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Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs, Serpent’s Tail, 1852425326, £11.99
And also
Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, Lester Bangs, Serpent’s Tail, 1852428236
Lester Bangs loved rock’n’roll – the real stuff, the heavy stuff, the stuff that smells of sweat, spunk, bubblegum and gasoline.
In the autobiopic Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe has Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) acting as mentor to the young about-to-come-of-age hero. It’s a sentimental thank you to the doyenne of unsentimental rock critics (a deep oxymoron, that – ‘rock critic’).
Bangs’ advice is this:
‘You have to make your reputation by being honest and unmerciful.’
Of all the rock’n’rollers he loved, Bangs was least merciful, and over the longest period, to Lou Reed. Probably because he felt Reed’s was the biggest talent for NOISE that America had come up with, in his lifetime – and the biggest waste of talent, if he kept going on the way he was.
Bangs kept returning and returning to Reed, in a series of articles from ‘Deaf-Mute in a Telephone Booth: A Perfect Day with Lou Reed’ (1973) to ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or, How I Slugged It Out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake’ (1975) to ‘How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying, or, Louie Come Home, All is Forgiven’ (1976) to ‘Untitled Notes on Lou Reed’ (1980).
Here he is at full throttle:
‘My personal payoff with Lou came when we got back to the hotel after the gig. About a dozen people sat around a shadowy suite while the Original Phantom Purveyor of the New Rock got drunk on his ass and rambled on to the point of babble. I got totally blasted myself, my disappointment came through, and I started baiting him:…’
‘“Hey, Lou, then doncha think David Bowie’s a no-talent asshole?”’
‘“No! He’s a genius! He’s brilliant!”’
‘(It makes sense that Lou would say that, since he allegedly made an ass of himself by falling in love with Bowie when he went to England last summer.)’
‘It went on like that for a while; finally, the whole thing sort of flaked into silence, and a girl from his organization had to come and carry him off to his room. But I’ll always carry that last picture of him, plopped in his chair like a sack of spuds, sucking on his eternal Scotch with his head hanging off into the shadow, looking like a deaf-mute in a telephone booth. (He’s still pretty cool though; I stole that last phrase from him.)’
In Psychotic Reaction some of the Lou Reed pieces are gathered together under the title ‘Slaying the Father’. But Bangs’ relation to Reed (as above) is more like that of a younger brother, appalled by the behaviour of his sibling, so appalled that he wants most of all to behave that way himself, but also appalled at himself for wanting that, and in the end distanced enough – maybe - to save himself. His tone is sometimes that of the close relative of a heroin addict, pleading, ‘Please don’t (let your worse self) do this (to your better self).’ But heroin as such didn’t bother Bangs half as much as witnessing the musician who created ‘The Ostrich’, ‘Guess I’m Falling in Love (Instrumental)’, ‘Sister Ray’ and, yes, ‘Heroin’, stooping to release sappy pappy crap like Coney Island Baby or Sally Can’t Dance.
It may be an odd comparison, but Bangs on Reed is like the twentieth century equivalent of Ruskin on Gothic. There’s a similar moral rage – the people must not be exploited, you must give of your best.
But Bangs, of all critics, realised that the last thing musicians need to do is get cerebral. Far better they end up doing their own heads in.
What they do best is something beyond what critics can achieve – something instant and monumental, something irresistable and wayward, something simultaneously pop and rock.
I don’t know if I can explain why I prefer Bangs, as a writer, to Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe. He is more controlled than the former, more wild than the latter. His compass is smaller. His aim more direct. It’s probably enough to say, he doesn’t annoy me as much. He doesn’t play sleazy or louche. Honesty is his obsession. He wants to find something good in the world. He is wild with grief when the good goes bad.
If I were to get rid of all the records Bangs didn’t or wouldn’t approve of, my collection would be about a tenth the size it is. There wouldn’t be a lot left to relax to. But with life so short, why relax?
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