Never Mind the Pollacks

The Neal Pollack Invasion: Neal Pollack (vocals); Jim Roll (guitar, kwyboards, percussion, background vocals); Dakota Smith (guitar); Jon Williams (bass); Neil Cleary (drums).
Recorded in Austin, Texas.
While Neal Pollack is inarguably America's greatest living author (just ask him -- he'll tell you!), that hardly means he has no vistas left to conquer, and since Pollack has written a novel, Never Mind the Pollacks, which documents his previously unknown status as the single most important and influential figure in the history of rock music, it seemed only appropriate that he make an album to help back up his contention. Teaming up with Jim Roll (a gifted singer/songwriter who had collaborated with Pollack in the past) and Dakota Smith (a guitarist Pollack met in Austin, TX), the three assembled the Neal Pollack Invasion, and Never Mind the Pollacks -- supposedly recorded in five hours by a band whose members barely knew each other when the tape rolled -- is the first fruit of their collaboration. As music, for the most part it's a collection of reasonably clever parodies of various heroes of the rock demimonde, such as the Sex Pistols ("Never Mind the Pollacks"), the Velvet Underground ("Vein"), the Stooges ("I'm a Seeker"), the Ramones ("I Wanna Go to Coney Island"), and the Minutemen ("Racism Number Five"), with Pollack's purposefully smarmy lyrics skewering both the standard scripts for these performers as well as Pollack's own farcical arrogance (though if Pollack and Roll want to avoid hearing from Bruce Springsteen's lawyer, they ought to just concede that the music to "Jenny in the Car, 1972" is "Cadillac Ranch" just as the Boss wrote it). As an album, this isn't much more than a goof, but it's a goof that's also good fun; Pollack told a reporter "If I'm going to suck, I want to suck in a Sex Pistols kind of way," and if this album doesn't quite reach that lofty height, the Invasion generate a healthy head of steam on most of these tunes and do right by their obvious influences, while Pollack makes up for his limited vocal range with a good sense of vocal caricature. Maybe Neal Pollack isn't the greatest living rocker just yet, but there are plenty of folks who've done worse taking their material a lot more seriously than Pollack does here. There's a message there somewhere. ~ Mark Deming