Reading Lester Bangs: it's not wall-to-wall bangers

So, I've just ploughed through Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, the hefty (posthumous) collection of music journalism by Lester Bangs, the US music critic who wrote for Creem, Village Voice and the NME (among others). Familiar with Bangs? Possibly not. I'm not sure if I was before reading this book (think I'd vaguely heard of him, that's all).

Lester Bangs: the star of his own prose

Anyway, enough with the preliminaries - what's the book like?  Answer: pretty damn strange. Because, for one thing, it's full of massively excessive gonzo journalism - Hunter S Thompson-type prose apparently all the rage in the early 70s. To me this is just bad writing - OTT show-off stuff which, with its trying-too-hard-to-be-hip-at-all-costs approach, only ends up boring the reader half to death. In the book's intro, Greil Marcus talks about how Bangs might conceivably be the "best writer in America" (which also appears as a back-cover puff for Psychotic Reactions). I've read and enjoyed Marcus' own stuff in the past but this - I have to say - is one of the most ludicrous literary assessments I've ever encountered. No, Marcus is way out. Bangs has some good lines, is sometimes funny and even touching, but he's also a painfully uncontrolled writer who sometimes appears to be splurging stuff out when off his head on drugs (entirely possible given his obsessive patter about drugs and alcohol). Or he's seemingly trying to write as many words as he can because he's being paid at 15 cents a word or whatever. For example, how about this on The Troggs' Wild Thing?:

"If you take 'Wild Thing' to heart and somehow attain its at least Kilimanjaroan level of godawful beauty, you will have so much sheer sheen-gleam of pure fuckin KLASS that your brain will explode like an overheated pan of rabbit gizzards on a prospectors' Bunsen and propel you like a teenage Nike skull-first straight outta that fuckin' school ..."

And there's plenty more where that came from. No, very few people would read Bangs for his prose style. Which brings me to the the second major thing about his book - Bangs' underlying seriousness. Beneath the fuck-it-and-to-hell-with-it-all goofing around and the (self-parodic?) shtick about getting wasted because "life stinks", Bangs is some sort of would-be humanist. Things matter, the music matters, life and death matters. Though a good proportion of the pieces in Psychotic Reactions include over-cooked amazement that people don't kill themselves because of the sheer tawdry worthlessness of modern life, the death of his 24-year-old friend Peter Laughner (from Rocket From The Tombs/Pere Ubu) seems to shake Bangs badly. In his obituary piece on Laughner, Bangs says:

"If I let myself get started I will only begin to rant and threaten those who glamorise death, but there is a death in the balance and you better look long and hard hard at it you stupid fuckheads, you who treat life as a camp joke, you who have lost your sense of wonder about the state of being alive itself."

And though it could be I've got this slightly wrong, it seems to me that after this rather shell-shocked Laughner tribute in the autumn of 1977 Bangs is never quite as flippant and misanthropic again. This is another thing about the book - it's a chronologically-arranged collection, so if you read it all the way through you begin to get a feeling for how Bangs' reviews change (get more serious). Quick digression: I've had the book for about ten years. When I first acquired it I did what lots of people must do - just dipped in and speed-read my way through the chapters on artists I was interested in (in my copy there are neat little Niluccio pencil ticks on the contents page for chapters on Richard Hell, the Clash, Sham 69, PiL and, er, Van Morrison). Meanwhile, most of the book I left untouched. Now, a decade later, I've read the whole bloody thing - from super-indulgent beginning to markedly-less-indulgent end. I've even dutifully read the wildly haphazard Creem reviews on bands I don't care about or even know anything about (Chicago, J Geils Band, Jethro Tull, Black Oak). So yes, at one level the book charts Bangs' progression - or at least faltering steps - away from a brattish self-indulgence at the start of the 1970s, to a more rounded persona by the beginning of the 1980s. Anyway, enough already. Why, I hear you cry, should anyone care about Bangs these days, especially if his writing is over-florid (it very much is), sometimes sexist (it occasionally is) and sometimes homophobic (it very occasionally is)? Well, for quite a few reasons, actually:

*He's got good music taste: the Velvet Underground, Richard Hell, Miles Davis, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, the Clash's first LP (or at least its first side, as he sometimes stipulates), Ornette Coleman, the Ramones, the Stooges' Raw Power, the Sex Pistols, PiL's Metal Box - these are his constant touchstones.

*His stuff is sometimes of genuine historical interest, eg the three long NME tour diary pieces he does while on the road with the Clash in late 1977, with all of its detail on audience behaviour (pogoing, spitting) and how the band seem to be slipping into rock star indifference toward the fans they'd once made a bit of an effort to talk to as equals.

*He has an occasional great turn of phrase, eg describing an interview encounter with a monumentally sulky Lou Reed in 1975: "I went into the Hilton and found Lou's party in the restaurant and sat down at a table adjacent. He's sitting there vibing away in his black T-shirt and shades, scowling like a house whose fire has been put out".

*He's sometimes extremely funny, for which read his two-page review of Sham 69 live at Hurrah's in New York in December 1979, a mini-masterpiece of exclamation mark comedy. (Yes! It Is! It's Great! Read It!).

Yeah, so it's a mixed bag (it's not wall-to-wall bangers with Bangs). Here and there Bangs can do what Nik Cohn did so memorably throughout his amazing Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom book - that's to say, make magnificently clipped judgements (eg "The Beatles were nothing. The Stones were something") which - in context - make perfect sense (maybe they do out of context as well). But he'll also veer off into over-ripe nonsense, delivering "a thudding pile of pages of random street gibberish" (Bangs' own description of Andy Warhol's famously self-indulgent a, A Novel). At times, Bangs reminds me of Paul Morley, another music writer who doesn't always know that less is more. And here too I should bring this over-long review to an end (I need to stop banging on about Bangs ...). A final observation: Bangs' post-Laughner railing against the deathwish negativity of some in the punk scene maybe shows him at his best. He seems to be genuinely trying to respect the creativity of punk, while challenging its morbid and even suicidal tendencies. And this stance also involves Bangs adopting the role of the (slightly) elder statesman in the late-70s New York punk/No Wave scene. The guy who, by around 1979, could tell the posturing scenester kids at CBGBs that they were in fact getting quite tiresome. Bangs has become the teller of hard truths (sort of). With Richard Hell (a personal friend of Bangs' who exasperated him with his obsessive interest in death), he says (in a direct published address): "in spite of you being one of the greatest rock and rollers I've ever heard, you're full of shit". Life, death, depression, punk morality, references to William Burroughs or Huysmans' Against Nature -  it may not be the raw material of the Great American Writer, but Lester Bangs' stuff is at least ambitious. Put it another way, whatever else it is - it certainly isn't Smash Hits PR fodder ...