It would be a considerable exaggeration—and possibly misleading in other ways as well—to say that James Wolcott and I were ever friends. But we did get thrown into each other’s company a lot for a while there in the late ’70s. I was struggling to make a splash in the Village Voice’s pool of juvenile freelance rock critics, and he was the paper’s foremost young Turk—one soon to be Christianized, you might say, by Harper’s and then Vanity Fair. Even though he’d graduated from riffing it up in Bob Christgau’s music section to a slot as the Voice’s attention-catching TV columnist, he still went to