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In Almost
Famous, Cameron Crowe's cinematic ode to his bygone days in the early
1970s as a young writer at nasty ol' Rolling Stone magazine, actor Philip
Seymour Hoffman plays the role of Crowe's journalistic mentor, the
notorious rock critic Lester Bangs. Hoffman brings a gentle touch to the
role. He portrays Bangs as sensitive, thoughtful, soft-spoken, harmlessly
anti-establishment, enormously accommodating, and ever armed with the
wisdom of the ages. "Don't get chummy with the rockers," he
advises his painfully innocent protégé, "they'll only screw you in
the end." Naturally, the kid goes right out and cozies up to the boys
in the band. And does he get screwed in the end? Of course he does, but
the fun along the way negates much of the pain of being a blundering
adolescent in the fast, dirty world of rock 'n' roll. From such precious,
bittersweet memories, Big Screen blockbusters are made.
I vacated the theater with a light '70s buzz and Bangs heavy on my mind.
For me, even if the movie was only a romantic fairytale draped in the
guise of non-fiction, it was well worth the price of admission to see the
greatest rock scribe of them all hauled into the consciousness of
21st-century American pop culture. So Bangs was probably whitewashed a
bit. Whitewashing is a time-honored Hollywood tradition. Only through the
lens of some hopeless Tinsel Town romantic, after all, could a truly
dangerous firebrand like Jerry Lee Lewis be depicted as a handsome,
pure-of-heart, Southern loverdoll, as he was in Great Balls of Fire.
Still, the question lingers: Is it better to be whitewashed for
posterity's sake or simply forgotten forever? And then there's the larger
question: What's it matter either way if, like Lester Bangs, your body has
long since been cremated, your ashes scattered unceremoniously into the
unremitting tides of the Pacific Ocean?
Posterity is a conceit for the living to consider. The dead could give a
shit.
ate one evening about two years ago I was reading about one dead man,
Elvis Presley, when I encountered the work of another, Lester Bangs. I was
well into the endnotes of Mystery Train, Greil Marcus' popular treatise on
rock music. Following a couple dozen pages of detailed notes on Presley,
Marcus arrives at what he calls "the finest, or the most final, words
of obituary spoken on the occasion of Elvis Presley's death. Lester Bangs
was writing in the Village Voice, August 29, 1977, in a piece titled 'How
Long Will We Care?'":
If love is truly going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along
with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more
contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought
it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else
seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's
many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner,
because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose
domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing; we will
never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying
goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.
Those were the first words of Bangs' I had ever encountered and they
numbed my brain for a while. The prose was nebulous, but it also had heft.
It was at once elusive and direct. As cultural critique, it was a
masterful stroke. There it was, not only the death of a potent cultural
icon but, more to the point, an unusually perceptive and accurate
assessment of the splintered and withering society from -- and, strangely,
into -- which the icon passed. The words reverberated in my mind for days.
In the following weeks and months, I would break out Mystery Train, flip
to the back of the book where I had underlined the passage in black ink,
and read it aloud to anyone who looked like they might be remotely
receptive to whatever cold, haunting spell those words cast.
In a preface to the quote, Marcus mentioned that the full article was
available in an anthology of Bangs' work called Psychotic Reactions and
Carburetor Dung. I soon laid hands on the book and I've felt something
akin to blessed ever since. Reading Bangs, I recalled what Sun Records
founder Sam Phillips once said of the great bluesman Howlin' Wolf:
"When I heard him, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of
man never dies.'" Lester Bangs was that full of life. At least his
writing was.
He championed bands that fellow critics either maligned or ignored. At
length and glowingly, he wrote about ? and the Mysterians, the Godz, and
another forgotten band of the mid-to late-1960s era, Count Five, whose
first album was called Psychotic Reactions. Bangs approached these bands
from a peculiar angle. Disregarding standard critical concerns regarding
professionalism, musicianship and the like, Bangs saw in a band like Count
Five a glowing reflection of his own deeper concerns. "But chillen,"
he wrote in a 1971 article for Creem magazine, reprinted in Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung, "I'm tellin' ya that it took me many
weeks of deliberation, and many an hour's sweat hunched over a record
counter, before I finally got up the nerve to buy that album [Psychotic
Reactions]. Why? Well, it was just so aggressively mediocre that I
simultaneously could hardly resist it and felt more than a little wary
because I knew just about how gross it would be. It wasn't until much
later, drowning in the kitschvats of Elton John and James Taylor, that I
finally came to realize that grossness was the truest criterion for rock
'n' roll, the cruder the clang and grind the more fun and longer
listened-to the album'd be. By that time I would just about've knocked out
an incisor, shaved my head or made nearly any sacrifice to acquire even
one more album of this type of in-clanging and hyena-hooting raunch. By
then it was too late."
There was a nagging void in the heart of Lester Bangs for the sweet sound
of dissonance cranked to the max. Whether writing about an obscure New
York outfit like the Godz or a more popular act of his day -- Lou Reed,
David Bowie, Van Morrison, Grand Funk, Jethro Tull, etc. -- he reserved
his highest praise, if not always his best writing, for those who stayed
closest to the original raw-boned spirit of rock music. Just keep it
raunchy and real and the rest will take care of itself. Rock 'n' roll was
a big party, Bangs contended, nothing more and, if it was any good at all,
certainly nothing less. Too much contrivance and it all goes to hell.
"When I get really dour sometimes," he wrote in "James
Taylor Marked for Death" in 1971, "I wonder if it'd be possible
at all to write a song today like, oh, say, 'Wild Thing.' People are just
too superconscious of every creative move made in their lives of infinite
possibilities and friendly niceness to do anything anymore that's … just
a simple expression of something with no real ramifications, at least none
that the creator consciously put there: if some clown like me wants to
come along and tell you that 'Wild Thing' is the supreme manifestation of
Rock and Roll as Global Worldmind Orgasm plus Antespurt to the Millennium,
you have the privilege of laughing in his face and telling him to shut up
and go back to his orgone box. But if the writer of "Wild Thing' had
actually had any considerations in mind even remotely related to that kind
of stuff when he sat down and made it up, you can bet it would have been a
terrible song."
sychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus, was first
published in 1987, five years after Bangs died --
"accidentally," according to Marcus, "due to respiratory
and pulmonary complications brought on by flu and ingestion of Darvon."
It is the only book of Bangs' writings in print, the only book of his ever
in print aside from a tossed-off Blondie biography, and just about
everything I or anyone of my post-Baby Boom generation or younger knows of
Lester Bangs we garnered from its nearly 400 pages. (The book constitutes
but a small fraction of Bangs' complete oeuvre. A bit more is available on
the Internet. Also, earlier this year, Broadway Books published a fine
biography of Bangs. Rather straightforwardly written by Chicago Sun-Times
rock critic Jim DeRogatis, The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's
Favorite Rock Critic includes as an appendix the entire text of Bangs'
wickedly funny "How to be a Rock Critic.")
You don't have to admire or even like rock 'n' roll to enjoy what Lester
unearths and wrestles with in the Psychotic Reactions. A mere interest in
one man's struggle with the sick but occasionally tolerable world around
him will suffice. You may not agree with all or even most of his tastes
and contentions -- i.e., "the Beatles were nothing" -- but Bangs
didn't write for anyone other than himself. The feature articles and
reviews, mostly culled from the pages of Creem and the Village Voice and
all written between 1970 and 1981, are a distant cry from what generally
passes today as rock journalism, which, by most appearances, is a thinly
veiled, fully incorporated extension of the propagandistic swill passed
down to the ever-gullible masses by major-label conglomerates who trumpet
every ignoble release by every run-of-the-mill hack "artist" on
a precisely calculated promotional budget as an "event," a
"timeless, unprecedented masterpiece," a "deeply personal
confession from one of the most compelling voices or our time …
Jewel." In his day, when the rock industry was not much different
than in our own, Bangs railed against such phony conceits.
"The plain fact is that 99% of popstars do not have the true
charisma, style or stature to hold their bastion (Bastille) stage without
the artificial support they've traditionally enjoyed," Bangs wrote in
a 1970 article for Creem titled "Of Pop and Pies and Fun."
"Most of them, were they splat in the kisser with a pie or confronted
with an audience composed of sane people demanding calmly (crude militant
bullshit is out), 'What the fuck do you think you are doing? Just what is
all this shit?' -- most of your current 'phenomenons,' 'heroes' and
'artists' would just fold up a stupefied loss, temperamentally incapable
… of dealing with their constituency of wised-up marks on a one-to-one
basis."
In the current media-wide atmosphere of sheepish pandering to the
hyper-inflated egos of modern pop stars and their handlers, the question
is not whether there exists a writer with sufficient pluck to launch a
Lester Bangs-type assault on these people -- there are several -- but
rather what mainstream music magazine would be willing to print an overt
attack on the dubious artistry of what constitutes, after all, the
magazine's chief commodity? In the old days, of course, no one wrote about
Bing Crosby or Sinatra the way Bangs often wrote about Lou Reed -- which
is to say, with absolute malice and complete disregard for one man's
carefully cultivated reputation. Neither did many critics make a living
expounding on the chicanery and false pretenses that imbued much of the
recording industry itself. But somewhere in the receding pipeline of
history, right around the advent in the late 1960s of what was then touted
by Tom Wolfe as New Journalism and what is now touted by its detractors in
this renewed, sterile age of facts and "objectivity" as Bad
Journalism, all that began to change.
Influenced by the Beat writers of the 1950s as well as by the liberalizing
effects of America's rapidly changing political and social climate in the
1960s, dissatisfied journalists like Wolfe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion,
and Hunter Thompson cast aside traditional notions concerning objectivity
and began searching for "the truth" on more personal, visceral
levels. "Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are
wrong for Objective Journalism," Thompson wrote in a damning eulogy
for Richard Nixon in 1994, which, along with English music writer Nick
Kent's post-mortem assault on Sid Vicious and H.L. Mencken's obituary for
William Jennings Bryan, is probably the nastiest eulogy ever written about
a man who wasn't a known serial killer or an acknowledged leader of a
fascist regime. But, Thompson continued, "it was the built-in blind
spots of Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the
White House in the first place ... You had to get Subjective to see Nixon
clearly."
Lester Bangs was one of many exponents of the form. In fairness, few of
these New Journalists were as innately hostile toward their subjects as
Hunter Thompson, although Bangs could often be counted among the small
number of writers who were. Reading through many of his essays and
reviews, one can imagine the frumpy Bangs sitting in some messy office at
Creem, speed and booze close at hand, pounding away on the Olivetti,
harboring all the ill will in the world for a slick, bloated recording
industry that to his particular sense of smell fairly reeked of sophistry
and wholesale fraudulence.
"What we need," he wrote, "are more rock 'stars' willing to
make fools of themselves, absolutely jump off the deep end and make the
audience embarrassed for them, if necessary, so long as they have not one
shred of dignity or mythic corona left. Because then the whole damn
pompous edifice of this supremely ridiculous rock 'n' roll industry, set
up to grab bucks by conning youth and encouraging fantasies of a puissant
'youth culture,' would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of
the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off of it."
Why did so many worthless bands and worthless records get the positive
spin? That's what Bangs wanted to know. Money only explained so much. He
found more satisfying answers embedded in Western culture's gullibility,
its confoundingly low expectations, and its related willingness to warmly
embrace and celebrate so much that was merely banal, mediocre and
uninspired. Why, for example, was everyone so smitten with Led Zeppelin
when it was obvious to Lester that the band was nothing but a spoiled,
pompous pack of silly-assed poseurs? "Can you imagine Led Zeppelin
without Robert Plant conning the audience: 'I'm gonna give you every inch
of my love' -- he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured
grinful 'Howdy-do' -- or Jimmy Page's arch scowl of supermusician
ennui?"
Stylistically, Bangs owed his 10 cents to the Beats, another dime to
Charles Bukowski, and at least as much to Hunter Thompson. There is
contemplation and reflection in Bangs' work, but neither is of the deeply
meditative Dali Lama-on-a-serene-hilltop variety. His were musings lifted
straight from the maelstrom of whatever crazy storm he happened to be
weathering at the time. And Bangs always seemed to be weathering a storm.
Marcus touches on the point in his intro to Psychotic Reactions:
"Lester became a figure within the world of rock 'n' roll; within its
confines, he became a celebrity. Doping and drinking, wisecracking and
insulting, cruel and performing, always good for a laugh, he became rock's
essential wild man, a one-man orgy of abandon, excess, wisdom, satire,
parody -- the bad conscience, acted out or written out, of every band he
reviewed or interviewed. He went to an interview ready to provoke whatever
band was in town; whatever band was in town tried to provoke him. Thus by
the time he moved to New York [in 1976] -- to find a burgeoning punk scene
that seemed on the verge of fulfilling all his hopes and jeremiads -- he
was a man to be lionized: a man you could be proud to say you'd bought a
drink or given drugs."
One often senses while reading Bangs' words that the only thing that saved
his head from exploding was the sure sense of purpose he brought to his
work. If rock 'n' oll was the people's salvation, as Bangs seemed to hope
it would be, even in the late 1970s when solipsism held all the cards and
cultural fragmentation was everywhere the order of the day, then he, the
great Lester Bangs, would be rock's chief drum-pounding, bone-rattling
Minister of the Word. A writer from the New York Times accurately assessed
Bangs' work in a review of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung:
"With affection and rudeness and fury and mockery, with prose that
moved in gusts and swirls and pratfalls, he showed how music could be --
for him as well as for less articulate, less self-conscious fans -- an
arena of moral choices."
mong other things, life is a series of comings and goings, doing and
undoings. Stasis is death.
Lester might have been portrayed differently in Almost Famous. Alternative
options always abound, even if they're mostly ignored. Most of us want to
find some meaning to our existence, something real beneath all the
bullshit that clutters and obscures our lives every waking moment if we're
not careful. Everyone has felt at least a fleeting moment of naked wonder
at simply being a human being tossed for a precarious few years into the
heaving tides of this beautiful world. Every so often, a breathless autumn
evening comes along when the moon glows wild and the wind whispers softly
in your ear, reminding you that life is more than what you buy and what
you buy into. In the very scent of dawn, there is something real and true
that we all must bear occasionally if we're to find any meaning at all to
our strange lives. We are all immersed in brilliant music rarely heard.
The lords of popular culture tell us what to wear, what to hear, what to
smell, what to taste, who to love and who to hate. They tell us what's in
and what's out, what's lost and what's found, who to screw, how to do it,
and how to leave gracefully when we're done. None of it is necessarily to
our benefit. We just grow more lost and desperate in our own fractured
worlds. So much for the Pepsi Generation in the land of the Gap.
I never knew Lester Bangs, of course. I never even read a word of his
writing until one lovely evening a couple years ago. He's been gone for
nearly two decades and I've just begun to miss him. He wrote some enduring
and important words about rock music and pop culture. By necessity, not
all of it was nice or approving. For instance: "Elvis was a force of
nature. Other than that he was just a turd."
Well, maybe Elvis was just a supernatural turd, some singularly complex
ethereal composite of voice, presence and elemental waste beyond the
reckoning of mere mortals. Even so, for a few fleeting moments before fame
swept him away forever, Elvis was the purest expression of faith and
freedom and yearning that exemplified rock 'n' roll in its finest hour and
Lester Bangs was right: We have never agreed on anything as we agree on
that. But, hell, what's it all matter now? The king is gone, as is, for
that matter, one of the great torchbearers of rock 'n' roll's original,
uncompromising spirit.
Lester Bangs died on April 30, 1982. He was 33 years old.
David Pulizzi, a former CP staffer and music
columnist, now is features editor at JAZZIZ Magazine in Florida.
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