Gabba-gabba hey! Neal Pollack’s history of rock BY CLEA SIMON
	Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel By Neal Pollack. HarperCollins, 270 pages, $23.95.

Inside every rock critic — perhaps inside every thinking rock fan — are two dueling personae. There’s the intellectual, the history-minded listener, who seeks to follow her or his favorite tunes back to their roots, usually in some deep Delta sound. And there’s the fun lover, the hedonist who just wants to enjoy the beat. That’s the fan who says, as in the motto of Stiff Records, "Fuck art, let’s dance!"

Satirist Neal Pollack understands this dichotomy, and he’s given voice to both personalities in the hilarious Never Mind the Pollacks. This incredibly silly, often filthy book, a tour de force through rock’s spotty history, features a wild-man critic named Neal Pollack who stumbles, drugs, and sleeps his way through almost every major pop-music moment of the past 50 years. Elvis? Played Neal’s bar mitzvah. Jerry Lee Lewis? The Memphis star was briefly married to Neal’s mom. Dylan, once the ’60s kick in, has issues with Pollack, partly because Neal steals the love of Joan Baez. When they break up, Neal finds himself in London with the Rolling Stones, and then back in New York for Warhol’s Factory and punk’s artsy anarchy. Iggy Pop? A shy high-school student until Pollack gets his hands on him. Kurt Cobain? An ignorant wimp.

But if Pollack lives the life, it’s his highbrow nemesis, Paul St. Pierre, who makes this book possible. Paul is the pretentious ego to Neal’s id, an establishment critic, perhaps the John Rockwell to Pollack’s Lester Bangs. As a recognized cultural commentator, St. Pierre gets e-mails from his editors at the New York Times that say things like: "We haven’t interviewed Sam Phillips in nearly two years. . . . Our readers demand roots-music coverage."

For reasons that are eventually made clear, St. Pierre is haunted by Pollack and sets out to write Neal’s biography (which will follow Paul’s masterwork, "The Threepenny Hip-Hopera, which compares the sociopolitical roots of Chuck D’s work with those of Kurt Weill’s"). After Pollack’s untimely but not unexpected demise, three days before Kurt Cobain’s death, St. Pierre is the only one who can trace Pollack’s incredible adventures and chart his often undervalued influence on every major pop-music movement. "My research skills are impeccable," says St. Pierre, but there are darker secrets hidden within his obsession.

Pollack’s life, as we recount it with St. Pierre, was a mess. Much of the book consists of him doing drugs or recovering from their effects. As a result, Never Mind the Pollacks reads like a Ramones song: it’s fast, it’s not too serious, and it’s really, really fun. When Pollack wakes after a binge, he’s terrified by the image he sees over the sink: "a hideous goblin, its face a mottled mess of hair patches and dried puke," until he realizes, "Wait. He was looking at a poster of Iggy Pop."

Many of the less obvious jokes are aimed at insiders. For readers of rock criticism, there are numerous send-ups of famous critics. St. Pierre cribs the real Jon Landau’s summation of Bruce Springsteen, except that where Landau referred to seeing Springsteen as the future of rock, St. Pierre writes (in the Phoenix, no less):, "I have seen Bruce Springsteen, and he may just have a future in rock ’n’ roll."

For rock fans, there are numerous song parodies, some silly, some dead-on, such as a Pollack-penned ballad of justice gone bad that, it’s clear, will be the basis for "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" once the jealous Dylan gets his hands on it. A fake discography completes the illusion, but its construction sounds so real that Boston music fans may soon be looking for the lost Mission of Burma album Only About 15 People Showed Up on the local Ace of Hearts label.

How readers will react to the fictional Pollack’s careering through history, Zelig-like, will depend largely on how they feel about the music scene the author parodies. For this former music critic, when Pollack goes on tour with the Minutemen, the endless indie-rock suffering begins to pall. The author also fudges the occasional fact: Elvis’s mother was still alive when he enlisted. And Pollack’s history (and his namesake’s experience) has an East Coast bias. The late-’60s San Francisco psychedelic scene is slighted, as is most of the Los Angeles punk of a decade later. Still, so much is crammed in here — like cat treats into Pollack’s two spoiled kitties, Max and Kansas City — that if any part drags, well, the scene soon changes. All that remains, in fact, is the quest for the truth, the real music, the soul of rock and roll. And that song, as the fictional Neal Pollack would never admit to saying, remains the same.