Read an Excerpt From Robert Christgau’s Memoir ‘Going Into the City’
By his count, Robert Christgau has reviewed around 14,000 records since 1967. “To the eternal ‘Opinions are like assholes — everybody’s got one,’ ” he writes in his upcoming memoir, Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, “I just say, ‘Yeah, but not everybody’s got ten thousand of them.’ ” Writing mostly for the Village Voice, where he was known for his Consumer Guide column (a regular roundup of letter-graded album reviews) and the annual Pazz & Jop poll of rock critics, Christgau has championed everyone from Al Green to Sleater-Kinney to Taylor Swift. (Christgau also wrote for Rolling Stone and mentored some of the magazine’s writers and editors.) His opinions are pithy, funny, sometimes infuriating and always incisive. (Last line of his 1980 rave for Prince’s Dirty Mind: “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”)
Going Into the City runs from Christgau’s childhood in Queens through his days as a pioneering rock critic in the late Sixties, concluding around the time he left his post as music editor of the Village Voice in the mid-Eighties. There’s frank discussion of his personal life (including his relationship with the writer Ellen Willis), and there are great passages on Pop Art, Jerry Garcia and Dostoevsky, among other topics. At the Voice, Christgau was one of punk’s biggest proponents and a regular at CBGB, often accompanied by his wife, the writer Carola Dibbell. This excerpt finds Christgau in the thick of the late-Seventies New York scene, bearing witness to the Ramones, Patti Smith and Television, whose Marquee Moon was one of CBGB’s great gifts to the world.
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The same night Richard Meltzer presented me with the copy of Kant’s Critique of Judgement I never finished, he urged us to go see Television, who were connected to his Blue Öyster Cult buddies via Patti Smith, inamorata of both BÖC’s Allen Lanier and TV’s Tom Verlaine. So we caught them at Max’s and thought they sucked, as by all accounts they often did back then, which doesn’t mean I was right to leave it at that. But when the same Patti Smith embarked on a seven-week March-April stand at a refurbished version of the dive where Carola and I had connected post-Cockettes, we checked in early and came back often bringing friends. Barely aware that Smith’s rock writin’ had appeared in Creem but a collegial fan of critic-guitarist Lenny Kaye, I’d enjoyed her before — at St. Mark’s Church and a West Village spot where some folk victim put his hands together to keep time, I cracked, “What is the sound of one asshole clapping?,” and she laid out for a beat or two to reward me with one of her delighted cackles. But at CBGB, for that was the new name of the beer-bar, she’d added second guitarist Ivan Kral and, crucially, Jay Dee Daugherty on occasional drums. She had a band and I had a rooting interest. Wolcott’s Patti Riff ran in early April.
The Tuesday after that review appeared, Tom Johnson invited me to get my avant on at the Kitchen. When the highly enjoyable performance ended, I remembered a flyer I’d gotten from four geeks in leather jackets: “The Ramones are not an oldies group, they are not a glitter group, they don’t play boogie music and they don’t play the blues. The Ramones are an original Rock and Roll group of 1975, and their songs are brief, to the point and every one a potential hit single.” I was struck by the pop principles informing this manifesto, and Tom was as game to cross over as I’d just been. So he climbed into the Toyota with me and Carola. CBGB was almost empty. Danny Fields said hello at the bar.
My best estimate is thirteen songs in twenty-three minutes with no intraband sniping — I saw the Ramones dozens of times without witnessing that piece of the legend. I was stunned by how much I liked them. Their uniforms-in-disguise disguising the class split between Forest Hills Joey and Middle Village Johnny, these stylized Queens boys traded the expressionist doomshows that mucked up their semi-popular antecedents the Stooges for deadpan comedy and killer hooks that didn’t understate their alienation an iota. Ever the pop guy, I was an instant fan, albeit one concerned about that blitzkrieg song, while avant-minimalist Johnson recognized music whose limited means were simultaneously primitive and apt and dug it on formal grounds. Wolcott’s mythological Ramones Riff, “Chord Killers,” was in the July 21 Voice, two weeks after Stephen O’Laughlin’s musicological TV-at- CBGB Riff. A month later came Wolcott’s Goldstein-assigned feature on the CBGB Rock Festival, four or five bands a night between July 16 and August 1. There he posited the thesis that the “unpretentiousness” of the CBGB stalwarts — topped at that moment, according to hippieish impresario Hilly Kristal, by Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Heartbreakers, his managerial clients the Shirts, and, he swore, Johnny’s Dance Band from Philadelphia — represented a “resurgence of communal faith” Wolcott traced to the ’60s. This thesis was odd for Wolcott, no hippie himself, and odd for the punks, who hated hippies. But it was also prophetic, because just like hippies both the fledgling punks and the pre-Vanity Fair Wolcott were bohemians. From CBGB would evolve an alt-rock bohemia that would put its distrust of corporate capitalism into DIY practice. And while in recent years band culture has been pushed aside as social media transform the subcultural yet again, the indie business model has become standard, and its mystique remains an essential component of a hipsterdom that will eventually be called something else but isn’t as I write. Half a century later, we’re still washing “The White Negro” out of our hair.