“A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”
- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," March 1975
Lester Bangs, through no fault of his own, is one of the people who made me want to write. The other big culprits are Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Brautigan. All three had what we now so quaintly refer to as substance abuse issues. All three are dead now, by their own hands. Thompson and Brautigan both shot themselves, and Bangs floated out of this world and into the next on a cloud of painkillers. Not intentionally, of course. He’d had the flu, he took some Darvon (and maybe some Valium, too – no one seems too sure), and he died. I don’t imagine a lifetime of self-inflicted chemical imbalance did him any favors in that respect. Not quite as speedy as gun to head (Brautigan) or chest (Thompson), although the result was just the same.
Of the three, Bangs is probably closest to my heart at this late date. Not so much what he wrote – some of his pieces are staggeringly off the mark – but the way in which he said it. I try like hell not to ape his stylistic tics, with varying degrees of success. Hey, at least I cop to it. The other big draw for me is his passion for what he wrote about. Yeah, I know, the word “passion” has been misapplied and misused so many times now that it verges on being almost meaningless, but I really do think it is the best description for what he was about. I suppose we could say “enthusiasm” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it does seem a bit pale, really. “Passion” suits him much better.
Lester had this real love/hate relationship with Lou Reed, as documented in the book Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung. (If you don’t have your own copy, drop everything RIGHT NOW and rush out to your local independent bookstore and get one. You cannot hope to lead a fulfilled life without it.) I’ve been flipping through my very dog-eared copy while putting together this piece.
It’s really hard, at least for me, to think about Reed without thinking of Bangs. They had this weird symbiotic thing going on – reading those pieces has this sorta trainwreck fascination to it. Each man baits the other in turn, alternately trying to one-up and chop the legs out from under the other. In a way it’s touching, in the same way that watching middle-school kids tease their crush objects is. In other ways, it’s really sorta pathetic. Especially when the conversation turns to drugs.
When I think back on the seventies, one of the things that comes to mind is how much a given drug use was. The blissed-out ecstatic psychedelia of the hippie was short-lived, as the goofy buzz of grass and the ego-destruction of acid gave way to the ego-enhancement of coke, the teeth-grinding unblinking rage of amphetamines, the warm thrill of confusion brought on by downers, and heroin’s nullification of life itself. By the time the seventies rolled around there wasn’t anything more “revolutionary” in rolling a joint than there was in mixing a pitcher of martinis. The object of both was to get loaded. Any lip service paid to expanding consciousness was, for the most part, just that.
I dunno. Back when I was young and naive and dumber than a sack of wet mice, Rock & Roll Animal was The Shit for me. Now that I’m old and cynical and marginally less dumb, I just can’t support the “rah rah junk” thing anymore. The inane “any drug you can take, I can take more of” dick-waving contest just makes me itch. It’s not cool, nor is it funny anymore. It pisses me off. Dead people don’t create anything but mulch.
If there’s a death more stupid and pointless than overdosing, I don’t want to know about it. I suspect that Lester Bangs would agree with that sentiment, if he were still around. Instead he became yet another victim of death by misadventure, which may or may not prove my point. He bought into that whole “too much is not enough” scene, promoted it as much as anyone else I could possibly think of, and consequently snuffed it at 33. (Actually, if my math is right – an always shaky proposition – he was 33 1/3 years of age at his death. Make of that what you will.) I firmly believe that every adult has the right to end their life when they see fit, but to do so by accidentally ingesting too many drugs is just depressingly idiotic and sad.
I will spare you the obligatory “just think what masterworks he might have created” bit; given the turn paying journalism has taken in the 25 years since he shuffled off this mortal coil, I doubt he’d be able to find much in the way of remunerative outlets for any criticism he might’ve written. Things are too sanitized, too artist-and-label friendly (don’t wanna piss off the advertisers, now, do we?), and too brief. Keep it light and positive and snappy. When was the last time you read a magazine review that ran more than, say, 500 words? Features don’t run all that much longer than that, either. As I said earlier, somewhere, if you can say it in three minutes (or 500 words), stop there. The flip side of that, though, is if it takes longer, it takes longer. “James Taylor Marked For Death” runs some 28 pages in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. God knows how long the piece was in Who Put The Bomp?, the mag where it originally ran. I imagine that it could be cut down, but why would you do such a thing? What a colossal mistake that would be! Every word, every clause, every run-on sentence is there for a reason; remove one and it would not carry anything like the desired effect. It’s sorta like Beckett in reverse. Yet I can’t think of a current music mag, with the possible exception of The Big Takeover, that would even consider running something of that length.
Would he have embraced the intarweb? Possibly. Someone who actually knew him when he was alive would have a better take on that than me. My guess, and that’s all it is, is that if he couldn’t get published, he might have turned to self-publication. We’ll never know for sure.
Once again, I must shrug my shoulders. Things are what they are. Lester’s still dead, and we’re still here floundering in his wake.
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