Remembering Lester Bangs
by Thomas Christian
I thought it would be a fun idea to punch a hole in the mundane fabric of the reality curtain yesterday afternoon, which coincidentally happened to be the anniversary of Lester Bangs’s death. So I headed out, to Penny Arcade (a misnomer if ever there was one; pennies get you nowhere these days except maybe puddle wishes) at the multi-leveled glass and silver mausoleum of the county mall.
And maybe because Lester Bangs was on my mind, after I’d slipped a ten-er into the change making machine and emerged with two full fists of quarters, the first thing that caught my eye was a digital-faced pinball game called “Motor City.” Lester Bangs, who in Christ-like fashion was born in December and died in April – AND at the age of 33, just like the Son of Man (and I’m not making comparisons mind you, only pointing out the uncanny coincidence), would have turned 50 this year, had he survived the lethal bug of flu virus that laid him to rest in 1982.
Bangs’s legacy remains in his inspiring of others, which makes this an even more profound statement when you consider that this claim is staked on the work of a reviewer/journalist/critic of rock ‘n’ roll. Hundreds of his reviews and featured articles were published in places like CREEM and Rolling Stone throughout the 1970s, some of which were later compiled and edited by Greil Marcus for publication in the 1987 Knopf release, Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung. What stands Bangs apart from your normal everyday critic is that as dead on-target as he sometimes was, or as completely mis-guided (ditto), it was clearly evident that above all else, he gave a shit. He was a fan of rock ‘n’ roll who possessed a gifted script of prose and a heady background in lit. to boot. In his own words, as a teenager, he recalled “days home from school faking flu I would put ‘Trane on loud as my Silvertone could bear, and stand up on a hassock reading Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ at the top of my lungs… HONK! BLAT! SQUEEEE!… TOOT!… HONK! HONK! HONKHONKHONK SQUAKSQUONK!… GRRUGHRRGLONK-EE-ERNK!”
One of his most memorable re-current tirades were his long running love/hate encounters with Lou Reed:
LESTER: Lou Reed is my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination.
LOU: You really are an asshole. You went past assholism into some kinda urinary tract.
He was subject to gifted fits of prophecy: “The Rolling Stones will go on letting it bleed across the decades. Unrelated streams of Chuck Berry riffs… Mark my words,” from a CREEM article in 1970, and mysticism (using the phrase “punk” so often that an entire movement was wombed and born of this moniker just to shut him up). In a posthumously-released piece called “All My Friends Are Hermits,” he scribbled some of the most yearnful, desirous, and lust-filled sex this side of the century since Henry Miller, and in a wonderfully symbolic microcosmic blip that summarizes his intent and madness-flow, having the audacious balls to procreate Joycean slambag stereophonic prose into a 30-page review, titled “James Taylor Marked For Death,” that similarly invoked comparisons of The Troggs, The MC5, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Martha and The Vandellas, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Flying Nun TV Show, Grand Funk Railroad, and Marcel Proust in the same article.
As the ’70s wore on, and the New York Dolls/Iggy Stooge Heavy Metal Kidz melted down into the Richard Hell/Clash City Punker Society, Bangs moved to Manhattan where an entire movement was unfurling before his very own buggy-eyes. Documenting the fruition of a bona-fide scene in the pages of the Village Voice, NY Rocker, and the NME, his prose was as excitable as ever, and merging with the outward signs of a growing conscientiousness. It was a new beginning – a fresh start amongst the polyurinated shamrocked taverns and used record stores of 14th & 6th Puerto Rican New York (I know ’cause I useta run inna him alla time there), leaving his CREEM days and Detroit City behind forever.
Which is why I was attracted to this pinball game in the first place, although it ate all my quarters gluttonously and repaid its gratitude with the bellows of losers’ bells, buzzers, and horns, at some point I don’t remember even being in the arcade anymore, only that I was being sucked right into the game somehow and walking the dirty vacant downtown streets under bulbous Zen clouds, hearing only the feint whistles of a mantric KONNNNNNGGG-UH that were lulling my emotions while all the night lit towering office buildings began bulging and contracting as if they were gasping for breath amid the chimneys rising from their rooftops, which weren’t even chimneys anymore, but instead were turning into long tubular dildos with Josephine Baker’s face on their heads and a parade of tinkling razor-sharp mandalas went whizzing by down the street like miniature dagger-ended taxicabs and I was thirsty and magically just like that a water fountain appeared where I guzzled and gulped gallons of liquid only to discover that the fountain was filled with cough syrup! and then became aware of some strange electro-acoustical current zazzooing through the air glinting the leaves naked and making me dizzy, so dizzy it lifted me above myself, right into the middle of the street, as the sky started crying warm blood and raining down empty cognac bottles that shattered when they landed on the pavement in an odd pattern that I felt was trying to tell me something, some kind of message, some kind of feeling I was feeling the vibrating pavement foundation that seemed to be spinning out from my torso and rising in a whirling spire of light and crowned with a crucifix that was sparking gold under a stream of electrical cables running parallel to the street which I followed by eye to a far corner of the block where children with tear-smeared black mascara’d eyes were climbing up a wrought iron fire escape and began pounding their fists on all the glass windows screaming “MACHINE! MACHINE! MACHINE!” until they would be let in, whereupon they sat on my couch eating potato chips and watching cartoons until the sun rose in the sky and they danced away, hand in hand, with the dazzling light of the dawn.
A Brief Bio of Lester Bangs
Born 14 December 1948, in California. Worked as a dishwasher and a salesman. Began writing record reviews in the late 1960s. In 1971, moved to Detroit where he worked as a staff writer for five years at CREEM, publishing over 70 feature articles, and over 170 reviews. Add to this his output of some 150 additional reviews for Rolling Stone, between 1969 and 1973. Moved to NY City in the late ’70s where he continued to freelance for a number of publications up until his death, on 30 April, 1982.
A posthumously released compilation of some of his essays & reviews, Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung was published by Knopf in 1987. This is only a portion of his work, and rumors continue to circulate regarding the release of a second volume. To a generation growing up that has never read him, he is best known as a trivial part (along w/Lenny Bruce) in REM’s song “The End of the World as We Know It.”
