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Topic: Lester Bangs (NSC) Return to archive
May 15th, 2005 07:39 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Lester Bangs embodied the very spirit of rock 'n' roll
BY CRYSTAL K. WIEBE / For the Lincoln Journal Star
May 15, 2005

America's most famous rock journalist flamed out 23 years ago in a demise befitting the rock stars he wrote about.

An accidental overdose of the painkiller Darvon cut short the career of Lester Bangs on April 30, 1982. Yet, his premature death helped secure the critic's place in rock writing's history and contributes to his inclusion in "The Outlaw Bible of American Literature."

Remembered as much for his rowdy lifestyle as his raucous prose, Bangs was a groundbreaking gonzo journalist, the likes of whom may never be seen again in the increasingly professionalized realm of music reporting.

More than two decades after his death, Bangs still looms large.

He has been immortalized in song by the Ramones, R.E.M. and Bob Seger.

Two anthologies of his writing have been published since 1987.

In 2000, he was the subject of a biography by Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis

That year, he was portrayed in the motion picture "Almost Famous," a film directed by Cameron Crowe, one of Bangs' proteges when both wrote for Rolling Stone.

In the movie, which has provided the widest public exposure for Bangs, actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays up Bangs' less notorious side — the pudgy, kindly writer, eagerly doling out helpful advice to a teenager trying to get published in Rolling Stone.

According to those who knew the real Bangs, the representation in the film is right on, nailing the gentle Bangs, who is too often eclipsed in memory by the madman.

Dave Marsh, former editor of Creem magazine (where Bangs did much of his work), a longtime Rolling Stone writer and biographer of The Who and Bruce Springsteen, lived with Bangs for two years. In an e-mail interview, he reflected on the portrayal of Bangs in the film:

"Cameron really did get him, a lot of him, right, the kind of bullshit detector that Lester could be…Lester was a very affectionate person," Marsh wrote. "If I talked to Lester about something I did at Rolling Stone, he would give me the best appraisal of it. He was very judgmental but very right in his judgments."

But Bangs was a mercurial sort. In their Creem days, Marsh said, a musical debate with Bangs was likely to turn into a physical tussle. "It was that important that you'd fight about it," he said.

Why Bangs has been held above other equally (or more) talented rock scribes is intrinsically tied to his story, which is as compelling as any rock 'n' roll classic.

A contrarian from his Dec. 13, 1948 birth, Leslie Bangs changed his name, denounced his mother's Jehovah's Witness church and lost his virginity to a Mexican prostitute, all before the end of high school.

The soundtrack to Bangs' early life was jazz, the music of his literary heroes, the Beats. He emulated his favorite authors — Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs — on the page and in person.

Throughout his adolescence, Bangs cultivated a mysterious, intellectual image, spouting poetry at parties and experimenting with drugs and alcohol, often recording his experiences in a notebook, like a true Beat born a generation too late. Although Bangs would burn much of his Beat collection as a high school freshman, its influence carried on throughout his life in the hyper sway of his sentences and in bottles of pills, booze and cough syrup.

The lifestyle of a rock 'n' roller didn't differ much from that of a beatnik. And, after hearing The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in 1964, Bangs would trade the Beats and jazz for rock 'n' roll. He embraced this new, living movement with the same intensity he had the last, dreaming of one day owning a cellar stocked with a copy of every record ever made.

Always seeking passion above all, Bangs usually preferred the noisy stuff and connected hard with the punk movement of the 1970s, which he admired for its anti-authority, do-it-yourself aesthetic.

After a brief desire to teach passed, the college dropout launched his career as a music critic in 1969 by answering an ad seeking submissions to Rolling Stone, then a fledgling start-up with an anemic music section. The magazine would publish some of Bangs' finest early work, including an obituary of Jack Kerouac.

Fired in 1973 by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner for a disrespectful attitude toward musicians, Bangs spent the most productive years of his career writing predominantly for Detroit-based Creem, where his rambunctious style was more accepted.

In the course of about seven years, the irreverent magazine published some of Bangs' most important writings, including a series on Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed, which demonstrated the reporter's no-holds-barred interview style.

After a 1976 move to New York City, Bangs began writing regularly for the Village Voice, edited by the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau.

Before he died, Bangs was about to begin a new chapter in his life. He told friends that he wanted to get away from his rock 'n' roll lifestyle. He wanted to go to Mexico, as Kerouac had, to write a novel. The only Beat that Bangs hadn't incinerated remained a role model. Kerouac's writing exhibited many of the same themes as the loud rock 'n' roll Bangs so desperately loved — passion, disillusionment and spiritual transcendence.

Bangs' death at age 33 by a pharmaceutical drug he took recreationally off and on for years, exemplifies another parallel between the two cultural movements he latched onto in life. Like his favorite alcoholic beatnik and so many rock 'n' rollers, Bangs was doomed by an indulgent nature.

In keeping with the theme of ill-fated artists, Bangs left behind a collection of work that continues to entertain and inspire.

His writing and life reflect a body-and-soul investment in the rock 'n' roll scene, which he analyzed with the ears and heart of a devoted fan. Bangs' performances on the page were every bit as impassioned as the ones he critiqued in the clubs. Arriving with the first wave of rock critics, he was a fearless experimentalist, whose contagious spirit and disregard for the journalist's role as detached observer are his contributions to the trade.

Considering their shared influences, speed-fueled rants and readers' tendencies to blur the lines between their public and private personas, it's easy to draw similarities between Bangs and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, also enshrined in the "Outlaw Bible."

Balking at the journalistic tradition of detached reporting, Bangs and Thompson told vivid stories from the inside of a situation, be it a rock concert or a national convention of police officers.

"Definitely, there's that very high-energy kind of prose that comes out of both Thompson and Bangs," said Brian J. Bowe, current editor of Creem. "Both of them seem to tell a story by their own personal reaction to what was going on around them."

In his Bangs biography, "Let It Blurt," DeRogatis goes one step further in his analysis of the Bangs-Thompson connection:

"Bangs was the great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock writing — its Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one."

Not everyone, however, agrees. Thompson may be the more accomplished of the two writers, based on the work output afforded by a longer life. But Marsh contends that comparing Bangs to Thompson is like comparing "steak to a hot dog."

It is unclear whether Bangs or Thompson were acquainted. Richard Riegel, a friend of Bangs', doubted that they ever met, even though both writers contributed to Rolling Stone in the same time period — "As freelancers in different parts of the paper, there probably wouldn't have been any occasion for them to meet in person." However, in a 2002 article in The Guardian, British rock critic and one-time Bangs protégé Nick Kent refers to Thompson as Bangs' "nemesis."

If they were not on good terms, the basis for the friction could have been differing personal philosophies. Thompson's dour view of humanity would have grated against Bangs' romantic optimism.

"Lester could be bitter, cynical, abusive, but he always — virtually always — wound up with a truly compassionate perspective and he believed that things changed, and could change for the better," Marsh wrote. " Hunter Thompson was a cynic. Lester died from an accident; Hunter Thompson committed about the most selfish act of suicide I've ever heard of."

While their voices may be imitated (often poorly) by young writers, the real legacy of both Bangs and Thompson is not so much a style of writing as a first-person approach that makes gonzo the journalistic equivalent of method acting.

As Bangs told a young DeRogatis in 1982: "Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life."

Taking his subject matter to heart, Bangs did not merely chronicle the existence of rock 'n' rollers from the back of the club. A fully entrenched member of the scene he covered, Bangs jammed and partied with them. He was a fixture of the New York punk scene with a status almost as iconic as that of his musician friends.

While attempting to be critical, Bangs bought into rock 'n' roll's rebellious ideology, boldly applying its aesthetic to his prose.

Words gushing off the page, Bangs' best works hook readers with the capacity of a good pop song and smack of the no-prisoners intensity of the punk movement that he himself named and fostered.

While Bangs admittedly stood in awe of many musicians, he refused to feed the notorious rock star ego in interviews or in his writing.

"The whole thing of interviewing rock stars was just such a suck-up," he told DeRogatis in 1982. "It was groveling obeisance to people who weren't that special, really. It's just a guy, just another person, so what?"

Just as no one can truly mimic Thompson's style, no one can write like Bangs. Nor would he want anyone to. Often called upon by young critics for advice, Bangs always encouraged them to look within.

The nurturing Bangs spirit persists at Creem, where Bowe considers the encouragement of rock journalism's next generation of voices part of his mission.

"People are always asking us who's going to be the new Lester Bangs," Bowe said. "We always respond, 'We're not looking.' We're looking for the people who are going to take rock 'n' roll journalism to the next step. The people who get rejected right out of the gate are the ones who try way too closely to emulate Lester."

The writers who get a second look from him are apt to name-drop Bangs but also demonstrate an understanding of what constitutes good writing. Bowe said the druggy reputations of gonzos like Thompson and Bangs can be misleading.

"People think all you need to be is just loaded and you can write like one of these guys," he said. "And the fact of the matter is, Lester was an incredible writer. He could break so many rules because he was clever."

The possibility that an outrageous voice like Bangs' would turn up on rock's most widely read pages is not likely today. Due to either professionalization, industrialization or both, rock journalism has evolved into a different beast from what it was in the 1970s.

With publications ever constrained by space and politics, Bangs' unorthodox methods would be stifled at best, relegated to obscure Web blogs at worst. Entirely a product of his times, Bangs was lucky to enter rock journalism at the very onset of the experiment.

According to DeRogatis, rock journalism "was born in the mid-sixties, blossomed along with New Journalism in the early seventies, and was professionalized and purged of much of its personality by the early eighties. Though much of it was as evanescent as a breath of air through a saxophone, Lester's work represented a high point that the field has yet to match."

For those who don't value Bangs' contribution to the craft of rock journalism, keeping the rambling of would-be-Bangses hushed or confined to the din of the Internet is a good thing.

In a scathing reaction to DeRogatis' book, Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis blamed Bangs for the geeky, leechlike reputation rock critics are plagued with and concluded that "his influence far outweighs his talent — then again, it would be hard for it not to — and rock criticism is far more impoverished for it."

Riegel, who confessed to "excoriating Anthony DeCurtis for condemning Lester without having read much of his writing," said he was confused by the tendency of such conservative writers to identify Bangs as a negative icon and suggested they may be exaggerating his influence.

"They complain in general about current rockwriting that's not careful & proper as done by 'would-be Lester Bangses,' yet these critics don't cite any examples… and I can't find any current stuff that sounds anything like Lester," he said.

Even Bangs' supporters admit that his legacy should not be overstated at the expense of other writers, nor should his own writing be overshadowed by his personality.

"He's certainly not the most influential rock critic. Christgau is by far. Christgau and (Greil) Marcus," Marsh said. "That doesn't mean I think that's a good thing. It just means I think that's what's true."

Whether they like him or not, most agree that the reason Bangs' reputation continues to haunt the halls of rock journalism has to do with more than just his writing.

Through his words, life and death, Bangs embodied the very spirit of rock 'n' roll and all of its courage and recklessness, beauty and pain. He came to rock journalism at the ripe time and left the world in a tragic way appropriate for legend-making.

His brilliant voice, which sang briefly from the pages of some of rock 'n' roll's most important publications, was a true one, inspired by two generations of rebels — the Beats and the rock 'n' rollers. Thrusting himself boldly into his articles and reviews, Bangs the gonzo wrote inspiringly about music and musicians with all the subjectivity of a true music fan.

Crystal K. Wiebe is a 2005 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This piece is an adaptation of her senior honors thesis.
May 15th, 2005 11:28 AM
texile hunter was a better writer in the tradional sense - lester was raw passion, more stream-of-concious and undisciplined........like punk;
can't compare the two..........both brilliant.
May 16th, 2005 12:37 AM
texile lester's stones reviews are great because he had a love-hate relationship with them.........
he worshipped them, and they would disapoint him.
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