Book Feature

Any music fan worth his or her salt needs to read Lester Bangs. That’s because unlike most “rock” critics, Bangs was first and foremost a fan. And a passionate, “music is my whole life” kind of fan at that. Objectivity was not in his vocabulary and politeness can fuck off because Bangs told it like it was. Crude, rude, and unapologetic, Bangs words were snarling, blaring off the page with the volume and rhythm of the music he so deeply loved. What follows is the first in a series of my favorite excerpts from Bangs prolific career as a writer for publications such as Creem, New Musical Express, Rolling Stone and Village Voice.

On Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or “Madame George,” is that an Adam’s apple?

(Originally printed in Stranded, 1979) - What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. 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.

“Madame George” is the album’s whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I’ll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite-at least as far as he knows, he is quick to add-but that’s bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song is that there’s nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it’s not about a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the “pedophilia”-it’s about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature.

Listen to “Madame George”

On Kraftwerk or “Anything a hand can do a machine can do better…anything a hand can do nervously, a machine can do effortlessly

(Originally printed in Creem, 1975) - In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance. Gradually the humans learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which human beings sought also to control. In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them, until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness of its own, are one and the same.

Listen to “Autobahn”

On Emerson, Lake & Palmer or “Robot music mixmastered by human modules”

(Originally printed in Creem, 1974) - Keith Emerson never played an interesting solo in his life. Hell, might as well admit it all the way, they’re not even solos, they’re just some guy racing all over a keyboard like Liberace trying to play Mozart behind a Dexamyl OD. To make the crucial distinction, trained fingers might as well be trained seals unless there’s a mind flexing behind them.

Listen to “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 1″

On Miles Davis‘ Electric Period or “A tangled scream for freedom”

(Originally printed in Phonograph Record, 1976 and Music and Sound Output, 1981) - Ever since Jack Johnson, which came out in 1971 and was his last incontrovertibly masterful album, Miles has become something whose antithesis he had been for the previous 20-odd years of his career: erratic. Critics particularly had trouble deciding whether albums like Miles Davis in Concert were difficult, dense masterworks or plain old dogshit: it wasn’t even as simple as the fact that Miles is a figure traditionally deemed above criticism, but rather that nobody wants to be caught sitting on yesterday’s curb wacking their doodle to old blowing sessions when Miles is sculpting new thruways and monorails.

(Miles) has defined at least three eras in American music – can Dylan say the same? Never mind that when In a Silent Way came out it had the same effect as Charlie Parker’s renaissance and influence on his followers – i.e., it ruined a whole generation of musicians who were so swept by its brilliant departure that they could do nothing but slavishly imitate so every goddamn album you heard dribbled the same watered-down-kitsch-copy of Miles’ electric cathedral – it remains now, seven years later, In a Silent Way not only has dated but stands with Sketches of Spain and a few other Miles albums as one of the sonic monuments of our time. And that’s neither hype nor hyperbole.

Bangs’ early (1976) opinion about Miles’ cosmic funk album On the Corner
On the Corner was garbage…simple ideas repeated for whole sides, up to a half hour each, in an electronicized repetitiveness and distortion-for-its-own-sake that may have been intended as hypnotic but ended up merely static.

Bangs’ later (1981) opinion about On the Corner
It is, in fact, pretty cold everywhere, but it is a coldness of rage at the very heart’s death. If Miles seemed to be losing his capacity to feel, he only predicted what would soon begin to happen to all of us.

Take the most expansive heart in the world and subject it to unknown force with almost unimaginable pressure, compress and crush it relentlessly until it is one small cold hard ball of anthracite black hate. Then watch it begin to turn in the void, spitting occasional needles of light. That’s what I hear in this music, that and the perception of being constantly surrounded by alien entities, insectival and reptilian, swarming all around you On the Corner.

Listen to “One and One”

On Talking Heads’ 1979 album, Fear of Music or Welcome to the “global out patient clinic”

(Originally printed in The Village Voice, 1979) - (David) Byrne’s a kind of Every-neurotic, wandering through the world encountering ouch-producers every step and breath he takes, relaying them back to us filtered through his sense of humor, his natural musicality, and the ever sifting-shifting medium that is Brian Eno. Fear of Music might as well have been called Fear of Everything.

Sometimes I thing Fear of Music is one of the best comedy albums I’ve ever heard. Which doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real. Byrne just reminds you that it’s something you’re going to have to live with, so you might as well get a kick out of it while you can.

Listen to “Life During Wartime”

On Jim Morrison and the Doors or the great Bozo Prince

(Originally printed in Musician, 1981) - I never took Morrison seriously as the Lizard King, but I’m a Doors fan today as I was in 1967; what it came down to fairly early on for me, actually, was accepting the Doors’ limitations and that Morrison would never be so much Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Villon as he was a Bozo Prince. Surely he was one father of New Wave, as transmitted through Iggy and Patti Smith, but they have proven to be in greater or lesser degrees Bozos themselves. One thing that can never be denied Morrison is that at his best (as well as perhaps his worst or some of it at any rate) he had style, and as he was at this best as a poet of dread, desire, and psychic dislocation, so he was also at his best as a clown.

Listen to “Land Ho!”

On David Bowie and his 1976 album Station to Station or “De-virilized”

(Originally printed in Creem, 1976) - Now, as any faithful reader of this magazine is probably aware, David Bowie has never been my hero. I always thought all that Ziggy Stardust homo-from-Adelbaran business was a crock of shit, especially coming from a guy who wouldn’t even get in a goddam (sic) airplane. I thought he wrote the absolute worst lyrics I had ever heard from a major pop figure with the exception of Bernie Taupin; lines like “Time takes a cigarette and put it in your mouth” delivered with a face so straight it seemed like it would crack at a spontaneous word or gesture, seemed to me merely gauche. As for his music, he was as accomplished an electician (a.k.a. thief) as Elton John, which means that though occasionally deposited onstage after seemingly being dipped in vats of green slime and pursued by Venusian crab boys, he had Showbiz Pro written all over him. A façade as brittle as it was icy, which I guess means that it was bound to crack or thaw, and whatever real artistic potency lay beneath would have to stand or evaporate.

(With Station to Station) Bowie has finally produced his (first) masterpiece. To hell with Ziggy Stardust, which amounted to starring Judy Garland in The Reluctant Astronaut, fuck trying to be George Orwell and William Burroughs when you’ve only read half of Nova Express - this and Young Americans are the first albums he’s made which don’t sound like scams. Bowie has dropped his pretensions, or most of them at any rate, and in doing that I believe he’s finally become an artist instead of a poseur, style collector and (admittedly always great, excepting Raw Power) producer. He’ll still never have a shot at becoming my hero, because he’s neither funny nor black enough, but I can hardly wait to hear what he’s going to have to say next.

Listen to “Stay”

On Lou Reed’s controversial and much-maligned 1975 album, Metal Machine Music or Music for “insect death buffs”

The following are two of Bangs’ theories concerning Metal Machine Music

(Originally printed in Creem, 1975)

(1). You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album.

(2). This is what it sounds like in Lou’s circulatory system.

Listen to “Metal Machine Music, Part I”

Sadly, Lester Bangs died in 1982 after an accidental overdose of Darvon and Valium, but his legacy as the greatest (and by far the most entertaining) rock critic lives on.

“I’ll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.”

                                                                 (Lester Bangs, “A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence”, 1968)