CORNER BOY: Loiterings New and Old, by Nik Cohn
GONZO NEUROTIC: The Best (and Not-So-Best) of Jerry Stahl, by Jerry Stahl
“First of all,” Michael Kinsley wrote in the preface to one of the collections of his columns, “I don’t want any grief about throwing together a bunch of old articles and calling it a book.” He liked this sort of volume (so do I) because they’re a “way to recapture the flavor of the recent past.”
Two longtime freelance scene-makers, Nik Cohn and Jerry Stahl, have new collections out soon. They’re dissimilar writers in many ways, but read together, the commonalities really begin to pile up.
Neither is a mainstream type (their work doesn’t go well with the furniture) and each practices a form of journalism that might be called loitering with intent. Each was born in the middle of the last century (Cohn in 1946, Stahl in 1953) and each wrote for a slew of music magazines, alt-weeklies, and slick and lowlife outlets that aren’t around any longer. Each has admitted smuggling fiction into what appeared to be fact pieces.
Each was a drug addict, though only Stahl made a career out of it. His junkie memoir, “Permanent Midnight,” from 1995, was turned into a film with Ben Stiller. Each is Jewish. Each wrote more books than most people are aware of.
Each wants to semi-disown his most popular work. In Cohn’s case, that’s “Tribal Rites of a New Saturday Night,” a 1976 New York magazine article about the disco and club scenes in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that inspired the movie “Saturday Night Fever.” He later admitted he’d made most of it up, and seemed surprised people hadn’t known all along. In Stahl’s case, he made a killing writing for “ALF,” the late-1980s NBC sitcom about a furry alien.
Each took an interest in unknown and marginal souls and wrote profiles of people like boxers, preachers, night court defense lawyers, barbers and exuberant peddlers of bedspreads. Each speaks about having a heavy freight of impostor syndrome.
Each of their new, career-spanning collections — which include essays, reviews, profiles, think pieces and random blurts — is issued by ZE Books, the iconoclastic independent publishing house. Cohn’s is called “Corner Boy.” Stahl’s is “Gonzo Neurotic.”
I’m going to begin with “Corner Boy,” because Cohn’s stuff is more to my taste. He’s cool to the touch, for the most part, while Stahl has an over-the-top, Hunter S. Thompson meets Anthony Bourdain meets Cosmo Kramer (he’s always bumping into the things he’s writing about) shtick, a maniacal style I dug when I was 17 but now mostly clangs on my ears.
Cohn grew up amid the rubble of post-World War II London and was in the exact demographic place to feel the detonation of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who across a formerly dull, gray landscape. He was a pioneering rock critic, the author of “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom” (1970), a landmark early history of rock.
His music writing was ardent, fond and knowing, and it had bite. He mostly loathed Bob Dylan (“the whining dentist’s drill in his voice”). While the Stones were his favorite band — he wrote about them as crude, mean, vital liberators — he thought they’d gone soft and posh by the late 1960s. He infuriated Mick Jagger by writing that a) he’d gradually lose his hair and b) the band wasn’t meant to get old. “If they have any sense of neatness,” Cohn wrote, “they’ll get themselves killed in an air crash, three days before their 30th birthdays.”
There are profiles of Phil Spector, Grace Jones and Gary Stewart, the honky-tonk renegade who’s back on the radar thanks to Jimmy McDonough’s recent biography. But Cohn was more interested, ultimately, in trends and scenes, in what was happening on the streets. He wrote a book — “The Heart of the World” (1992) — about walking up Broadway, from Battery Park to Times Square, and about those he met along the way.
This collection’s best piece might be one about Teddy Boys, the truculent, middle-finger-giving subculture that sprang up in London after the war. The Teds, as they were often known, wore Edwardian-style jackets, drainpipe trousers, slim-jim ties and combed their greased hair into pompadours. They mattered, Cohn writes, because England’s teens had previously been so bland and sheeplike and deferential to their elders. The Teds gave the world a blueprint for all future teen revolts.
Cohn bores down into fashion. Indeed, the Teddy Boys piece is adapted from his book “Today There Are No Gentlemen: The Changes in Englishmen’s Clothes Since the War” (1971), now so scarce that the few extant copies sell for enormous sums.
Cohn returns repeatedly to New Orleans, where he has sometimes lived, and he has good antennae for how the city, mostly below sea level, pulls your spirit around with its strange tides. He describes walking the French Quarter with Pete Townshend in 1972; Townshend is so blown away by the life-affirming chaos that all he can do is utter a long string of expletives.
Cohn was an aspiring rap producer in the city, and he wrote a good book about it — “Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap” (2005) — that’s excerpted here. He’s witty about all the things that can go wrong in a recording studio. The excerpt is strewed with lines like, “I’d seen dead men in coffins before, but none who’d been shot in the face.”
Cohn has revised some of these old pieces, cutting them down and rewriting. He refers to this process as “remixing.” (Stahl has done the same thing.) I’m of two minds about this practice, but rare is the writer who can resist airbrushing old material and deleting idiocies.
You can infer the tone of Stahl’s book, “Gonzo Neurotic,” by its title and by the first sentence of the author’s note up front: “I would rather have testicle surgery, on horseback, performed by Special K-crazed lumberjacks, than sit down and read my old writing.”
Well, that makes two of us, a reader is tempted to respond. In truth, Stahl is funny, self-aware and very much in on his own “professional ex-junkie” act. His pieces may fly off the tee like screaming bananas, to borrow a bit of golf slang. (I don’t play golf.) But he’s a more sober observer than he lets on.
There are essays here on the Miss America pageant — Stahl asks each contestant, hoping to shake them out of their canned responses, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” — and a nudist colony. Amid the meditation rooms and hydro-pools, he thinks to himself: “If I’m lucky I just might find Gay Talese’s wallet!”
Stahl writes about the making of “Café Flesh” (1982), the postapocalyptic porn film he co-wrote that became a cult classic. He profiles, or tries to profile (this book includes a lot of write-arounds), Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro, the wild-eyed TV host Tom Snyder and Hugh Grant’s short-term girlfriend Divine Brown. He wrote for “Twin Peaks” and says he was fired for turning in scripts with blood and hair on them. There are semi-believable pieces about being the Joey Chestnut of heroin.
He writes about honeymoon suites, religious television and appearing on “Oprah.” There’s a piece about ruining his liver (“my big pink organ”) that segues into a wildcat appreciation of the liver steak at Musso & Frank Grill in Los Angeles, “roughly the width of a car seat and the length of a baby’s forearm.”
Stahl is his own vivid comic invention. Life whooshes past him like arrows, and some of those arrows stick in his guts. He wonders if Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s innovator, knows how much his restaurants have meant to generations of junkies. Stahl has a survivor’s wariness and takes the long view. He asks, in what might be the best bit of self-help language I’ve ever stumbled across, “Maybe that’s as close to happiness as you get — not making other people unhappy.”
Ben Ratliff, the journalist and rock critic, edited Cohn’s “Corner Boy.” In his introduction he delivers a line that applies to both writers: “His writing on any subject is for anyone who believes that the best option is usually off the menu.”
CORNER BOY: Loiterings New and Old | By Nik Cohn | ZE Books | 372 pp. | $35
GONZO NEUROTIC: The Best (and Not-So-Best) of Jerry Stahl | By Jerry Stahl | ZE Books | 444 pp. | $24
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