Richard Meltzer - trivializer of the awesome or awesomiser of the trivial?

Some people swear by his earliest writings but I found them impenetrable in a bad way: not only did I not get any musical information out of them, I also didn't take away any entertainment value. A bit later on when he loosened up a bit and actually strove for coherence, it became a bit more interesting. Much of the time the subject was really still Meltzer, not music, but occasionally he would write about the behind-the- scenes part of the music industry, like being schmoozed by the PR people, the drugs and the hookers, the press releases and the freebies...you know, the REAL music industry. It's also fun to see his relationship with the Blue Oyster Cult deteriorate throughout the years. Informative? Debatable. Entertaining? Definitely.

I'm really biased when it comes to Meltzer, because he seems to piss off everyone I dislike - people who are more middle-of-the-road than they think they are. I think at the root of his writing is a strong anti-authoritarianism and he is just so "right-on" because of it. Nothing he's written has pissed me off because it's so obvious that he gives a shit.

Plus, every time the Reader publishes a piece of his, a zillion angry letters from boring Midwestern "no bullshit" anti-intellectual types appear. I love that they're being confronted with an outlook completely antithetical to their own.

E.g., more important than either Dewey or Wittgenstein (despite not being as good a philosopher as either and perhaps not being as good a writer as Wittgenstein) (and nowhere near as good a person as D or W, though that's just a comment on his life in print, which is all I know). Reason = both Dewey and Wittgenstein attacked the theory- practice split but only took on the split's esoteric philosophical ramifications, whereas Meltzer defied the split as it existed in everyday practice, thus forged new practice himself. (Um, I was trying to be brilliantly cryptic here like mark s but I was neither concise enough nor intelligible. Mark, help!) (And Meltzer is maddening, hate-filled, obnoxious, and perhaps even delusional or at least something of a social retard, so I won't disagree with Pat or the rest except to say that there's more to Meltzer than his faults.)

For me...what I love, absolutely love about his writing is the complete obliteration of high vs low. He places Bud Powell, Soup Labels, and Gozilla movies on the same level. At the same time, I find his iconoclastic tendencies very refreshing. He gets u to re- think ideas, structures, systems (even 'proper' writing) you take for granted. Contrary to initial impressions...he also spends a lot of time on his writing. It ain't no free writing session (at least not anymore)

Keep an eye on salon.com...I've got a piece on Meltzer coming out soon.

Umm...thanks.

"He doesn't collapse the distinction between importance and unimportance so much as he simply walks away from the issue, leaving you to do the same, if you want."

This almost sums up Meltzer's writing perfectly and more accurately describes what I was saying that he broke the high-low barriers....not he just ignored it.

By the way...I run an animation festival in Ottawa (canada) and I got so tired of the dull writing in our catalogues (I'm a big Tosches/Meltzer buff) that I just contacted Meltzer and asked him if he'd write for the catalogue. In my own writing I've been trying to bring to animation what they brought to rock...but to date most of the other writers are just thrashing out dull, dictionary prose. Anyway...to my surprise...he agreed and late I convinced him to serve on our festival jury...so he'll be coming to town this fall. I'm very curious to see how the jury goes (he's with 3 other animation folks)...I really liked the idea of asking him to do it and his article was umm..what can I say...classic Meltzer.

Sorry...not meaning to brag at all...just wanted to share this with other Meltzer readers (not to many people I know have any idea who Meltzer is).

Frank K already knows my dream abt RM, which I dreamt the night I read Vinyl Reckoning: he had a huge bed — actually that element is quite common in my dreams — and we all lounged on it while he served us these fantastically tasty tiny little pork pies, and then by mistake I destroyed his whole bathroom (a kind of super-elaborate Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson set-up with a siny galvanised bucket): I touched it and the WHOLE WALL FELL OUT, and everything fell into the street. Meltzer was real nice about it, but I could tell he was REALLY ANGRY. Um, this means what?

I gotta admit...when I interviewed Richard last year...I was SCARED SHITLESS. I was like a fuggin school boy....

As for the dream....umm...

So what I want to ask here, if anyone's still with this thread, is: What is the intellectual value of Meltzer's nastiness? And I don't mean just that while angry he makes a lot of brilliant points in brilliant ways, which for sure he does. Do the anger and cruelty themselves make a point? What do we learn from them?

I've got thoughts about this - yes, they make a point, yes, I learned a lot - but I've been listening to my own thoughs all day, so I want to listen to some other people's first. And I'd like to hear Mark elaborate on distinction between love/hate = collapsed.

The Canadian interviewer that Meltzer was referring to might have been Scott Woods (with these results).

Yeah...the issue of Meltzer's nastiness is something I've wondered about as well. Not only does he routinely attack Christgau, Marsh et al.. but also Sandy Pearlman (apparently he screwed Meltzer out of some $20,000 in royalties for Burnin' for you). AND...if that ain't bad enuff...check out the Caned Out books. In them (and later in The Night Alone)..he rips the shit out of his parents.

Now I can justify them to a point. I think it's important that he's taken numerous punches at The Voice and Rolling Stone because they are sometimes to quickly held up as the vanguard of hip, new, counter- culture etc... But...to me it's a system that needs to be attacked not necessarily people. As such...the Christgau attacks emerge as a bit petty. S'like why waste all this energy on Christgau who didn't appear to really do much to Meltzer (who knows what we don't know!).

What's disturbed me more (when I stopped laughing) are his attacks on his parents. He told me that they were not bad people just boring, average etc... Now I do like the fact that he's just taken, again, a system and just smashed it to pieces. The whole idea that we should be nice to our parents etc...respect the family structure. He's writes about dreaming of fucking his mother, how ugly she is...and has a piece called "Things I learned from an asshole named Dad". In one sense..these are great pieces because it just shatters our assumptions about family relations. He's simply saying what many of us have thought or felt.

HOWEVER...there is still something bothersome about them. Again...why use your family as scapecoats?

Well..sorry guys...I'm rambling a bit...just throwing my morning thoughts out.

Maybe part of the problem is that very few people have challenged him or called him on some of the stuff he said.

I mean..christ even here...this whole Christgau shit. You'd think that Christgau was responsible for Meltzer remaining a cult writer.

"I am inclined to believe that the heart of and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth, or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life.... Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred."

Now, I find that passage to be choking in contradictions, and I think that the decent academic prose that Dewey epitomizes is itself a kind of deadness and bigotry - well, not the prose itself, but the insistence in Universities and in Journalism that (to some extent) everyone write like that. But there are reasons to try to make everyone write the same, just as there are reasons to make people wear school uniforms and follow dress codes. Sure, uniforms suppress diversity and personality, but in doing so don't they also suppress social conflict and violence? This isn't a rhetorical question either: I don't know if uniformity suppresses conflict and violence, but even if it did I'd be against it. But maybe the consequences of genuine freedom are that people get hurt. Anyway, I grew up in a college town: the pretence was that it was an intellectual utopia, the reality was that whole categories of people (call 'em rocks, hoods, greasers, beer freaks, grits, burnouts, dirtbags, stoners) got their esteem smashed in that nice town, in nice language, as did individuals, as did the people that the hoods et al. scapegoated in retaliation, so my discovering Meltzer at age 15 in 1969 was a return of the repressed for me: he was an intellectual who was actually speaking the social war that everyone was living through, not hiding it behind politics but just ripping. Abuse was in his words, but the abuse was in the world anyway. But...

"Great writer" would be a boring outcome for Meltzer, since he held the promise of being so much more. Earlier in this thread I'm claiming that he tops Dewey and Wittgenstein and everyone else as a 20th century intellectual. And I claim in my Whore review that he's recently been letting his ideas about music molder - choosing to say not-so-smart things that are wrong simply because he can say them powerfully. (This probably in the long run makes him a worse writer, too, but that's a somewhat different issue.)

First...Frank...you mention that his ideas about music have sort of faded. I came to Meltzer because I thought he was a great writer. He made me laugh. He made me think specifically about my pre-conceptions about 'proper' writing and also criticism. He put (and yeah I know first person writing ain't nuttin new) the self into his criticisms and to me that was so important and it gave his work so much more meaning and honesty. BUT I've never considered him just a music writer...in fact I could care less about half of the musicians he writes about (similarly...Nick Tosches could write a cookbook and I'd read it because I love the power and force of his language). You seem to be pigeonholing him still as a music writer when he's a Writer and has always been. I'm not even sure he was writing about music to begin with (but hey...I was 2 years old in 1969 so I'm coming at his work from a different context).

Intellectual value in his nastiness? I dunno but for me his treatment of his parents, for example, made me re-think (after I laffed my ass off) the way we act towards the family structure. Most of us treat it with a certain amount of respect and don't cross certain lines....to me there is this social war (as u call it) just in little things like "Things I learned from an asshole named Dad"

On the other hand....the nastiness towards Christgau don't make much sense to me and seems of little social value...BUT in a way this is also what I like about his work....There's no hiearchy or division: this is LITERATURE. This is CRITICISM. This is my GROCERY list. It's all mixed in together. And that in itself is a form of social criticism or 'war'.

Didn't Foucault say something about that in Death of the Author?

Ok...my automatic comments.

I don't know if this is the right place for this, but here's a live music preview I recently wrote for the Regina Prairie Dog, that's not only a big-time copping of what RM does in the Reader, but it actually stars RM and it's not even made up--though I've been known to do that.

Stompin' Tom and the Writer by Emmet Matheson When last I spoke with Richard Meltzer, rock crit's anti-hero, author of some really great books like, THE AESTHETICS OF ROCK, A WHORE JUST LIKE THE REST, and HOLES: A BOOK NOT ENTIRELY ABOUT GOLF, he asked me about Stompin' Tom Connors.  It seems that while Meltzer-who now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes mostly about getting older-lived in New York during the early 70s, he made frequent trips to nearby Montreal just to see Dr Stompin' Tom (in 1996, Connors received an honourary Doctorate of Laws from St. Thomas University in Fredricton, New Brunswick). "We thought he was the wildest thing going," Meltzer remembered fondly. "Is he still active?"  I was pleased to him that Stompin' Tom was not only still active, but that he's been enjoying quite the renaissance of late. Meltzer was intrigued to hear that Connors has penned two memoirs, BEFORE THE FAME, chronicling his childhood in Skinners Pond, PEI and his early days spent hitch-hiking with nothing more than a flat-top guitar, and the recent STOMPIN' TOM AND THE CONNORS TONE, where Stompin' Tom sets the record straight on his rise to fame and the disillusionment with the Canadian music industry that led him to return all of his Juno awards in 1979. Meltzer further marvelled at Connors' unyielding orneriness when it came to protecting and valuing Canadian culture. "Well, he's a hell of a custodian," Meltzer laughed.  Meltzer then went on to opine on how, like blues artists such as T-Model Ford and R.L. Burnside, by staying true to himself and true to his music, Stompin' Tom is a helluva lot more of a genuine Rock & Roller than ninety per cent of the acts who actual claim perform Rock & Roll music. "It's a big monster, Rock," he said wearily, "And it exists for certain pre-ordained reasons that were not part of the package once. Part of what it's there for is to make people stupid. To make people cease to resist. It's crowd control."  But you know, and I know, and hell, even Richard Meltzer knows that Stompin' Tom Connors, who was recently in the headlines again, demanding to be removed from the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame due to what he considers the association's lack of support for true Canadian culture, is about something quite the opposite. 

If you like this stuff, there's plenty more at http://www.egroups.com/ group/thismusicismylife plus a nifty pic of mustachioed RM to boot.

THE ROBERT BECK MEMORIAL CINEMA PRESENTS

August 2001

28 AUGUST - RHYMES WITH SELTZER (RICHARD MELTZER) Tonight we make a sojourn into cinema with the Philosopher of Rock, Richard Meltzer, presenting several of his rarely-seen Regular 8mm movie masterpieces, Ages 9 to 12 (1970), Piss Daiquiri (1971), A Royal Flush in August (1972) and Cots for Sleeping Six Abreast (1973). In addition we'll see films by his alter-ego Lar Tusb, including Joe Cocker Live (1969) ("An exhibition baseball game featuring Joe and Les, the first major singer in the Soft White Underbelly after Jeff Richards and Jack Sprat; Les's sister is one great broad and she's wearing her lipstick in this one." -RM) and Janis Joplin's Mams and Cunny (1968). Mr. Meltzer himself will do a phone-in introduction from lovely Portland, Oregon, as well as a video-reading in excerpts from Rhymes With Seltzer:Richard Meltzer Reads Some Stuff. The program will close with a screening of Andrew Dickson's Good Grief, in which Mr. Meltzer makes an all-important cameo appearance as a (semi-)mysterious writer.

All programs on Tuesdays at 9pm at Collective Unconscious, 145 Ludlow St. NYC

$5 Admission

Be sure to check out the website at: www.rbmc.net. Its changing all the time. Lots of cool new features.

contact: Brian Frye Cooper Station Box 499 NYC 10276-0499 fryebrian@hotmail.com

http://users.skynet.be/sb017192/meltzer.jpg

You say it like it's a bad thing.

Why do YOU care about our sex lives, anyway? I mean, It's not like we're gonna fuck you or anything. Not even me, and my dubious taste in men is legendary.

So I just finally got a copy of THE NIGHT (ALONE). Halfway through as of right the eff now. Been looking for it for seven g-damn years. What the what anyhoo? Anybody notice that RM's no longer doing the Of Notes for the San Diego Reader, he still does one review a week in the Blurt section, but not as funny.

Is Dino really more substantial than Night Alone or even the SD reader published, Autumn Rhythm (2002) or any number of other writings?

I dont think so....ESPECIALLY given Tosches' recent insubstantial books including In The Hand of Dante which I found very disappointing

Tosches just gets more press.

chris robinson ottawa, canada

maybe kogan did though

a) ok get to the point now
b) what the fuck does that mean?
c) hahaha very funny
d) hmmm that's valid if he means what I THINK he means
e) omigod that's fucking genius, why didn't I think of that?
f) what the fuck does that mean?
g) (repeat)

i think it'd add a little color to her cheeks.

That's exactly my point.

kogan's line — probably laid out further up the thread — that as his writing got better his thinking got lazier is on the whole true (interesting also: eg name a writer this is NOT the case with...) (ie whose writing AND thinking improved in lock-step) (apart from me obv) (joke) (kinda)

+ there's no way you can call the thinking 'in' the writing in The Night (Alone) (for example) 'lazy'.

Lazy isn't neccessarily a bad word to use in respect of later Meltzer, but this is bound up in the enabling/disabling baggage of rockwrite that he endlessly, er, 'negotiates'.

yeah and whatever happened to those? all the links have been down since that site went out of business.

overall its worth a read.

Anyway, Meltzer isn't too hot on post-anything 1970, at least in writing, seems like he knows about it but he can't summon up the energy. But Aesthetics is one of the essential books on the '60s, period, and indeed the greatest book ever written on the Beatles, their force field of influence on everything there for a fat five years.

Aesthetics of Rock is one of the few attempts by a rock critic to address both musicological topics (the "tongue," etc.) and subtle factors regarding the aesthetics of particular records (as in his Sgt. Pepper analysis).

Meltzer was a truly great rock critic, but the selection of pieces in A Whore Like the Rest seems to imply to me at least that he's not all that interested in this aspect of his past work. He poo poos his Village Voice pieces (of which there were many), for example. The record reviews he did for Rolling Stone in the early seventies were great, but there's only one of those made the book (the L.A. Woman review). I understand it, in a way; the book is more about him than it is about the music he was writing about. The problem with the book, though, is that it's too easy for someone to read it and to think that he might have been a good writer, but wasn't necessarily such a great critic.

eddie so so SO OTM

Last year I was trawling the library shelves for a book and came acorss RM's "novel" The Night (Alone) which I'd never read. Apparently I was the first person to check out this copy! Now I wasn't expecting er, Madame Bovary or something in terms of traditional narrative etc but WTF! Talk about recycling the SOS. Right about the time the Meltz wheeled out his snowball fight with the New York Dolls anecdote for the 12th time I hung my head in despair. A real crisis of IMAGINATION in a truly original stylist who previously never lacked "I" (is more depressing than hemmorhoids). Hopefully his geezer book is a rebound.

Search: "Buy A VTR And Rule The World" (1978)in the old Best Of The Village Voice anthology. Meltzer at his non-bitter funniest and also wierdly prescient re: hometaping, file-sharing etc.

And I think RM is willfully cranky, myself. I came across this mot when I was trying to write something useful about Big Star (which I find somehow impossible)--something like "Big Star is the means by which the current generation gets their dose of the British Invasion." Which is obvious, way obvious, also bedrock, and something, like so much of his writing, you shouldn't forget.

I was trying to explain how to read "Aesthetics" to a friend, he was put off by the "philosophy" angle. Forget that, just concentrate on it like you do Nietzsche or someone, go for the aphorisms, like the great bit about listening to the first Rolling Stones album and how its re-creation of a one-night stand corresponds to the millions of real one-night stands happening at the same time. That's great.

first, wtf @ old ilx/this thread -- it's just bananas right from the beginning.

i just have one simple question related to richard meltzer:
will 17 insects can die in your heart ever be reprinted or has it been and i just can't find it? going price for a used copy appears to be over $100.
i'm assuming "good verse and bad" means it's going to be verse and not rock criticism?

maybe try interlibrary loan?

i've always wanted to track down meltzer's article about abbott and costello -- i came across a reference to it once in one of his interviews but have never seen it anywhere.

yeah i have a trip to the library in my future anyway, it's on the list.

apparently acc to my local library/worldcat there are 3 copies in libraries in this country, none of which are circulating.
interesting.

and one of them is in the library of the HoF