I first decided I wanted to be a writer when I encountered a rock music fanzine called Heavy Metal Digest in the early 70's.
I was a - rock & roll nerd, had every Beatles/Stones/Who/Kinks
album and was just starting to get into the heavier sounds like Zeppelin
and Black Sabbath.
To accommodate this enthusiasm, I voraciously consumed every available
copy of Circus magazine--a picture-heavy industry puffmag marketed
toward impressionable pre-teens, which is exactly what I was at the
time--as it hit the shelves, and eventually saved up enough lawn-mowing
money to purchase a subscription (with the little I had left over from
binge-buying LPs, of course). It was in the classifieds of Circus that I saw the ad for HMD. I figured, with a name like that it must be right down my bowling alley, right? I shoved some bills in an envelope and sent off for a subscription.
It was a classic "zine", 2-3 sheets of photocopied text stapled together and folded in half, published by a teenage Doors sycophant named Danny Sugerman, stamped and mailed out whenever he wasn't too strung out on heroin to get around to it. The bulk of the writing was done by Sugerman himself--who unfortunately couldn't write his way out of a Munsters lunchbox (a handicap he'd carry with him all the way up to his ponderous dumber-than-dogshit bio of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive)--or his own tagalong Cameron Crowe--who wrote flabby and pretentious puff pieces that effectively foreshadowed the flabby and pretentious movies he'd go on to direct in the 1990's.
But then, there was Lester Bangs.
Lester was the managing editor of CREEM Magazine, a job he scored after getting booted from Rolling Stone for being "disrespectful to musicians". He contributed exactly one article to HMD, as far as I know, but that was enough to convince me. This wasn't Circus Magazine / Rolling Stone tripe, this was writing with piss and vinegar...vulgar, obscene, and as pungent as a fart. But literate! Bangs used words like "puissant" and "atropine" and dropped references to Artaud and Malcolm Muggeridge. I was sucked in, dazzled that such a dangerous thinker could be both eloquent and brutally crude at the same time, in the same article, and often in the same sentence. This was outlaw stuff, forbidden and dangerous, and--like those paperback "porn" novels that graced the pre-video era--worthy of being smuggled into Jr High and passed on to my fellow pimple-pocked metalhead friends, just make sure you hide it behind your World of Botany textbook lest you incur an unwanted faculty confiscation.
I'm not sure how long HMD published--I only remember getting two or three issues, though I think I paid for a "year's subscription", which was supposed to be four. No matter, I knew where to find Lester, so I subscribed to CREEM and never looked back.
At CREEM, Bangs entertained me with his hardcore junk-culture stream-of-consciousness freeform rants--about Sabbath and Purple and Zeppelin, of course, but also about bands I'd never heard of like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the MC5. This was my first exposure to the term "punk rock", and right after getting my first issue, I bought Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power and the first album by the New York Dolls .
But it wasn't just my musical taste that changed. Bangs influenced me in a way no other writer had before. He was my first real taste of the gonzo school, and while he may or may not have been influenced by Hunter Thompson himself, they certainly drank from the same well of Beat-prose-cum-new-journalism that had influenced such disparate voices as Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Marshall McLuhan. And Richard Melzer, whose Aesthetics of Rock was a harbinger of the whole Bangs/CREEM mindset, but more about him later.
Bangs connected with me. He was my unwitting mentor, my literary role model. He wrote about things I wanted to know about, and wrote about other things in a way that made me want to know about them too. Because of him, I learned about reggae and existentialism, Dada and White Light White Heat . He was a punk rock Pauline Kael, he illuminated the works and artists he wrote about, he didn't just give a "thumbs-up-thumbs-down" observation but dove headlong into whatever it was he was writing about and opened up its vein and made it bleed. He could write with awe-inspiring praise or acid-drenched damnation and hellfire, but he was always eyes-wide-open, vibrant and funny as fuck.
It was a classic "zine", 2-3 sheets of photocopied text stapled together and folded in half, published by a teenage Doors sycophant named Danny Sugerman, stamped and mailed out whenever he wasn't too strung out on heroin to get around to it. The bulk of the writing was done by Sugerman himself--who unfortunately couldn't write his way out of a Munsters lunchbox (a handicap he'd carry with him all the way up to his ponderous dumber-than-dogshit bio of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive)--or his own tagalong Cameron Crowe--who wrote flabby and pretentious puff pieces that effectively foreshadowed the flabby and pretentious movies he'd go on to direct in the 1990's.
But then, there was Lester Bangs.
Lester was the managing editor of CREEM Magazine, a job he scored after getting booted from Rolling Stone for being "disrespectful to musicians". He contributed exactly one article to HMD, as far as I know, but that was enough to convince me. This wasn't Circus Magazine / Rolling Stone tripe, this was writing with piss and vinegar...vulgar, obscene, and as pungent as a fart. But literate! Bangs used words like "puissant" and "atropine" and dropped references to Artaud and Malcolm Muggeridge. I was sucked in, dazzled that such a dangerous thinker could be both eloquent and brutally crude at the same time, in the same article, and often in the same sentence. This was outlaw stuff, forbidden and dangerous, and--like those paperback "porn" novels that graced the pre-video era--worthy of being smuggled into Jr High and passed on to my fellow pimple-pocked metalhead friends, just make sure you hide it behind your World of Botany textbook lest you incur an unwanted faculty confiscation.
I'm not sure how long HMD published--I only remember getting two or three issues, though I think I paid for a "year's subscription", which was supposed to be four. No matter, I knew where to find Lester, so I subscribed to CREEM and never looked back.
At CREEM, Bangs entertained me with his hardcore junk-culture stream-of-consciousness freeform rants--about Sabbath and Purple and Zeppelin, of course, but also about bands I'd never heard of like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the MC5. This was my first exposure to the term "punk rock", and right after getting my first issue, I bought Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power and the first album by the New York Dolls .
But it wasn't just my musical taste that changed. Bangs influenced me in a way no other writer had before. He was my first real taste of the gonzo school, and while he may or may not have been influenced by Hunter Thompson himself, they certainly drank from the same well of Beat-prose-cum-new-journalism that had influenced such disparate voices as Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Marshall McLuhan. And Richard Melzer, whose Aesthetics of Rock was a harbinger of the whole Bangs/CREEM mindset, but more about him later.
Bangs connected with me. He was my unwitting mentor, my literary role model. He wrote about things I wanted to know about, and wrote about other things in a way that made me want to know about them too. Because of him, I learned about reggae and existentialism, Dada and White Light White Heat . He was a punk rock Pauline Kael, he illuminated the works and artists he wrote about, he didn't just give a "thumbs-up-thumbs-down" observation but dove headlong into whatever it was he was writing about and opened up its vein and made it bleed. He could write with awe-inspiring praise or acid-drenched damnation and hellfire, but he was always eyes-wide-open, vibrant and funny as fuck.
But don't just take my word for it. Here's the Man himself, waxing poetic about the Stooges:
Some of the most powerful esthetic experiences of our time, from “Naked Lunch” to Bonnie and Clyde, set their audiences up just this way, externalizing and magnifying their secret core of sickness which is reflected in the geeks they mock and the lurid fantasies they consume, just as our deepest fears and prejudices script the jokes we tell each other. This is where the Stooges work. They mean to put you on that stage, which is why they are super-modern, though nothing near to Art. In Desolation Row and Woodstock-Altamont Nation the switchblade is mightier and speaks more eloquently than the penknife. But this threat is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation.
In Stagger Lee Was A Woman, Bangs explained to me why Patti Smith's Horses was essential:
Which brings up one of the truly ballsy things about this album: that she is meeting the Mademoiselle articles and Earl Wilson columns, not with some slicked up tech-mech superproduction (which John Cale is certainly capable of), but the finest garage band sound yet in the Seventies. The band cooks primarily because, with certain momentary exceptions (Richard Sohl’s beautiful piano intro to "Free Money," Allen Lanier’s ghostly guitar in "Elegie"), they’re all used either as percussion instruments or (as in the halcyon days of the Velvet Underground) for the sustenance of one fortifying drone. Lenny Kaye gets off some of the best one-note distorto guitar since the Stooges’ "1969," and the general primitivism makes you realize you’re a mammal again and glad for it, licking your chops.
And his review of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is almost as inspiring as the album itself:
“Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
But critics don't always rave; sometimes they rant as well. And Bangs could rant with the best of them. His lifelong obsession with Lou Reed was a wonder to behold. Has there ever been an article as scathing as Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute In A Telephone Booth ? And this coming from a man who genuinely admired and respected Lou Reed--which makes this piece all the more resolute. And his review of Lou's infamous Metal Machine Music is legendary:
I have heard this record characterized as "anti-human" and "anti-emotional." That it is, in a sense, since it is music made more by tape recorders, amps, speakers, microphones and ring modulators than any set of human hands and emotions. But so what? Almost all music today is anti-emotional and made by machines too....At least Lou is upfront about it, which makes him more human than the rest of those MOR dicknoses. Besides which, any record that sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medications to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content.
Some of the most powerful esthetic experiences of our time, from “Naked Lunch” to Bonnie and Clyde, set their audiences up just this way, externalizing and magnifying their secret core of sickness which is reflected in the geeks they mock and the lurid fantasies they consume, just as our deepest fears and prejudices script the jokes we tell each other. This is where the Stooges work. They mean to put you on that stage, which is why they are super-modern, though nothing near to Art. In Desolation Row and Woodstock-Altamont Nation the switchblade is mightier and speaks more eloquently than the penknife. But this threat is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation.
In Stagger Lee Was A Woman, Bangs explained to me why Patti Smith's Horses was essential:
Which brings up one of the truly ballsy things about this album: that she is meeting the Mademoiselle articles and Earl Wilson columns, not with some slicked up tech-mech superproduction (which John Cale is certainly capable of), but the finest garage band sound yet in the Seventies. The band cooks primarily because, with certain momentary exceptions (Richard Sohl’s beautiful piano intro to "Free Money," Allen Lanier’s ghostly guitar in "Elegie"), they’re all used either as percussion instruments or (as in the halcyon days of the Velvet Underground) for the sustenance of one fortifying drone. Lenny Kaye gets off some of the best one-note distorto guitar since the Stooges’ "1969," and the general primitivism makes you realize you’re a mammal again and glad for it, licking your chops.
And his review of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is almost as inspiring as the album itself:
“Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
But critics don't always rave; sometimes they rant as well. And Bangs could rant with the best of them. His lifelong obsession with Lou Reed was a wonder to behold. Has there ever been an article as scathing as Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute In A Telephone Booth ? And this coming from a man who genuinely admired and respected Lou Reed--which makes this piece all the more resolute. And his review of Lou's infamous Metal Machine Music is legendary:
I have heard this record characterized as "anti-human" and "anti-emotional." That it is, in a sense, since it is music made more by tape recorders, amps, speakers, microphones and ring modulators than any set of human hands and emotions. But so what? Almost all music today is anti-emotional and made by machines too....At least Lou is upfront about it, which makes him more human than the rest of those MOR dicknoses. Besides which, any record that sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medications to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content.
But it was Elvis Presley's death that brought out what was perhaps the most poignant statement of Lester's aesthetic. Where Were You When Elvis Died is Bangs at his best, contemplative and angry and funny, all at once:
The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience. Those who indulge in it will ultimately reap the scorn of those they've dumped on, whether they live forever like Andy Paleface Warhol or die fashionably early like Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday. The two things that distinguish those deaths from Elvis's (he and they having drug habits vaguely in common) were that all of them died on the outside looking in and none of them took their audience for granted. Which is why it's just a little bit harder for me to see Elvis as a tragic figure; I see him as being more like the Pentagon, a giant armored institution nobody knows anything about except that its power is legendary. Obviously we all liked Elvis better than the Pentagon, but look at what a paltry statement that is. In the end, Elvis's scorn for his fans as manifested in "new" albums full of previously released material and one new song to make sure all us suckers would buy it was mirrored in the scorn we all secretly or not so secretly felt for a man who came closer to godhood than Carlos Castaneda until military conscription tamed and revealed him for the dumb lackey he always was in the first place. And ever since, for almost two decades now, we've been waiting for him to get wild again, fools that we are, and he probably knew better than any of us in his heart of hearts that it was never gonna happen again, his heart of hearts so obviously not being our collective heart of hearts, he being so obviously just some poor dumb Southern boy with a Big Daddy manager to screen the world for him and filter out anything which might erode his status as big strapping baby bringing home the bucks, and finally being sort of perversely celebrated at least by rock critics for his utter contempt for whoever cared about him. Classic Bangs. Respectful of talent, impressed by the power of music, but completely disdainful of authority and pomp. And that's the heart of his writing. Underneath the caution-to-the winds prose and wildman demeanor, Bangs was a moralist. And he was on our side, the side of the audience, the side of the fans. Okay, I guess I've leaned on Lester enough: this article started off being a tribute, but it's becoming an anthology. Lester quit CREEM in 1977, and freelanced the rest of his life, which ended all too soon in 1982. He was never a healthy man--overweight, a smoker, and addicted to cough syrup--but he was generous and accessible, and utterly lacking in pretension. His work lives on in anthologies, and--indirectly--in every clumsy attempt I've ever made to emulate him. RIP Lester, let it blurt. |
No comments:
Post a Comment