Bruce Pollock the Writer

Although they were an integral part of my Greenwich Village experience in the mid-to-late sixties, these three characters were deemed not “folkie” enough to be included in my new book, THE BLEECKER STREET TAPES: ECHOES OF GREENWICH VILLAGE (out now from Trouser Press Books)

“Canters!” the three teenage girls called out to the man with the long black hair, Fu Manchu moustache, and goatee. “Ben Franks!”

Frank Zappa, in Greenwich Village for a summer job at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street, with his freaky ensemble, the Mothers of Invention, stopped in his tracks when he heard the names of his favorite L.A. hangouts. This trio of teenyboppers were obviously aliens from back home. So, Zappa proceeded to escort them into the Garrick to see the show that night for free. It was 1967 and the Village was in the midst of a love-in, influenced in part by Zappa’s compelling translation of the L.A. Experience, opening on the Lower East Side at the Balloon Farm, later exported to the Garrick, in the West.

Two of the girls were from Los Angeles, while the third was from Philadelphia. She was nineteen; her name was then Sandy Hurvitz. Within two weeks she’d be a Mother.

“When I went to hear the Mothers, Jeremy Steig was opening that night,” Essra Mohawk told me. “It was the only concert I ever saw on acid, and I ended up being in both bands.”

Sandy was rechristened Uncle Meat once she became a part of Frank Zappa’s bizarre musical operation. “One of Frank’s jokes was that he liked to use opposites to call people,” she told me. “Like Suzie Creamcheese, another of his characters, was a real bitch. You try to be nice to her, she’d go ‘Who are you talking to?’ So, she had this attitude and he called her something soft—Suzie Creamcheese. I was real nice and sweet, so he called me Uncle Meat. After a couple of months of it I said, ‘Hey, I really don’t want to be Uncle Meat,’ and Frank said, ‘I’m sorry, but I must insist you are.’ And I said, ‘Well, excuse me. Here I thought you were Frank Zappa, the wonderful musician, and now I find out you’re God and you’re going to tell me who I am.’ So, a few days went by and he said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to be Uncle Meat. If you don’t want to make money out of the name, I will.’ I said, ‘Thank you and more power to ya.’ And so, he came out with an album and called it Uncle Meat just to prove a point to me.”

Abundantly long-haired and freaked-out, Uncle Meat’s three-song cameo in the Mothers of Invention concerts that summer was, to me, the high point of the show. Though her songs were frankly incoherent (her main theme was entitled “Arch Godliness and Purpleful Magic”), I saw her as the ultimate merger of all that was wonderful in the reigning female types of the age, possessing the street-wise angst and funky sex appeal of Maria Muldaur, the verbal dexterity of Joni Mitchell, the troubled urban soul and ethereal innocence of Laura Nyro. Though her voice was closer to Etta James than pseudo-Joan Baez, in all other ways she represented the essential candy-store evangelist of the mid to late sixties, who lugged guitar cases twice their size down to Washington Square Park to sing their wrenching rhymes in voices about six decades too old for their bodies—a mystical cross between Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and the classic Janet Margolin character Lisa, from David & Lisa, who talked in rhymes and had soul-deep, scared little faraway eyes and a sad smile that could break your heart.

Sandy left the band after six months as an auxiliary Mother. By that time her Village dues were paid in full. “I opened for everybody at the Café Au Go Go, next door to the Garrick. I did three sets a night there, three sets a night with the Mothers, and three sets with Jeremy Steig & the Satyrs—nine sets a night, for fifty dollars a week.” Her first album, on Verve records, done under the auspices of Frank Zappa, was actually an unfinished demo tape. It came out in 1968, attracting relatively little attention, except for a phone call it prompted from an admirer.

“I was living with my girlfriend on West Fourth Street in the Village,” she related, “and one day a voice on the other end of the phone says, ‘My name is Laura Nyro, and we heard you need help. David Geffen is my agent and he helped me and I’m sure he could help you.’ And I was a flower child, and my thought was, ‘Isn’t that nice, these strangers want to help me’—not knowing that these things don’t happen.”

Briefly, Sandy became part of Laura’s entourage, an artist-in-waiting. And wait she did. While recording what would be her second album in California, she met and six weeks later married her record producer, Barry Feinstein, aka Frazier Mohawk. Thus, Essra Mohawk was born. The couple took a house nestled among the elite of sixties rock in Laurel Canyon. Paul Rothschild, who was producing Janis Joplin’s first solo album, Pearl, lived across the street. “He was looking for material, and my stuff was perfect for her,” Essra said. “But we were a little tardy in getting the tape to them, and, I’ll tell you, she died before I finished making that tape.”

“I don’t remember those years,” Essra said when I met her at her mother’s house in Philadelphia. “There are a lot of things I don’t remember. Little by little I’m starting to remember. With some of the stuff I’m starting to remember why I forgot.”

Zappa himself wasn’t overly impressed by the revolution in manners and mores taking place on the streets of Greenwich Village. “There wasn’t too much going on in the Village that interested me,” he said when I interviewed him in 1974 at the Golden Gate Motel, overlooking scenic Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. “The people who came to see us at the Garrick mostly had short hair; they came from middle-class white Jewish environments, mostly suburban. They came to see our show because we were something weird that was on that street and we were a sort of specialized recreational facility.”

As a charter member of that stereotypical group, I silently took offense at this portrait. But Zappa wasn’t partial to the hijinks going on in San Francisco either.  “I was up to San Francisco once or twice, but I wasn’t interested or influenced by the scene there,” he said. “Basically, I thought what was happening in San Francisco in that early stage was … well, I’ll tell you what I saw when I went there. Whereas in L.A. you had people freaking out; that is, making their own clothes, dressing however they wanted to dress, wearing their hair out; that is, being as weird as they wanted to be in public and everybody going in separate directions – I got to San Francisco and found everybody dressed up in 1890s garb, all pretty specific codified dress. It was like an extension of high school, where one type of shoe is the ‘in’ shoe. It was in the same sort of vein, but it was the costume of the 1890s. It was cute, but it wasn’t as evolved as what was going on in L.A.   

         “At the time I was living in a part of town called Echo Park, which was a Mexican, Japanese, Filipino, Black neighborhood and I lived in a grubby little two-room place on the side of a hill, 1819 Bellevue Avenue. In that house, I wrote ‘Brain Police,’ ‘Oh No, I Don’t Believe It,’ ‘Hungry Freaks,’ ‘Bowtie Daddy,’ and five or six others. A lot of the songs off the first album [Freak Out] had already been written for two or three years before the album came out. And a lot of songs wouldn’t come out until the third or fourth album. About fifty percent of the songs were concerned with the events of 1965 At that time, in the kiddie community I was hanging out in, they were all getting into acid very heavily and you had people seeing God in colors and flaking out all over the place. You had plenty of that and meanwhile there was all that racial tension building up in Watts.

“The reason people were shocked by our music in those days was that they hadn’t seen or heard anything that came close to what we were doing.  Basically, what people want to hear in a song is I love you, you love me; I’m o.k. you’re o.k.; the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees; the wind was blowing, it got cold, it rained, it stopped raining; you went away, my heart broke, you came back and my heart was okay. I think basically that is deep down what everybody wants to hear – it’s been proven by numbers. So, you start to think about the performer’s role as an entertainer, and that the audience is paying money to come there and see you do something that will basically gratify them. And I have a conflict where I believe that people are entitled to get off as much as they can, and I think entertainers ought to do just that; however, I don’t merely want to go out there and bullshit my way through a show. I want some substance too, so I have to mix it up a little bit and do some of the things that people wish to have done before their very eyes on stage, and at the same time keep myself from going crazy by writing down some of the things I want to hear.”

 Fellow iconoclast Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, had a similarly negative view of the prevailing ethos not only of the Village, but also of San Francisco.

“When we went to Frisco,” he told me in 1974, “Bill Graham was doing his Fillmore, and he had a light show, right? So, we walked in and we saw a slide of the Buddha and we said, ‘That’s gotta go!’ He hated us, said we were the lowest trash ever to hit Frisco. Ralph Gleason, the dean of American reviewers, wrote in a review—I’ll never forget it—he said the whole love thing going on in San Francisco has been partially sabotaged by the influx of this trash from New York, representing everything they had cured. Let’s say we were a little bit sarcastic about the love thing, which we were right about, because look what happened. We knew that in the first place. They thought acid was going to solve everything. You take acid and you’ll solve the problems of the universe. And we just said, ‘Bullshit, you people are fucked. That’s not the way it is and you’re kidding yourselves.’ And they hated us.”

When Lou Reed arrived in the Village in ’67, the neighborhood had been engaged in a mini-civil war. The Village west of Fifth Avenue had tradition on its side, some notable watering holes, the Vanguard for jazz, and the coffee house scene, with Folk City, the Night Owl, the Café Wha, the Bitter End, the Garrick, the AuGoGo, and the Gaslight. But the East had those marvelous slum apartments, perfect for dropout living, had the Summer of Love in its backyard, rock flow, the Balloon Farm and the legendary Fillmore East. St. Mark’s Place was giving Bleecker Street a run for the hippie dollar. There was more than mecca at stake here, more than a territorial skirmish for possession of those sultry girls in tight dungarees, weekend runaways to decadence. There was a philosophical debate raging too, a war of lifestyles. It was like the difference between folk/rock and heavy metal, between grass and heroin. In the West Village, you still held onto your day job, got stoned every night after work. Acid was a risk worth taking, every once in a while, for the world it revealed. Primary to your lifestyle was control, discipline in your craft. For years, you might plod along, revising.

But once past Fifth Avenue, everyone freaked-out. No one did acid over there because they believed in it, only because it happened to be a good kick at an orgy. Minds were blown and busted routinely out on the edge where hippie genii spewed speed raps into microphones, issued verbatim transcripts as works of art and were rewarded with the keys to the vault as they slouched through the ozone.

So, if you were a Western Yankee, the Rebel Eastsider was an object of envy and ridicule. You longed for a taste of such liberation – to really go psycho for a month or two – but knew the price was way too high – spontaneous art was fine, but let’s see them do that again for posterity. Meanwhile, those on the other side of the divide held the Yankees in the same ambiguous contempt, whining for your Establishment praise and approval, while at the same time calling you gutless or worse, conventional.

With their image of leather lips and contemporary cool –so chic and vague and dispirited—their melancholy songs of addiction and despair, led by Reed scowling in sunglasses, the Velvet Underground started at the Cafe Bizarre, off McDougal Street, a tourist trap, where they didn’t even have hawkers. Then came Andy Warhol and soundtracks at the New Cinematheque. When they opened at the Balloon Farm, a converted dancehall above the Dom, later to be known as the Electric Circus, all the freaks in the neighborhood made the place the number one local hangout. The group did ‘Heroin’, and ‘I’m Waiting for My Man’ – songs of another culture, the new age, written in blood, accompanied by a grinding, atonal backbeat.    

“At one point you seemed to be into describing a certain kind of scene.” I said to Reed, “and making it very real for people who knew about it, but didn’t really know about it.”

“Especially for people who didn’t know about it at all,” Reed chimed in, dropping his cool for a moment.   

“Well, people might have heard of the East Village, but that’s as far as it went.”   

“Yeah, but I brought a little taste of–” Catching himself, he held back. “Ah, maybe that’s pretentious. It’s just I wrote about what I knew about.”

“What would you call it, the Lower East Side experience?”

“It was a show by and for freaks, of which there turned out to be many more than anyone had suspected, who finally had a place to go where they wouldn’t be hassled and where they could have a good time.”

“Did it surprise you that this crowd was out there?”

“Well, you see, Andy had a week at the new Cinematheque when he could put on whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to put on was us. . . with films and stuff. And the people who showed up – everybody just looked at everybody else and said ‘Wow, there are a lot of us.’ So, we knew they were there.”  

His album Berlin was another highlight moment of our conversation. “Berlin needed a lyrical approach that was direct. There could be no mistaking it, no head games. You didn’t have to be high to figure out what was happening, or be super hip or anything. It was to-the-point, whereas some of my other albums and songs had puns or double entendres. In other words, the difference would be, in ‘Heroin’ I wrote ‘It makes me feel like Jesus’ son’. Now if the Berlin guy had said that he’d say ‘I take heroin’. That’s the difference. Like in ‘Heroin’ I say ‘I wish I was born a thousand years ago’. The guy on Berlin would say ‘I don’t dig it here.’ You can go through the whole album and he’s always approaching things that way. He’s consistently saying very short, straight, to-the-point, unmissable things.”

Reed seemed uncommonly proud of the review the album got in Rolling Stone, in which the critic thought the singer should be shot.

Like a freaked-out Zen master, Reed’s words can be misconstrued in several ways, but for much of our interview, he was he guy from Berlin, with a series of short, straight, unmissable replies. The question occurred to me: had the many complex emotions he’d lived through in the sixties, the drugs and suicides, the bad trips which scarred the Andy Warhol crowd, then his belated rise to fame, driven him into a psychological corner? And his response to it, like his songs, were statements of an experience so devastating as to defy expression except by the most primitive of means? Reflecting a life where, after feeling too much for too long, the safest reaction is no reaction at all?

“Do you see this as representing a new approach to things on your part?” I asked. 

Reed shrugged. “On my next album I may go right back to the other way.”

         He perked up when I asked him what writers he admired. “Dorothy Parker,” he said quickly. “If she wrote a song, watch out! That would be something else because she was right on target. I mean, just a little short story about a guy and his wife, where he’s reading the newspaper and she’s setting the table and they’ve got nothing to talk about – that story’s unbelievable, so painful sometimes you just have to put her away or she’ll drive you through the wall.”

I asked him if any songs had ever affected him that way.

“‘Mother’ by John Lennon,” Reed said. “That was a song that had
realism. I mean, that did it to you. That’s about the only one I can think of on that level. When I first heard it, l didn’t even know it was him. I just said ‘Who the fuck is that? I don’t believe that.’ Because the lyrics to that are real. You see, he wasn’t kidding around. He got right down to it, as down as you can get. I like that in a song.”

“Do you think you’ll get further down in your songs?”

“I think I’ve gone as deep as I want to go for my own mental health,” Reed replied. “If I got any deeper I’d wind up disappearing.”

As opposed to Reed, Frank Zappa’s relationship to language was stark and unambiguous. “I’ve always hated poetry quite a bit,” he said. “I really hate it. The whole idea of it just makes me gag. And usually people who produce it – I don’t like to make sociological generalizations, but that’s not something I readily identify with…the suffering and the pumping on the chest with the closed fist, bowing of the head… leaves falling off the trees, the wind coming up and all that shit. I hate it. I don’t like books either. I very seldom read. My wife and I have a joke because she likes to read. I say there’s two things wrong with the world today, one of them is the writers and the other is the readers. The main thing wrong with writers is that they’re dealing with something that is almost obsolete, but they don’t know it yet – which is language. The meanings of words have been corrupted to the point where, from a semanticist’s point of view, how can you convey an accurate piece of information with this language?

“I’m not saying writers should be replaced. I feel sorry for them. They have a problem similar to people who write music. It’s just as hard to write an accurate musical concept down on a piece of paper because of the new techniques on all instruments.  

“I think, ideally, the way it should be is you could use words for amusement purposes only, because the spoken word, the sound of words…strikes me as funny, because of the differences in people’s noise-producing mechanisms. But as far as the information communicated in the words, it would be better if people could communicate telepathically.

“Actually, that’s all a bunch of crap. I’m telling you, folks, I just don’t read very much. I don’t like books too much. I don’t like poetry at all. And that’s it.

“I think by the time I put a lyric down on a piece of paper and go through all the drudgery of setting it to a musical format and rehearsing it and so forth … that they’re all reasonably successful in saying what they were intended to say. There’s plenty more that could be said, but there are obstacles in the way of getting that out to an audience. I think there are lots of things I’d love to be able to express to people in lyrics, but being sort of a rational person I sit down and figure out, do those people really want to know, and is it worth the trouble to write it out, rehearse it, perform it night after night, record it just to express my point of view on a subject when it’s none of my business to inform somebody else about it in the first place.”

“As open as I was when I began,” Essra Mohawk told me in Philadelphia, “by the mid-seventies I’d become a totally conventional young lady.” She’d returned to California in 1973, but an album deal with New York-based Paramount sent her shifting coasts again. When Paramount merged with ABC, Essra’s management took the record to Elektra/Asylum. The ensuing Essra Mohawk, a sensuous war-whoop of anguish and bliss, was regarded warily by an audience who wanted to put such extremes well behind them. Songs like “If I’m Gonna Go Crazy with Someone It Might as Well Be You,” “Back in the Spirit,” and “Magic Pen,” which contained the statement “There will always be more of us …” were a mild shock to the easy-listening sensibilities of 1974, a period dominated by the comfortable blandness of Carole King’s lyrics and Olivia Newton-John’s physique. Even though Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark would appear, filled with fragrant and touching moments, they seemed in the stale and complacent atmosphere like the dying embers of a smoldering torch first kindled in the woods of Monterey.

Essra’s fourth album, Essra, begun on Elektra/Asylum, went over budget and was peddled to Private Stock, which released it in 1976—one more shriek of weird life into the void that was becoming disco, and then silence. Essra moved back to California in 1977, got married again in 1978 and divorced again in 1979.

“I believe in the eighties and I believe in this generation,” she said. “The sixties were just a taste of something yet to come. It was short-lived because the people suddenly had a direction without any practice or chops and the seventies was spent getting their chops together. Now all of these people who were in their twenties are in their thirties and can better and more stably do what they set out to do then.

“I think I’m real fortunate that it didn’t happen for me back then,” said Essra, speaking to me on the phone from Beverly Hills, where she was preparing, as it happened, for her third marriage. “At that point in my life I had no caution and I would ride with the flow. Now I’m older and there are lines I don’t go beyond. I was a fearless teenager then. We were all adolescents forever. Our parents had been through the Depression, therefore they overprotected us, so we were allowed to remain children longer than any other generation in history. So, we didn’t know responsibility. We didn’t know caution. We only knew freedom. What’s wrong with all these people older than us? Don’t they know how to be free? Then we found out, if we lived long enough, that there were things they were hip to that we had better get hip to. So, I personally feel I was saved. I grew up really wanting to give something to this world, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it. So, I’m grateful I didn’t make it then. I’m not bitter at all. I know what I would have done with my success. I would probably be dead.”       

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