on and alter critical discourse within a few years.”
The White Album reference is off — the dozens of pages RM devotes to the Beatles in The Aesthetics of Rock are decidedly (and crucially, I would argue) pre-White Album — but that’s a fairly minor quibble. The line that jumps out at me is, “applying the jargon of aesthetics usually reserved for the Met Opera.” Wow — really? I don’t know the first thing about opera or classical criticism, from the ’60s or any other time frame, but my guess is that the language such criticism is steeped in is about as far removed from The Aesthetics of Rock as you can possibly get. I mean, maybe there’s opera criticism that throws in a lot of references to philosophy or something — maybe that’s what Davis is getting at? Even so — I’d be very hard-pressed to believe that there’s any sort of connection there. It’s not that Meltzer (of all people) didn’t believe rock couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of opera, but rather, that he knew rock had already by that point (mid-60s) traveled light years past opera, in terms of scope, ambition, awesomeness, triviality, etc. and etc. I’ve never ever gotten the sense that the hyper-inflated constantly-cancelling-itself-out language employed by Meltzer in any of his early criticism had any precedent — well, anywhere, really (or anyway, no clear precedent — he didn’t emerge out of nothing, obviously, and maybe his roots are the beats?).
Woah, did a little more scouring around after my last comments-reply (here), and found this:
Reading L.A.: Richard Meltzer tracks down the ugly (Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times)
Sample:
“There’s a seen-it-all informality to the writing, and an impatient, galloping pace — Meltzer’s gift for inventing new contractions is impressive — but his task here is, well, nothing short of monumental: To take on the whole massive cityscape of Los Angeles, with its ‘displays of florid vanity’ and its long boulevards stuffed with misguided attempts at one kind of period revival or another. One of the best entries here, on an office building in the Miracle Mile, has a first sentence that could stand alone on the page: ‘And then there’s neo-Tudor.'”
Someone bring this book back in print now! (Mind you, I still haven’t read the golf quickie I own by R.M., though I’m proud to have it on my shelf.)
“The whole analysis-of-music bit sort of calls for the use of a pack of words to tack onto a pack of sounds juxtaposed with another pack of words. Every creep who has ever bothered with that has to groove on how silly, in the good sense, the whole operation has to be. How do you talk about music, anyway, particularly when…”
– Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 1970 (more here)
Who knew? The guy acted in his spare time. Someone was excellent enough to upload a clip to YouTube.
RockCritics.com 