Almost every dude who aspires to music criticism encounters Lester Bangs at some point. If gonzo political journalism had its Hunter S. Thompson, Creem, Rolling Stone and The Village Voice had Bangs, a ‘70s scribe whose record reviews veered crazily off point into crazed fantasy and stream-of-consciousness raving, almost always circling back to reason by the end of the piece.
Yeah, he could be funny as hell. But reading too much Bangs can also be unhealthy for writers. Cutting the connection at some point becomes necessary. We have to kill our idols in order to move on, just as we must learn not to ape Kerouac, Burroughs and Thompson too much. It’s just unseemly.
That’s okay, killing your idols, because that’s what Bangs did most of his career. Part of Bangs’ modus operandi was to build up his heroes — whether they be Lou Reed, Dylan, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Van Morrison — then take particular pride in dismantling them, shooting down their subsequent efforts, showing just how far his idols could fall from their perches. He was a tough critic. And he seemed to take things personally, as though rock stars had deliberately insulted him by taking wrong turns, not living up to his expectations. There was an unhealthy, stalkerish aspect to his criticism. It’s not always comfortable reading, even in this day and age of venomous blogging and comment threads.
Most hipsters and would-be music critics have probably toted around Bangs’ first collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, for years, like it was the Qaran of record review gospel or something: that familiar yellow cover with the E Puribus Unum ear and comic book graphic style.
But even I got tired of thumbing that one. Main Lines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste offers a “companion volume,” this time assembled by John Morthland, and while it doesn’t have Lester’s greatest hits, it’s pretty much a sampler of what’s left over.
Turns out that, amidst the solipsistic streams of consciousness and back alleys of his typical review, Lester was an astute observer. A reliable journalist, even. His reviews were often reactionary rather than accurate — perhaps his ego got in the way of pure listening — and he later found himself having to backtrack, recanting, say, a hatchet job on MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” or the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street.” Bangs always seemed to think there was something much better hovering over the horizon of rock music, something more balls to the wall than what everyone else was content to listen to. His fierce attachment to Iggy and the Stooges’ “Raw Power” is one example of how prescient he could be: it sold few copies, but inspired future punks around the globe. It was a heady blast of fury and anarchy at a time — 1973 — where everything else was James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt.
Such clear-headed vision was fleeting, though. Bangs was notorious for his “think pieces” — often long-winded drivel cooked up on deadline, fueled by caffeine or stronger stimulants. The verbal diarrhea is pretty hard to get through in parts of Main Lines…, but if you stick it out, there’s plenty of good writing.
Bangs was much better when he was a first-person observer, stuck in the middle of an actual milieu — whether it’s the Hell’s Angels gang bang he attends in an opening piece called “The Great El Cajon Race Riot and Two Friday Night Parties” or his visit to Jamaica (“Innocents in Babylon”), in which he’s honest enough to admit his fear of being killed by the Jamaican poor, just because of the color of his skin.
In pieces like this, you realize Bangs’ reputation rests on more than just free-associative whamma-jamma: he really did bother to take notes, and his sense of mood and tone are sharp as hell. Like Thompson, who many seem to think was purely gonzo, fueled by hallucinations and drug spasms, there’s solid journalistic observation here. Beneath the clowning, both Bangs and Thompson knew how to be the fly on the wall, clocking everything in sight. Their gift was to put that warped view down on paper.
Bangs excels at covering bands on the road. He trails along with Emerson, Lake and Palmer in their heyday, and gets just the right sense of how their massive technological gear is upstaged by the egos at the center of the band.
I came, I saw, I drowned. There was no choice. Arenas are arctic huge, but ELP has finally met the challenge of the arena and emerged the huger gnats. Three limos, three dressing rooms. Three egos exploding tight as a rapacious cyclotron and slick as Gorgo’s dildo. Backstage the equipment crates clog the hallways like mainlined boulders.
He does much the same when hanging out with Ozzy Osbourne on a Black Sabbath tour (in “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber!”), or chatting with his hero Captain Beefheart. Bangs was at least fair: if the personalities are likable, he lets their good side shine through.
But, oh, don’t get on his bad side: in reviewing Bob Dylan’s “Desire” (1976), he chides the former folk singer for exploiting black and other controversial figures for song material. He does a hilarious breakdown of the song Joey, ostensibly about slain New York gangster Joey Gallo, who Dylan tries to portray as some kind of folk hero, while Bangs — citing the factual data — exposes him as nothing but a cheap, murderous thug.
These are the moments when Lester Bangs shines, when his writing seems truly righteous, if a little peevish and kvetchy. It must be said, though, that his view of women was at times misogynistic. It’s not unusual for his record reviews to drift into graphic fantasies of having sex with the female musician he’s critiquing (such as Cherie Currie of The Runaways).
On the other hand, Bangs could be a moralist. After calling for the overthrow of the MOR music industry in the early ‘70s, he found himself at odds with the punk music scene that resulted by the end of the decade. While he championed some bands — The Clash, for instance — he tended to rail against punk rock kids who celebrated nihilism, flirted with death and embraced decadence, much as the rock critic had in his own earlier writing. Bangs himself died of a drug overdose at age 33. (Reports say he had been listening to The Human League’s “Dare” album at the time of his death.)
For Bangs fanatics, the collection includes “Deaf-Mute in a Telephone Booth: A Perfect Day with Lou Reed,” a kind of prequel to his more widely-anthologized “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarfs,” in which the rock critic seems to do a Spock personality mind meld with his subject, getting as drunk and as belligerent as the singer and trading verbal blows into the oblivion dawn. Now, there was a subject worthy of Bangs’ critical faculties: it’s at least as entertaining as their follow-up meet in 1975 (included in Psychotic Reactions…), when Reed was obviously more cagey and prepared for Bangs’ antics.
Ultimately, Lester Bangs’ secret weapon was this: he had no shame whatsoever. It’s remarkable to see someone make a complete ass of himself in the name of rock journalism the way Bangs does — like watching a professional heckler trot down the street after a particularly squirmy celebrity, baiting them until they do something real or stupid. Yet way, waaay better than watching TMZ.