"Meltzer is a writer who will hook you like a drug" says the Los Angeles Reader on the cover. Funny that, as I found the effects of reading this weighty tome to be slightly more excruciating than a 'Deep Heat' suppository. I'm very surprised this book exists, and that those who have read it also tend to rave about it. Setting myself up for accusations of serious point-missing here, I thought A Whore Just Like The Rest stunk.

Meltzer kicks off with a story about how he had been to bed with three women who had also been to bed with Jim Morrison, and had actually specifically sought carnal knowledge of those who had a similarly venereal insight into the Lizard King. Meltzer completely fails to see the peculiarity of his desire to not so much be a groupie as to be a groupie to groupies themselves, responding to awe-struck admirers who'd comment "Christ - that's like fucking him." with the words "No - it's like being him!" Wrong. It's simply too tragic to even contemplate.

Meltzer introduces the essays / articles that he's selected for this anthology with a few words reflecting on the passages he presents to us. He introduces his Jimi Hendrix review by paraphrasing the writer Byron Coley who once referred to this piece as "the greatest record review ever written". Scarcely able to believe my eyes, since I had the exact mirror opposite response to the passage, I checked with Byron to ask what it was that so appealed to him about Meltzer's writing:

"I first read it when it came out and it was the piece of writing more than any other that interested me in the idea of sliding a piece of paper into the typewriter. I still think that it functions beautifully - especially when viewed inside the context of its place in the space/time continuum - as an essential grapple with the basic spirit of the creative process that flowed through Hendrix while he was organizing that record. I have always thought that reviews in major magazines (as opposed to those in fanzines) are challenges to use language to code albums in such a way that they will speak to a certain receptive audience while confusing everyone else. This is a perverse thought on my part, no doubt, but it's one that made writing for the mass press bearable for a decade or so."

Inspiring stuff indeed, but on rereading the passage, it still feels like we have read a completely different text. We learn nothing about Hendrix or the album in question - that in itself isn't a sin; Meltzer could have written not about the album specifically but about whatever thoughts, passions or memories the music mustered within him, the "essential grapple" that Byron refers to above. However, his nonsensical, unamusing and uninteresting dribble tells us nothing about Meltzer, Hendrix, life, the universe or anything else at all. We are informed in his introduction that he smoked a lot of pot before writing this, and I'm sure that was the best excuse he could come up with. It's so utterly self-consciously unself-conscious that it makes me want to puke bedknobs. He later commented, about a completely different subject, ".things got real silly overboard sort of pseudo weird. Instead of being solid outasite far out. It was just so much flimsy shit." Nail-on-the-head time, had he been referring to his own writing.

Meltzer's writing has similar problems to the ones evident in Bob Dylan's Tarantula - very little to say and a whole book in which to say it. The difference is that Dylan knew how to break up the barrage of nonsensical applesauce and grammatical nightmares, drawing us back into his imagination with a wry absurdity just as we were about to desert for good. Meltzer however pounds on at his typewriter, only pausing for the odd toke and to pat himself on the back for being just as cool as Hendrix. Except he's not. The review ends with the premise that the word 'frog' is funny when you are stoned and slipping it into a sentence unexpectedly is a little bit daring, adding a sousant of danger and wildness. Today, however, such naive cannibinoid blatherings are not only old hat, but are also an old hat on which someone has first sat and then farted upon. The fact that Byron, a writer who I respect, was inspired by Meltzer confuses the hell out of me. And Byron isn't alone in his admiration either which confuses everything outside of hell out of me too.

A few pages later Meltzer outlines his intention, ". clearly, I'm avoiding all efforts to actually write. Y'know, behave writerly - string words together for optimum or even semi-optimum clarity, comeliness or any of that - because I viewed such concerns as not only for squares but, well, pre-rock." So now that we're all 'post-rock' why not go the whole hog and deliberately sabotage our writings? Perhaps I should remove every fourth word in this review just to make it sufficiently hip for Meltzer's tastes? Uh... actually he's already done just that himself in the past; the paragon of experimental literature that he is. And because hindsight is always better than foresight Meltzer thinks that a bit of present-day self-deprecation is sufficient to get himself off the hook and make him look smart again. Sorry pal, it isn't. Coherence can occasionally be sacrificed if there is a mountain of vision to take its place, but as his Jimi Hendrix review demonstrated, vision is in pitifully short supply, while unfunny bong-fuelled 'see how far out I am, ma' posturing sadly is not.

We are treated to an article about Altamont which Meltzer smugly professes not to have attended with reviews for bands who never even played there. Neil Young's appearance at the Carnegie Hall receives similar treatment. A review for the film Performance, also not seen by the author at that time, contains Meltzer's own invented characters, story line and script from which to quote. I once employed this technique myself, while sitting in an English A-Level examination several years ago when I realised with horror that I was expected to write an essay about a book that I had not only never read, but also never heard of. Not wishing to abandon all hope of a pass and wanting to give it a good shot, I wrote the essay to the best of my abilities, given the somewhat disadvantaged position I found myself in. I didn't pass, and for good reason - I was talking utter bollocks. While mine was an act of desperation brought on by my own stupidity, Meltzer's action seems to be an act of absolute contempt - not only for both the artist and his / her audience, but also for Meltzer's own readers; in fact contempt for every aspect of the rock-writer's world. So why write about rock?

The true moronic cherry on Meltzer's frequently puerile cake comes in the form of a short essay about Patti Smith's breasts in which he writes "Squeeze em and your palm and digits will not meet with dissatisfaction (take it from me because I already have - got me a real good grab that is - and not against the lady's will, goody goody goody for me...)" etc etc. Meltzer tries to excuse himself for being such a vacuous idiot by saying in his introduction "I am not pleased with myself for having written the accursed thing" and excuses his inexcusably stupid words by saying that she had become a bit distant and a bit snooty so she deserved his 'prose rape'. Worthless and deluded schoolboy clap-trap such as this is much better forgotten about, but Meltzer has personally selected the essays in this anthology, and despite his feeble protestations to the contrary doesn't appear to have grown up too much since he first wrote it.

Right now I wish to Christ that I'd followed Meltzer's lead and written this review without the bother of acquainting myself with its subject, since the time spent passing my eyes over the words in this far too fat book could have much better been spent sorting the socks in my sock drawer. Then again, had I not read A Whore Just Like The Rest I might have made the foolish mistake of actually saying something nice about its nauseating pomposity and self-congratulatory vapidity of the contents.

And there it was going to end; my final word on the writings of Richard Meltzer. However, I managed to persevere beyond the first 150 / 200 pages (and a few duff chapters later on that I'd randomly flicked through), against all odds, and the tone and content began to change.

Where early Meltzer wrote with an insolent and idiotic swagger, he started to actually write about music or his life instead of producing incoherent dull word-marathons, and an engaging and genuinely humorous style starts to emerge.

Not only do the collected articles become entertaining and insightful (many of them, at least), but Meltzer's present day ruminations / reflections begin to engage. No longer the cocky-dunderhead deceiving us by writing about non-existent events, his contempt turns instead from the easily fooled reader/consumer to the industry itself as he realises that he is literally employed to lie in the first place. As the penny started to drop in my head too, things started to get really interesting. Instead of rebelling by writing crap about nothing, Meltzer starts to rebel by writing the truth as he sees it.

Noting the paradoxical situation that the rock journalist would inevitably find his or her self in - tell the truth and make an enemy of the record labels who would stop sending you records to review or lie and make an enemy of yourself - Meltzer wrote:

"Writing for [Rolling] Stone, you were out there quite naked, by which I don't mean you were encouraged to write nakedly, 'cause even if you did, by the time they were through with you, x many times through the sifter, you came out sounding stilted... starched. What you were was exposed - unprotected - record companies were sure to read you - and Atlantic did me, and didn't care for my comments on their latest shithook 'supergroup'."

The trouble with Meltzer is that his split personality leads to him producing eloquent and inspired prose one moment and then the next he writes a review for the Stones' Sticky Fingers that may well have been written by Keith Chegwin for all you'd care about the contents. I just wanted his writing to stabilise and be completely useless so I can stop reading, or to be as good as the good stuff so I can actually enjoy this under-edited tome.

The highlight of the book is the first lengthy, personal chapter about Lester Bangs, in which he writes:

"Rockwriting is, and nearly always has been, the trade of simps, wimps, displaced machos, brats and saps; of, in Lester's own words, "ass-kissers of the ruling class"; of fuddy-duddy archivists with cobwebs on their specs; of pathetic idealisers of a lost youth no one has ever (even approximately) experienced or possessed of sycophantic apologists for chi-chi trends, musical and extra-musical a like, without which (so they've always claimed) "rock is dead"; of binary yes/no cheeses with the cognitive wherewithal of vinyl, shrinkwrap, the physical column-inch."

This chapter beautifully sums up Meltzer's hatred of his own business, and also his own frustration at Lester Bangs' legacy. While most of us have been spared the horror of actually knowing Lester in person during the later years of his life, Meltzer was there and wants us to try to understand just a little more about how the self-destructive rock and roll life style is nothing more than a drag and a let-down to anyone close to somebody compelled to live it. Lester ended up as an unbearable pain in the groin to be around, and Meltzer elucidates this perfectly and admirably. Unfortunately he also takes every opportunity to take a sideways swipe at Bangs' talents as a writer which reveals an awful lot more about his own insecurities and jealousies than it does about Bangs. Time and again he refers to Lester as being "a footnote to the dregs of beat" or some such phrase seeking to rob Lester of any claims to originality. Bangs made no secret in his writings of his nod to the beats, but to focus entirely on this quality of his writing does both Bangs and Meltzer's readers a great disservice.

He criticises Greil Marcus who compiled Lester's posthumous anthology, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, for not including (nor even wanting to read) what Meltzer describes as "the 16-page slab of non-ironic racism Lester gave me [which was his] worst unpublished piece. Lester (qua text) at his ugliest: he himself said so." For Marcus to choose not to proliferate the racist trash that Lester used to dredge up from time to time in favour of the anti-racist writings he produced later on is not a failing in my view. Meltzer considers a Lester Bangs anthology and states: "to be worth a damn it would have to include the worst of right alongside. With someone as prolific (and as scattered) as Lester was, so open to everything, playing both sides of hell daily if not simultaneously, what's to be gained by avoiding his bad stuff? Bad - speaking both aesthetically and, shucks, morally." Umm... well I can think of several things to be gained - a better read for a start. By Meltzer's logic, a selection of your favourite tunes by a particular artist would be worthless unless accompanied by your least favourite. Senseless. We do not need to be reminded of (nor even informed about) a person's worst merely to enjoy their best.

To be fair to Meltzer, he has taken the approach that he claims should have been granted to Lester with his own anthology. Quality control is bypassed and the junk is included with the gems. Amusingly he states of Lester: "it's kind of nebulous how even his best mag outings will wear when inevitably anthologised," perfectly summing up the problems with his own anthology. His old editor at The Voice, Robert Christgau comes under fire for his 'petty' strictness - exactly what Meltzer benefited from the most.

And despite the impression that I may have somewhat mischievously given you with the first half of this review, A Whore Just Like The Rest does contain numerous gems and is frequently a fascinating read. It's just a shame that you have to wade through avalanches of poorly constructed streams of incoherence to get to them. At nearly 600 pages, it's very easy to get lost in the porridge and overlook the passages in which Meltzer skilfully shoots off at glorious tangents, taking us all around the houses with a barrage of beautifully executed verbal rhythm. You just need a hefty dose of patience to get to it. Comical passage such as his review of a Sesame Street album in which he complains about the non-workability of the 3D features of the sleeve, in a way that he has seldom considered the actual musical content of any album, nicely sums up his attitude and demonstrates perfectly 'where he's at', without the use of the sledgehammer which is employed in many of the earlier pieces. Similarly in his review for Johnny Rivers he chooses to review not the music, but the smell of the packaging.

Anyone capable of a line as perfect as "Holy Christmas mommy, opera is worse than spinach" has got to be read. And Meltzer has been and will be read, so who cares what I have to say about him?

Order A Whore Just Like The Rest from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

View Richard Meltzer's catalogue at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk