Sex, drugs, and a dead rock critic

A whirlwind tour of music history

By Adam Mansbach, 10/12/2003

Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel, By Neal Pollack, HarperCollins, 260 pp., $23.95

In ''Never Mind the Pollacks," the real Neal Pollack (author of ''The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature: The Collected Writings of Neal Pollack") continues his running joke of self-aggrandizement with another story of a fictitious Neal Pollack. Last time around, the eponymous hero was the ''greatest living American writer"; this time he's a dead music critic whose Forrest Gump-like presence at every crucial moment in rock 'n' roll history has made him an enigma and a legend.

The fictional Pollack is universally lauded as the embodiment of rock, despite a total lack of musical aptitude. His enthusiastic hedonism, genius for criticism, and knack for being in the right place at the right time turn out to be far more important. He brings his boyhood neighbor Elvis Presley to Sun Studios to cut his first demo; he befriends an unknown Bob Dylan at Woody Guthrie's bedside and then competes with him for Joan Baez's affections. He annoys the Rolling Stones, gets kicked out of The Ramones, inspires Iggy Pop, roadies for Bruce Springsteen, and mentors Kurt Cobain. Any star who can't be worked into the freewheeling plot of ''Never Mind the Pollacks" is name-dropped instead; one way or another, Pollack has touched them all.

Usually drunk, stoned, naked, or all three, Pollack careens through the decades dishing out abuse and absorbing it, jumping from artistic hotbed to artistic hotbed and sparring with critics who, unlike him, fail to grasp rock's true nature. Along the way, he is periodically visited by ethereal bluesman Clambone Jefferson, the one man even more deeply rooted in rock than Pollack. From Clambone -- an archetypal wise-and-soulful black musician knowingly invented by the author -- Pollack seeks The Message, the essence of rock. He doesn't seek it very hard, though. Mostly, Pollack parties.

The real Neal Pollack uses his character's whirlwind tour through history mainly as an opportunity to lampoon rock stars, rock culture, and grandiloquent rock journalists. Some of the volley pays off; Pollack's portrait of a rambling, bitter Springsteen is dead-on, as is the critic's garbled meditation on the importance of The King: ''He had multiple meanings, this Elvis, but no meaning to us meant as much as the meaninglessness of no meaning. He was decay and mystery, and because of that, he contained clues about our death."

Far more often, though, ''Never Mind the Pollacks" is as dreary and toothless as [insert your own Keith Richards joke here]. Rock satire is nearly as old as rock itself, and Pollack does little to reinvent the form. His take on the culture is disappointingly pat -- the standard tableau of sex, drugs, erratic violence, and vague rebellion -- and his protagonist's authenticity is constantly asserted through his mastery of the above. People are constantly waking up naked and covered with vomit. The soon-to-be-famous wander across Pollack's path, and either he attaches himself to them for a few months or, in the case of lesser lights, they make self-defining, self-parodying speeches and then fade away, having served their purposes.

The cast of characters keeps changing, but the jokes remain the same. One bright spot is the story's narrator, Paul St. Pierre, the rival rock critic to whom the task of writing Pollack's biography has fallen. The fact that Pollack has slept with all three of St. Pierre's wives over the years has not diminished his enthusiasm for the man he calls ''the living, breathing essence of America's music," and in the brief sections in which St. Pierre appears, his life stands as an amusing contrast to Pollack's. St. Pierre has violated the primary rock taboo and grown up, but the specter of rock hedonism, as embodied by Pollack, continues to haunt him.

Throughout the course of the book, we watch his marriage disintegrate, as the biography of Pollack on which he is working begins to obsess him. If only it exercised a similar power over the reader. Pollack the author seems to think that myth-making -- even tongue-in-cheek myth-making -- is as simple as bouncing his character off of various rock 'n' roll Hall of Famers.

But few of the resultant interactions rise above the level of clich. Seldom do the rock stars surprise or even amuse; rather, each one acts just as a casual fan might expect him to -- except that many of them also seem to possess an odd awareness of the portent of their actions, and they sometimes make odd pronouncements which, if viewed with the benefit of hindsight, might be considered entertainingly prophetic.

There is a flimsy, sketch-comedy texture to ''Never Mind the Pollacks" that no number of Important Historical Moments can obscure. At times, the problem seems to be that rock teeters too close to self-satire for Pollack to find any space in which to maneuver. This is most evident in the dozens of invented song lyrics that speckle the novel. Many stray so close to the songs they parody as to be entirely pointless, like these lyrics from a George Clinton doppelganger, virtually indistinguishable from the Parliament songs "Aquaboogie" and ''Chocolate City" on which Pollack is riffing: ''P. Amazing Frankenbooty here / Cosmic Ambassador / Of the eternal chocolate boogie / 20,000 Leagues / Under the chocolate sea. . .Glowing nuclear fishy dogs / Swim on by / Your open swimming hole."

Pollack has a gift for sending up popular culture, but one can't help but wonder what kind of laughs he might generate if he chose to engage his subjects on a deeper level -- and if he had something more to say. ''Never Mind the Pollacks" skims across the surface of rock's history, leaving barely a ripple of laughter in its wake.

Adam Mansbach's second novel, ''Angry Black Whiteboy," will be published by Crown in fall 2004.