all the things you want to achieve will require you to uv map the cylinder, map it with cylindrical mapping and maybe map the tapered top seperately.Once you have it mapped you can create a 2D texture for the post and sharpened top and if you want a bump map although to get jagged edges a displacement map might be a better way to go.
Another option is to add a lattice deformer (found under the Animation menu set ) and deform a few posts with that before dupication.
Personally if it was me i would add a few loops to the taper and phycally model it uneven and then add a bump map . you could do maybe 3 or 4 different ones and then duplicate them with different y scales for the hieght and with different rotations too.
If you wasnt so new to Maya you could duplicate with random values for both of these with a simple script but im guessing Mel is a little too much at this point .