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is a thorough read of "psychotic reactions & carburettor Dung" my best bet if i want to learn more about the real lester bangs, then? you and rizla both mentioned it, and i'm getting that idea.
"Psychotic Reactions.." is the stanard text, in that unless quite recently it was the only collection of his writing available in book-form. It is edited/compiled by Greil Marcus, and as such it's worth keeping in mind that it's more Greil's-favourite-stuff-by-Lester than either a definitive collection or one that was in any way approved by LB himself (him being dead and all).
That disclaimer aside though, yes, it is an excellent and indeed essential read and does a fine job of tracing the development of LB's writing and thought through his career.
There is now another Bangs collection available, "Mainlines, Bloodfeasts and Bad Taste", which makes for a good volume#2 if you enjoyed "Psychotic Reactions..", and Jim DeRogatis' "Let It Blurt: The Life of Lester Bangs" is a surprisingly vital and worthwhile biography if yr interested in the man himself - he certainly had an interesting enough time of things to DESERVE a biography, which is more than can be said of just about any other music journalist.
i am now curious why he is such a figure of fame, mainly. he died young and he was around in the early days of the mass media explosion of the later half of this century, but was there also something magical in his writing, something unique?
I would certainly say that there is, yes. But more of that later maybe.
I'd say Lester's influence/importance doesn't come from his being either the first or most definitive 'rock-writer' (as people often assume), because he wasn't, basically. If that's what you're looking for, you might be better off looking to Paul Williams or Richard Meltzer (tho his stuff is pretty whacked) and the aforementioned Mr. Marcus.
A far more convincing claim to fame comes from Lester's position as the first guy to go to print in the late-'60s / early-'70s who championed The Velvet Underground and the Stooges as the definitve bands of the period, expressed his love for dumb-ass rock n' roll, free jazz and "horrible noise" at every opportunity and rejected and mocked the reigning orthodoxy of Cream/'Dead/Zeppelin blue-rock and entropic post-hippie culture in general.
The fact he was getting this stuff down on paper during '68-'71 when it was seen as borderline madness understandably gained him a lot of kudos as the 2nd generation punk scene began to coalese around the exact same point of view in the mid/late '70s. He was/is often credited as the earliest exponent of the 'punk' aesthetic, and it is from this that his 'legendary' status largely derives.
And indeed this was the level on which I initially enjoyed "Psychotic Reactions.." when I first zoomed through it: Here's this guy who loved the music I love when everybody else hated it, wrote about it well, threw in a bunch of cool literary devices ripped from Burroughs, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and finished things off with some personal anecdotes and great gags. Good man! High fives all round.
do you guys feel he was a product of the time, unique because where and when he lived will never be with us again, or do you feel it was more than that?
I feel it was more than that. As I said above in this thread, I have just finished re-reading 'Psychotic Reactions..', and after a few more years of life-experience and continued music-obsession, I am floored by just what an incredible writer this guy was.
If 50% of the book is the fairly easy-going drug-punk wannabe gonzo stuff and general trash-evangelism that stood out for me the first time, the other, more serious half is... well... at this point it's hard to avoid unwrapping a lot of easily thrown out words like "passionate", "honest", "desperate", "articulate"; he CARES about music and needs it within his life in that guileless, devotional way that very few working music writers have the courage to admit to (Everett True & co aside), and when he encounters music he feels is genuinely coming from the heart (and it's usually something pretty out-of-bounds from his established punk-context, like Nico or Van Morrison or Mingus or Otis Rush), he responds in kind, spinning off for pages, getting DEEP inside particular songs and headspaces, relating the music's emotion/power back into his life, into other people's lives, into life in general with a skill for articulate expression that at his best takes him way beyond the music-writing sphere and elicits comparison to Brautigan or Bukowski or Vonnegut or, y'know, whoever.
On first reading, I didn't have much patience with the way he tries to drag entire moral frameworks out of a few scrappy lyrics - "oh for god's sake, who cares, they obviously just put that in to finish off the verse cos it sounded cool; tell me about the big guitar noises and whether the record's any good!" - but what can I say? Now I get it; now I see what he was laying down and why it matters. To those of us who engage with it to this degree and need it to get through the day, music is more than music: if you don't mean it, don't sing it, LB seems to be saying, cos we can't take it if the music starts to lie to us.
Towards the end of his life (especially in the unpublished notes and drafts for fiction included in "Psychotic Reactions.."), Lester forcibly removed himself from what he saw as the nihilism and lack of humanity in the punk / new wave world he'd helped to create, and his writing moves away from rock n' roll and more towards some extraordinary but sadly never fully realised meditations on the alienation and collapsing channels of communication between people, about loneliness and sexual neuroses and all the rest of it, part auto-biographical, part fictional, part random drunken typewriter spree, some of which is extremely moving, retaining the compassion and humour of the above-mentioned writerly comparisons and suggesting that he was making progress towards becoming a great novelist / essayist prior to his tragically premature death.
On music, he captures my own feelings and throws them back at me better than anyone else I've ever read... in retrospect, I think this may actually be BECAUSE rather than in spite of the fact that he so often goes beyond music. |
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