“Ah! The thudding frustration of ‘slipping through the cracks’-‘dying invisible’-or even worse: being branded a ‘cult writer’ (whatever that is. Sounds like caves and dungeons. Moonlight);”

excerpt from “As I Lay Dead” (A Whore Just Like the Rest)

Richard Meltzer, along with Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs, have been hailed as some sort of holy trio of famous rock critics (the Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg of rock criticism). This bland analogy has not only become a very tired cliché, but it’s also a load of bullshit. Sure they hung out. Sure they drank. Sure their writing was more than rock music deserved. Tosches and Meltzer certainly hung out, exchanged bylines, and were/are pals. Bangs wasn’t even in New York until Meltzer left. And by the time Bangs hit the road to heaven, Tosches and Meltzer were beyond rock criticism (for the most part) and writing about everything from country music to condoms.

Before they left the trio trashed the place they had in a role in founding. While most writers in this young field were already playing the record company’s skin flute, the trio’s writing stood out for its passion, unconventionality, and authenticity. They wrote uncompromising and often very funny reviews that were often enjoyable for the writing itself.  In bringing philsophy and literature (notably the Beats) to their work, they were among the first to take rock music seriously and in doing so bridged, or more accurately shattered the gap between high (eg. Aristotle) and low (eg. The Beach Boys) culture.  That’s not to say that their work had serious pretensions. Most of the time it didn’t. In fact, Tosches and Meltzer occasionally reviewed records they had not listened to and concerts they had not attended. By the mid-1970s, Meltzer and Tosches had had enough of rock (just as record companies had tired of them). While Bangs lingered around until his death in 1981, Tosches and Meltzer went on to become ‘real’ writers in the mid 1970s.  

Meltzer has written about a dozen books ranging from poetry (17 Insects in My Heart), autobiography (Caned Out: Volume 1 and 2), and fiction (The Night Alone) to pop culture collections (Gulcher, L.A. is The Capital of Kansas). Most recently, Da Capo published A Whole Just Like The Rest (2000), a collection of Meltzer’s music writings from 1967-1999. Along the way, he’s penned lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult (he penned the single, Burnin’ for you), fronted an L.A. punk band, Vom (yes, short for Vomit), and even temporarily hosted a punk radio show in L.A. (he got canned for vulgarity). 

Meltzer’s inability to achieve mainstream success is not really that surprising, given his iconoclastic tendencies. His writing style is notable for a seemingly automatic writing style (in fact some of his early writings were first drafts) that ignores the rules of syntax. Combine this with Meltzer’s philosophical background (his first book, The Aesthetics of Rock and Roll, which applies philosophical concepts to rock songs, has to be, next the bible, the most acclaimed unread book in history) and obscure cultural and autobiographical references and you’ve got a bizarre concoction of SCTV, Muhammad Ali and Immanuel Kant.   And herein lies the problem. People occasionally look at Meltzer’s work with disdain, ignoring the challenge of his deceptively primitive writing style and with it his words that cut through many of our assumed beliefs and values.

These days, Meltzer resides in Portland where he writes an often very funny concert preview section for the San Diego Reader, ‘sings’ for a band called Smegma, and continues to write (“slower than frozen shit”) everyday.  Last fall (October 00), I made a crusade, if you will, to Meltzer’s home where among other things we talked about his writing. Contray to his words, which might appear sexist, vulgar, misanthropic and just downight ugly to certain tight ass readers, especially those unfamiliar with the true subtleties of his work, the 57 year old Meltzer is almost the opposite of his words: generous, polite, caring, and moderately humble about his career.

Did you feel a measure of satisfaction with the publication of Whore? It seemed to receive a lot of coverage

Satisfaction, yeah.  It was EXACTLY the documentation I had in mind for my so-called career as a music writer.  I got more reviews than on all the others put together.  Five or ten of them actually got the point of what I've been doing, or trying to do, for the last 35 years.  The only problem is it's re-typecast me as a music writer, which means that if I want to CONTINUE to be "appreciated" (or paid attention to at all) I'll have to write record reviews and shit, and pretend to be current on the names of bands and all that...which I have no interest whatsoever in doing.  On the most benign level, it would be like going back to school to get a masters in public health or Belgian literature--life is too short for such silliness.

I think a lot of people were surprised to see that you were still writing and maybe saw this as some sort of comeback…but really you’ve been writing consistently for a number of years.

I haven't taken ten days off in the last 30 years.  If it's a day of the week, I'm writing.  My "visibility," is that's the word, had steadily gone down in the wake of my departing New York (1975).  This little island off the coast of America (which hasn't been especially relevant in, well, years) still has most of the publishing houses, and a newspaper and mag or two, but the folks who run them don't notice a lot of what's going on out there on the mainland.  It's certainly not the main thrust of their focus.

Have you ever considered making your writing more accessible? Because I mean let’s be honest the general reader probably looks at your work and immediately assumes you are an illiterate sexist pyschopath?

No.  Though I'm not really sure what that would entail, even in theory, life (once again) is much too short.  It's taken me this long to get to the point where I have some vague idea of how to express what it is that matters to me, and to have to reroute the whole damn thing at this point (and for whom, exactly?) would be absurd.  And let's be honest in both directions, Mr. Interview Man, my writing hasn't given off the vibe you speak of in 20 years.  Certainly not by my intent.  I no longer push any of those buttons, even as a joke.  I'm not Jonathan Swift, and I'm not even William Burroughs.

Reading through the 100 plus pieces you can really see your development as a writer. In the early years, it feels like you were struggling to get ideas through or perhaps was just goofing off (eg. “Barbara Mauritz: Music Box”), but later on and specifically in pieces like “Dolphy was some ‘Weird Cat”,  “Of Peep Shows and Piano Bars”, “Vinyl Reckoning”, “One White Man’s Opinion”, and “Real Time, Real Demons: Bouncing with Bud ’64”, you seem a lot more confident and yet the style is not compromised…it’s still got the intentional rejection of syntax etc… Did you reach a point where you started taking your writing more seriously?

I never goofed off.  If I took things "easier," well what the hey.  I probably got $12.50 for that.  We're all entitled to do less work for less pay.  But the Dolphy piece was much closer, chronologically, to the Barbara Mauritz thing than to those other pieces.  I was never NOT confident.  I've always had at least the swagger going, a comfort on the printed page with spewing language, with strutting words in a dance that suited my own heart and mind, my nervous system.  If it seems otherwise from the book, that's just one of the problems, I guess, with making any kind of finite selection for an anthology.  I picked this, I left that out, but I wrote all kinds of different ways all the time, then and now.  And I was always dead-on serious, even when I was playing it for laughs, but the point where I got quote-unquote "serious" for most things I wrote, in a conspicuous way that readers and editors couldn't fucking miss, was probably about 1981 (four years after the Dolphy piece, ten years before the earliest of the other ones you mention), when I started writing poetry.  From then on, even when I got back full time to prose, I did mega-multiple drafts, and I could never leave a clunky syllable alone, or an idea that wasn't clear from a thousand miles away.

In most essays, critiques etc…the writer contextualizes the subject’s work within some sort of biographical, historical, cultural framework. You do almost the opposite. For example, in your review of some Bud Powell discs you talk about him in terms of what was going on in your life at the time.

Well, more than anything, it seems pretty nec. to let the reader know I'm something other than the so-called author of a given piece: I'm a fully formed, fully flawed human being...penis warts and all.  But narcissism?  Heck, I'm as critical of my own act as I am of anybody's...I'm rarely even kind to myself.  And I wouldn't know if my work "reinserts the individual" back into anything...uh...well, like I AM an individual in the process of writing the damn thing, but I basically insist on eliminating any sort of protocol of superiority for the POSITION of the author--his/her, y'know, "status"--vis-a-vis the reader.  So if there's any of that, well, it's a lot more populist: the individual reader is as "individual" as I am, as free an agent, in the merry frolic of culture/dealt, culture/received.  I'm just, what's a better expression, an "active entity" in the frolic.

Aside from the autobiographical elements of your work, a common thread has been your dismantling of high and low culture and with it academia. In Aesthetics of Rock, it’s almost as if in applying philosophical concepts to rock music, you were in a sense trying to place philosophy in everyday life.  In Gulcher or even L.A is the Capital of Kansas, you seem to suggest that culture can be hockey, bottle caps, condoms, wrestling and Godzilla movies just as much as it can be Bach, Rembrandt and Shakespeare.

Yeah, in some version of everyday life.  But for those three books, and you could bring in all the others, the version is constantly changing, the parameters are always shifting, and not so much by design, by some strategy before (or even during) the fact, as simply, um...it's just an outcome of my own life, all my preferences and interests and values, having changed and continuing to change and being very open-ended.  And as far as high and low go, and the content of all this stuff at both ends and wherever, I've really never distinguished them at all...I pretty much just go experience to experience, item by item.  If I've ever had an anti-high-culture streak going, like say against classical music, it was mainly because I hadn't really experienced that stuff, not directly, and when I finally did (there are several pieces about this in the book) I embraced it--or didn't--to the extent that it fit the wants/needs of my heart-mind-etc.  I certainly didn't submit to it on ITS level, by ITS rules, whatever those might be...but I've never totally submitted to anything in that kind of masochistic, submissive way.  I do think I'm the only writer or culture critic of ANY scale of note who has always given equal weight to jazz and rock, to boxing and wrestling.

In the Caned Out series and The Night Alone you are particulary nasty to your family. For example, “Esther B” (from Caned Out Vol 1: Post Natal Trash) opens with “My mother (Esther B. Meltzer) is so ugly I wouldn’t fuck her with a 10-foot pole! I wouldn’t even fuck her with your dick.” And in volume 2 (Prickly Heat and Cold) you have a section called “Things I learned from an Asshole named Dad.” Throughout your writings you’ve really taken the piss out of the family in general, your family in particular. Why? You turned out ok.

How does your family feel about your attacks on them?

I don't know that I've ever actually "attacked" them...it's never been exactly combative, not like I've been with editors or record companies or institutions of whatever the fuck.  But I have expressed distaste or exasperation about my parents and their role in my childhood and adolescence and whatnot, and what utter shits they were capable of being.  It just felt so easy to write that--easy in the sense that I felt zero reluctance to just go for it, there was no taboo to violate, it was no more "unacceptable" than giving a record a crummy review--but at the same time my insistence on getting it right, on struggling to find the exact calculus to reveal every cell of everything in all its naked bitter truth, blah blah blah, has always been very wearing and tearing...it's not my favorite subject to suffer over.  Back in the '70s, my mother would get all weepy when she'd read things I wrote about her, but when she read my novel in '95 all she said was "What do you really feel about the 'mom' character?"  I told her it was fiction, and 'cause her memory by then was for shit and she didn't remember any of the original occurrences, that made it okay.  And if it hadn't, fuck, I'd've lived with her getting weepy again...that's life (and that's writing).  And as to my "turning out okay," I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.  Yes, my mother and father were ultimately benign, but so what?  I can be a happy man, a very happy man, and still say that Billy Joel, for inst, is a blight upon the face of the planet.  It's not like I'm suggesting to some court of cosmic justice that my forebears spend eternity in a horrible place of fiery damnation--if I believed in such horseshit--but I can still call 'em assholes.

The Caned Out series was originally supposed to be six volumes, but there’s only two. What happened? Will we ever see the remaining four?

Well, it was a small-press project in the first place, and as things moved along the press got smaller, and then finally there was no press.  There are actually five more--it was seven volumes--and I'm working right now on trying to resuscitate the whole thing.  It's what I would like to be "doing" next. Basically, it's the closest to Gulcher, both chronologically and stylistically, of any of my book-size texts, and I'm still fond of the all-over-the-place "automatic writing" way of filling pages that was standard for me back then.  I'll keep you posted.

Oddly, one of the best things in Whore is one of two non-music pieces on the L.A. Riots. It’s got a level of intensity, and almost seething anger that is not present in your other writings.

Hey--it triggered a wider range of thoughts and feelings, and certainly made me angrier, than Three Dog Night at the Cotton Bowl, f'rinstance.

What are some things you’re working on now?

I'm midway through an assignment for the San Diego Reader on "aging," y'know, "growing old," "geezerhood"...whatever.  A first-person feature.  This was their idea and I went along, I told 'em, "I'm not there yet, but I'll take notes."  Ha ha.  Six months later they got impatient and said, "Write the fucking piece," so I am.  So far I've dealt with things like whether or not I'm really a "beatnik drunk"--something I'll jokingly call myself, and I kind of deconstruct it, do a final take on it in the face of age-coded terminality--and the fact that I'm prouder of my tattoos than my gig--"being a writer."  The writing itself feels less "argumentative" than anything I've done on such a scale in a long, long time.  The voice at times is even serene, it  surprises me.  I've got another six weeks on it, I figure. 

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