November 9, 2003

'Never Mind the Pollacks': Reelin' and Rockin'

f you're the kind of hard-core rock-trivia enthusiast who knows the name of the Elektra Records talent scout who signed the Stooges to their first recording contract (Danny Fields, but of course), and you're the kind of hard-core scatologist for whom the excrement and vomit jokes just can't come fast enough, then ''Never Mind the Pollacks'' is the book for you. If, however, you're a comic-novel-loving reader who is primed for a bracing rock satire and encouraged by a title that puns on the name of the Sex Pistols' sole studio album, you'll be frustrated. ''Never Mind the Pollacks'' is a blown opportunity, a smart premise that its author sabotages with an avalanche of potty humor and a seeming lack of faith in his ability to construct an actual novel.

Neal Pollack is an accomplished print humorist whose shtick is that his protagonist is always a buccaneering, iconoclastic, legendary writer named Neal Pollack. This fictional Pollack is not an alter ego informed by the traits of the author, like Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman -- in the photos on his Web site, the real Pollack appears to be an ordinary humor dork, yet another doughy, 35-ish white man with a goatee and thinning hair -- but, rather, a blank slate onto which Real Neal can project the tics and pretensions of whatever milieu he's satirizing. In his last book, ''The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature,'' Pretend Neal was a pompous old literary heavyweight, the self-proclaimed ''Greatest Living American Writer,'' and Real Neal deftly zinged the self-aggrandizing fogies of literary journalism (middle-period Mailer comes to mind) with windy, absurdist ''think pieces'' with titles like ''Portrait of an Andalusian Horse Trainer'' and ''I Am Friends With a Working-Class Black Woman.'' In ''Never Mind the Pollacks,'' Pretend Neal is a dissolute wild-man rock critic whose lengthy career wends its way through the crucial moments in rock history, from Elvis's first session at Sun Studios (Pollack, ne Norbert Pollackovitz, the son of Memphis Jews, introduces Presley to Sun's Sam Phillips) to Nirvana's emergence in the early 1990's (Pollack, stranded in Aberdeen, Wash., befriends the young Kurt Cobain and tutors him in the nasty ways of rawk).

This version of Pretend Neal owes an obvious debt to Lester Bangs, the famous Creem and Rolling Stone critic who, in the 1970's, led a rear-guard charge against that era's denim-y, studio-polished album-rock hegemony, championing needle-pocked scuzz rockers like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. Like Bangs, who died in 1982, Pretend Neal is no longer with us, having passed away under mysterious circumstances in 1994. His story is related to us by his well-heeled, widely respected but infinitely less cool rock-crit colleague Paul St. Pierre, a man as comfortable in academia as he is on Jann Wenner's payroll, and more than a little evocative of Greil Marcus, the writer and former Rolling Stone reviews editor who, in real life, compiled and edited Bangs's posthumously published anthology ''Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.''

A nice setup and, for a brief while, one that delivers on its promise. Real Neal is an adept parodist, and he nails the elitist, NPR-friendly voice of St. Pierre (''I've often written, at Harper's folio length, about Sam Phillips'') and displays a gift for the sort of winking doggerel that John Lennon excelled at in his humor collections (''Pollack had heard that Andy Warhol was looking for a hairless androgyne for a film he was working on called 'Andy Warhol Presents a Hairless Androgyne' ''). And Real Neal, responsible rock snob that he is, steers Pretend Neal through the officially snob-sanctioned history of rock, which is not the airbrushed remember-when gloss of Dick Clark specials, but the poker-faced, parody-ripe pageant of Cultural Importance that encompasses the early Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the Ramones, Patti Smith and R.E.M. Pretend Neal materializes in every ''seminal'' scene rock has produced, having an affair with Joan Baez before Bob Dylan does, turning up in 1974 as ''Smokey, the elusive fifth Ramone,'' and touring in the 80's with the indie-label hard-core band the Minutemen.

But the problem with all these rendezvous with rock destiny is that Real Neal doesn't know what to do with them besides contrive to put Pretend Neal at their center, let him make a fool of himself and lay on thick the gross-out humor. Two days after a tussle with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Pretend Neal reappears at their flat ''naked, except for his dung-crusted underpants, which he wore on his head.'' Booted from the Velvet Underground's touring entourage after Lou Reed and Nico have tired of him, Pretend Neal wakes up in a Detroit bus depot, ''his mouth caked with dried puke.'' Entering Max's Kansas City one New Year's Day, St. Pierre discovers Pretend Neal ''spread across the stoop, naked except for a party hat, passed out in a puddle of vomit.'' Kurt Cobain, recounting a Neal Pollack dream in his diary, writes: ''He stands in a pool of his own semen and vomits bile. I lick it up, and vomit out my own.'' Vomit -- it is just unrelentingly hilarious, isn't it?

AS the book advances and Pretend Neal keeps vomiting and getting into ludicrous fights (with, among others, Sid Vicious, Michael Stipe and Lester Bangs himself), these scenes become ever more laborious and repetitive. ''Never Mind the Pollacks'' isn't one of those nonbooks for nonreaders, like ''Seinlanguage,'' but it doesn't amount to a novel, either -- even though Real Neal tries to bind things together with a half-baked subplot about an oracular bluesman named Clambone who appears before Pretend Neal at crucial moments. By the time Pretend Neal encounters Courtney Love, late in the book, their inevitable fight has a dull, exhausted joylessness to it (''Her nails dug into his palms. . . . She left-hooked him in the face''), as if Real Neal knows he's just going through the motions, straining to convey a feeling of gonzo wackiness.

It must be said that Bangs's stream-of-consciousness rants can be equally tiresome in this way and, for the most part, they haven't aged well. Like many a great counterculturalist -- Lenny Bruce also comes to mind -- Bangs produced material that was exhilarating and shocking in its time, but not built to last. So how successful is a pale imitation going to be, 30 years down the line?

David Kamp is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.