While retrospective collections of reprints of the American pioneers of rock criticism are familiar – Bangs, Christgau, Goldstein, Meltzer, Marcus, Nelson, Willis all gathered together one way or another – Robert Christgau's Going into the City is the first book-length autobiography of that generation. This is not only a bird's-eye view of how rock criticism emerged; it's likely to be the bird's-eye view.
The memoir covers the period from Christgau's birth in 1942 to 1985 and the joyous adoption of a daughter, Nina. Looking back in 1983, just in his forties, Christgau observed the ageing of new music: reviewing 1982, his ‘Pazz and Jop’ essay identified ‘pushing 40s’ and ‘35-niks’, noting that ‘old farts abound’. He joins a cluster of game changers and Christgau-obsessions born during World War II: John Lennon, George Clinton, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, with Neil Young and Al Green following close on VJ day.
While Going into the City is Christgau's sixth book, it's the first as start-to-end continuous prose, preceded by three collections of record reviews and two collections of essays. That said, each of the 11 chapters includes regular dividing spaces, so that the essayist's skills are still in play. By way of gossip, I particularly liked the one (p. 190) where Christgau in 1968 takes a phone call – famously inaudible – from William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker magazine, seeking a regular column on rock music. But the call is for Ellen Willis, not Christgau and, in the following gap of the memoir, I hear Gladys Knight hollering ‘It should have been me!’ And when Willis left the resulting ‘Rock Etc.’ column in 1975 (gathered in Out of the Vinyl Deeps), was Christgau expecting to listen again to Shawn's whispered request? In the memoir (p. 271), Christgau's thrill at his first collected essays, Any Old Way You Choose It (1973), is for a ‘collection just like A.J. Liebling and Pauline Kael’, both New Yorker regulars; Liebling's essay on the Marciano-Moore heavyweight bout of 1955 was a key inspiration to Christgau's becoming a journalist (pp. 144–5). Indeed, he rates Willis's 1967 ‘Dylan’ essay as its equal (p. 177) – while Kael's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang of 1968 is a favourite collection. Responding to Barbara O'Dair in an interview published in 2001, Christgau described the New Yorker, with reservations, as ‘the one place I'd have always liked to have worked’ (Carson et al. Reference Carson, Rachlis and Salamon2002, p. 159).
New Yorker, Village Voice: going into the city (p. 74), Christgau is tied to New York in the way that many of my family are strictly Ammanford in South Wales. Nearly always in New York, he goes to college elsewhere, walks off to look for America (pp. 140–2), travels to other cities for jobs and, after 299 pages, visits Europe. His 2010 visit to Dakar is a long way off, reflecting an interest in Afropop that gets going at pp. 309–10. We're congratulated in Europe for landscape, food and socialism (p. 300), but the Eurosceptic hint remains: he still conceives (p. 43) of a ‘Germanophile musicological establishment that protects its academic suzerainty to this day’. Happily recall that one of Christgau's all-time funny reviews is of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's tragic 1982 disco record, Hooked on Classics, with the role-reversal of Christgau's dreams: ‘at last, the three B's get to roll back over on Chuck Berry.’
A Great American Novellish tome, the book is often a real page turner, helped by sex-related family drama early on (pp. 45–7) and towards the end (pp. 335–6). The list of dramatis personae is lengthy but dominated by close family, the artist Bob Stanley (appearing first at p. 127), and three women: Miriam Meyer (pp. 91–131), Ellen Willis (pp. 161–208) and Carola Dibbell (pp. 216–363). Uxorious to a degree (OED: ‘dotingly or submissively fond of a wife; devotedly attached to a wife’), Christgau's wedding to Dibbell featured T-shirts labelled ‘MONOGAMY’ (p. 282) and, even with a lovely detail like that, he's attentive to the way marriage could be ‘in that peculiar subcultural moment, an ideological act’. That's typical if unsurprising of the book: chock-full of ideas, among which the Introduction (p. 7) singles out contingency as a consistent theme (see pp. 97, 101, 172, 259 and 318).
Alongside the long-walk narrative, the book stops off for many leisurely picnics, revisiting books, films and records from the period, but crucially from the 2010-ish perspective of the memoir's composition. Introduced at p. 6, the list of works includes (mainly by title alone): Kon-Tiki (pp. 41–2), South Pacific (pp. 42–4), Mad magazine (pp. 58–60), poems by Coleridge and Ernest Thayer (pp. 63–9), Crime and Punishment (pp. 78–83), Now's the Time (pp. 110–1), poems by W.B. Yeats and William Carlos Williams (pp. 122–4), Jules et Jim (pp. 131–4), Aftermath (pp. 168–71), Willis's essay ‘Dylan’ (pp. 177–8), Greil Marcus's essay ‘Rock-a-Hula Clarified’ (pp. 229–32), John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (pp. 237–9), novels by Theodore Dreiser and Christina Stead (pp. 254–60), Steely Dan (pp. 276–9), Marquee Moon (pp. 304–8), Mumbo Jumbo (pp. 316–8), and All That is Solid Melts into Air (pp. 342–6). Christgau often wonders whether he'll still sense the same power in these works as at their initial experience, but they all come through, generating an air of celebration and permanent wisdom to these revisitings. Among other anecdotes, the 1963 epiphany at the gallery – the Connie Francis art work – is again lovingly recounted (pp. 136–7); James Wolcott's memory (Lucking Out, p. 33) of Christgau's wearing ‘nothing but red sheer bikini underwear’ (and ‘pensively scratching his ass’) is firmly denied (at p. 289, and attributed to Lester Bangs); but the scrap with James Chance of 1978 is nobly passed over. (There's a great photo of that at pp. 72–3 of No Wave Post-Punk by Thurston Moore and Byron Colley, Christgau's cheveux longs (p. 322) intact.)
In the fabric of Christgau's prose, Blake's ‘minutely organized particulars’ are a familiar virtue, and here we find impressive lists including: eight aspects of sensibility (p. 6), eight ‘girlish virtues’ lacked in school (p. 32), 14 and 12 words counted in two lines of verse by Coleridge (p. 64), 15 present participles for Jules et Jim (p. 133), eight aspects of sex with Ellen Willis (p. 164), 21 aspects of Mick Jagger's performance of ‘Goin’ Home’ (p. 169), 10 groups of people who misremember the 1960s (p. 175), 13 memories of concerts (pp. 262–3), 11 rap sounds (pp. 357–8), and 12 adverbs for Marquee Moon (p. 306). The Jagger list is a possible record, and nearly all vocal (he ‘claps his hands’ and ‘falls to the bed’): of the remaining 19 verbs, only one (‘yelps’) is duplicated in the one-sentence list of 12 vocalisations heard in the band Liliput (Christgau Reference Christgau1998, p. 294). As a minor word-related matter, I stumbled over some of the Americana, such as ‘pizza heroes’ (p. 49), ‘Red Hots’ (p. 57), ‘coed lower-Ivy’ (p. 91) and ‘unhornswoggled’ (p. 205).
The early chapters are fascinating: I enjoyed the detailed attention to religion and church (pp. 30–93) and the portrait of the family fighting to get at the piano (pp. 22–3), with Auntie Mildred the master of modulation. Who'd have thought he was a ‘nominal Republican till JFK in 1960’ (p. 51)? The fifth chapter covers Christgau's years studying English at Ivy League Dartmouth College, the very college and period (c.1962) that informed the film National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). The Dartmouth literature course was a series of great books, the New Criticism dominant and, although he reacted to everything there (‘most of what I learned there was wrong’, p. 97), he after all goes on to evaluate 16,000 albums; ‘not sure Christgau ever really got out of the Academy at all’, as Simon Frith suggested (Carson et al. Reference Carson, Rachlis and Salamon2002, p. 69). Christgau ends the Dartmouth chapter with readings of two favourite poems he admired ‘not just as aesthetic structures but as guides to life and contemplation’ (p. 123): ‘Vacillation’, Yeats in the 1930s, and ‘The Dance’, from a 1962 collection by William Carlos Williams. And there was I thinking that Robert Creeley's For Love, also 1962, was the key text, more so than the ‘especially’ he gets at p. 147. That said, it's a Robert Creeley fan who, at p. 146, has ‘an exceptionally moist and succulent cunt’ – thank you for that, Mr Christgau – and a reminder-by-default that, in Stephen Burt's phrase, ‘Creeley could be frank’.
To readers of Popular Music, it may be the strand of Going into the City mapping out the emergence of rock criticism that proves most seductive. Christgau's journalistic models appear at pp. 155–6, there are interesting passages on Willis and Richard Goldstein (pp. 176–7), and the earliest rock criticism is carefully tracked, culminating at pp. 199–203. Editing for Village Voice generates stellar lists of writers (for example, at pp. 293–4 and 353–5) while (at pp. 287–9) there is brief discussion of the editing skills demonstrated in Popular Music in 2005.
‘A fucking tour de force’, Christgau concluded of a 1974 Earth, Wind and Fire album, and the same punchy summary could be applied to his absorbing memoir.
