Never Mind the Pollacks

Author:Neal Pollack
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061750212
Publisher: HarperCollins

In the summer of 1967, Neal Pollack and Wayne Kramer from the MC5 entered Cobb’s Corner, a bar on the edge of Ann Arbor where all the revolutionaries went to drink cheap. Pollack wore a T-shirt that proudly read “DETROIT: THE MURDER CITY,” and Kramer wore an ammo belt, a hunting rifle strapped across his back. The lumpen revolt could break out any minute, John Sinclair had told them, and what good would rock ’n’ roll be against the pigs? They needed guns, especially in bars.

At a table was a longhaired sleaze in a leather jacket. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a Camaro.

“This is my cousin Barry,” said Wayne Kramer.

“Hi, motherfucker,” said Barry Kramer. “You’re an asshole!”

“Barry has a magazine called Creem,” Wayne said.

“Screw your magazine!” Pollack said. “Let’s get loaded!”

Twenty whiskies later, Pollack and the Kramers had locked arms, and were singing “Sweet Caroline.” Pollack unzipped his pants. Through his open fly, he pulled a document. It was a fifteen-thousand-word essay called “Jefferson Airplane Through the Meat Grinder and Onto the Grill.” Barry Kramer read the opening sentence: “One song made me nauseous; another made me puke.”

“I wanna publish this as my cover story,” he said. “We’ll get R. Crumb to do the cover art.”

Pollack stood on the table.

“You may publish my story!” he said. “But I need five thousand dollars immediately! To build a bomb!”

“I’ll give you twenty-five bucks,” Kramer said.

They loaded into Barry’s Chevy and headed off to the Frutcellar in downtown Detroit, where the MC5 was scheduled to do a show in front of the same hundred people who always came to see them when they were unannounced. Pollack stumbled in to find John Sinclair standing in the middle of a crowd of black guys, telling them about the upcoming “race war.”

“You must arm yourselves,” he said. “It’s gonna be the biggest race war yet.”

Wayne took the stage.

“Brothers and sisters!” he shouted. “Are you ready to blow up the world?”

The crowd, half black and half white, retreated to opposite sides of the room, eyeing one another suspiciously. From the stage, Kramer shrieked: “Get ready for the race war!”

John Sinclair shot his gun, once in the white direction, once in the black. The two sides charged each other, snarling, fists pumping, chains brandished. The MC5 thwacked away, providing the soundtrack for the end of the world.

Pollack inhaled the smoke and the blood and the urine and the sweat, and excitement shot through his bones.

“Twenty-five bucks for a magazine article?” he said.

A large black man grabbed his ankles and flipped him onto the floor. A white guy looped a bicycle chain around his neck and yanked. Cartilage popped. Pollack was in agony. John Sinclair whacked his attackers with a gun butt.

Shit, Pollack thought. I’d do this for free.

The next day, a Sunday afternoon, a dozen people including Pollack and Danny Fields from Elektra Records straggled into the University of Michigan student union to see a rock show. Three dirtballs took the stage and started slogging through an incomprehensible chordless flood plain of noise.

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