Nick Cohen’s Corner Boys: Old and New is filled with mystery, intrigue, and revelations. “The Corner Boys” is a beautiful anthology of Cohen’s writing from his early days to the present, filled with the strong, contrarian voice of a working cultural critic.
But as Cohen pointed out to me in a recent interview, the idea of being seen as a critic has never been comfortable for him. “I never considered myself a critic, really. Certainly not at that time. I saw myself as a pop writer.”
While his work with The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones made him one of the most important rock critics of the time, he was fond of the egalitarian “spirit” of pop music, admitting, “I don’t really identify with rock ‘n’ roll. I like the rock ‘n’ roll of the ’50s.”
But as rock music grew and changed as a genre, it became torture for Cohen’s ears, with bands competing on loudness and boldness. Furthermore, he said, “I like singles. I don’t like albums.” For Cohen, pop music, unlike rock, provides “quick hits” compared to album-oriented music. When a new single is released, Cohen said, “You’re walking down the street, driving your car, and you hear something coming out of the window, out of the basement, and then you pass out. It’s over, and for three months you can’t listen to anything else.”
Instead, with an album, you can take it home and “keep it for 20 years and think about its tracks,” Cohen said. “What I wanted was the physical buzz, the immediacy, that it was a single, that it was a jukebox. That moment of immediacy exists in a specific space and time. If you walk up to the jukebox and play the song, even though it’s a recording that we all know and love, it’s happening to you in that moment.”
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When Pete Townshend premiered “Tommy” for Cohn in the late ’60s, the rock opera lacked the same sense of immediacy. “Pete started writing,” Cohen recalls, “and he came up with his whole concept. He worked in the studio for a few months, and finally, he wanted to play something for me. It was very, very serious.” Cohen told him, without mincing words, “There are some interesting things here, but nothing exciting.” That’s when the songwriter came up with the idea for “Pinball.” Wizard” idea, the guys he used to play clubs with in Cohen. “So he wrote ‘The Pinball Wizard’ and he knew I would love it.”
Cohen is perhaps best known as the screenwriter of “Saturday Night Fever,” a film that chronicled a generation’s disco era. The film is based on Cohen’s New York Magazine article about “Tribal Rights in the New Saturday Night.” At the time, Cohen recalls, “New York was collapsing and in bad shape. That’s when disco crept into the black gay clubs of Harlem, and from there it came downtown and then spread to the boroughs.”
Cohen smelled a story and took a cab to the 2001 Odyssey club in Brooklyn. “It was the middle of winter, and I would say there was this 18-year-old standing in the doorway, hunched over against the cold.” For Cohen, “there was something that echoed” in the image of the young man that reminded him of young, headstrong Brits in the 1950s. The next night, Cohen trekked back to 2001 Odyssey, but the young man had disappeared. “I didn’t find him again. I didn’t find anyone there. So, what to do?” He was desperate to capture the feeling he had experienced the night before. “I made it up, really. It was a work of fiction.”
Cohen wrote tall tales as a youth in Northern Ireland, and like his mother, Cohen used literary imagination and exaggeration to bring the stories to life. “It was just a little story in a magazine, not my best work,” Cohen said. “I mean, I knew even then that it wasn’t my best story. It was something that I immediately wanted to take back and do over again.” But soon, Cohen’s New York Magazine article was turned into Saturday Night Fever, a blockbuster movie and one of the best-selling albums of all time.
For Cohen, the whole experience was shocking. “It was completely confusing. It didn’t seem real to me. It was like it was happening to other people. It was nice to get so much attention. But at the same time, it wasn’t what I signed up to do when I became a writer, and I kind of lost touch with myself, with disastrous consequences.” Those disastrous consequences included FBI drug busts in the 1980s. Although the charges were later dropped, the entire experience forced Cohen to reconsider his place in the world. “It made me hit the brakes and think, ‘What are you doing with your life here?'” He stopped applying the brakes and met his future wife at the prison gate.
But as Corner Boys so presciently reminds, Cohen never gave up on his contrarian voice and his desire to combat complacency and seek out new experiences.
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