23: The Iggy Chair

There appeared in the Rolling Stone record review section, in which I was now appearing regularly, a new writer with a unique conception of what a record review was. Rather than commenting on the recording artist’s material or performance thereof, J. R. Young would write a little fictional vignette, a miniature short story, in which a character would be listening to, or would have heard, the record in question. I was amused. When Warner Bros. asked me to write a print ad for the forthcoming Joni Mitchell album, I did my best J. R. Young imitation, and it proved no less successful than my earlier Nik Cohn imitation. A&M Records offered me twice what Warner Bros. was paying, and didn’t flinch when I said I didn’t want to have to come in to an office if I wasn’t in the mood.

The first day I did actually show up, to show the workmen where in the office I wouldn’t be required to actually occupy I wanted everything, a sexy blonde promotion woman I’d lusted after when visiting my friend Bob Garcia on The Lot (formerly Charlie Chaplin’s, mind you) came up to welcome me in a way guaranteed to delight a libidinous 23-year-old. Everything was coming up roses!

Well, not everything. Heading for the Grand Canyon with two pals, I pushed too hard the VW microbus my parents had given me for my college graduation. We spent three days in charmless Barstow waiting for it to be replaced. I decided, on getting home, to get something sexier — a 1962 Porsche Super-90.

I never had a friendship quite like that with the guy who picked it out for me (I deferred to him on the basis of the huge stack of motoring magazines in his apartment), a veteran of the Barstow debacle. There were a few weeks in the early summer when, bedazzled by his high intelligence, sympathetic to his neurotic’s self-torment, and hugely amused by his wit, I couldn’t spend enough time with him. Then, after we both saw The Stooges’ LA debut at the Whisky, I made the mistake of suggesting that we form a similar band of our own, with him in the Iggy chair. Thus was reborn Christopher Milk, with which I’d fooled around in college. But it turned out he saw himself much more as Mick Jagger than as Iggy (whose zanier shenanigans, like chewing the shoes of the audience, he essentially refused to emulate). By the time I persuaded the others to expel him from the band, we weren’t speaking.

The first of my acquaintances — a guy with whom I’d played a lot of Frisbee in my college’s Sculpture Garden, and his high school sweetheart — married. On a hill. With an extremely non-traditional clergyman. Reciting vows they’d written themselves. I generously gave them as their wedding gift the dreadful latest Bob Dylan album, which I’d probably received free. I was getting huge piles of free records every week now, and being invited to lavish record company parties.

What remarkable displays of corporate masochism these parties were, with armies of grotty little self-anointed rock critics eating and drinking themselves sick while sneering or even throwing canapés at the invariably mortified new recording artists the parties were intended to promote. The more boorishly one behaved at these parties, the more ardently he was seen to have repudiated the greed and inhumanity that corporate America embodied.

Getting wind of how badly the Grand Canyon expedition had gone, a pair of feminists next door — one young and zaftig and in love with me, the other ancient (31!), gorgeous, and the sort of ardent ballbuster who found misogyny in the most innocent remark — invited me to accompany them to San Francisco. I had to sneak out the back of the kitchen of the restaurant in Bakersfield where we stopped for dinner, as some of our fellow diners found my appearance homicide-justifyingly objectionable. I’d have bet that I was spending four times on my haircuts what they were spending on their own, trendy layered English pop star cuts being very much more labor-intensive than crewcuts.

About 24 hours into the San Francisco excursion, I admitted to my zaftig neighbor that it was her ancient roommate in whom I was much more interested, and for my trouble was emphatically urged by the latter to find my own way home once I was done fucking myself.


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