The Books: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll; “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung”, by Lester Bangs

Next up on the essays shelf:

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll, by Lester Bangs

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when pieces such as Bangs’ actually got published in actual magazines. And this was in recent memory. The mind boggles. Of course Bangs always had issues with whatever publication he wrote for, and he was in trouble all the time for the things he wrote. He pushed back against the promotional needs of music publications, and thought the quid pro quo nature of such interactions was disgusting and damaging to true criticism. (You know: if you dis our album, we will deny you access for interviews, and also it will hurt the magazines’s advertising dollars.) But still: that this person was given a platform in the first place is something else. Today, he would rant and rave on his own blog and have an enormous internet following. Bangs’ audience was always small (relatively): readers of Creem, readers of Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and any little music ‘zine that would pay him to write. This is a small number of people, all things considered. His reputation loomed large in the sub-culture. You can feel his influence in those who followed. But who else but Lester Bangs boldly throws around references to Baudelaire and Bukowski and Rimbaud and all the rest? You can feel a well-read man at work in these pieces, as insane as many of them are. He was an autodidact, for sure, and his idols were the likes of William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and all the Beats. But he knew what things signified in the culture, he knew that he was not re-inventing the wheel (or that the rock bands he covered were not re-inventing the wheel). His frame of reference was both wholly personal and gigantic and universal. He makes you want to read more, listen to more.

Now of course Lester Bangs could be unbelievably obnoxious (in print and in person) and the stories of him are legendary. He was a full-blown alcoholic and speed-freak by the time he was in high school. He died of an overdose at the age of 32. He was working on a novel and was full of big plans, and had actually cut back on all substances (something that is, of course, very dangerous to serious addicts such as Bangs). I am not a Lester Bangs expert, and my “way in” to the man’s work was through his two unforgettable pieces on Elvis Presley which I have discussed on my site at length. If you’re an Elvis fan, you know those two pieces. Unfortunately, some Elvis fans seem to be invested in “sainting” their beloved King, and that does him a great disservice – both as a man, and an icon. And so because Lester Bangs said “mean” things about Elvis, Bangs should be discounted or dismissed as a crank. Or because Lester Bangs, in trying to talk about Elvis, said that the Beatles were “nothing” in comparison, means he was way out of line because the Beatles are untouchable and Lester was just stupid and not worth listening to. (Of course, if you think Lester said mean things about Elvis in his obit, you should check out what he said about John Lennon. Wow. Christopher Hitchens did not invent the Mean Obituary.) I guess I think it’s a huge error to dismiss Lester Bangs based on his opinions. Now what do I mean by that? He was often quite wrong. He praised things as classics that have since sunk to obscurity, and he dismissed bands that have withstood the test of time. He was writing record reviews, in the moment, not looking to posterity. Why would he be looking to posterity? As far as he was concerned, only the freaks who read Creem were even paying attention. He was paid $12 a review at Rolling Stone. This was not in any way shape or form posterity-building career-building platforms. (Not at the time, anyway.)

As I said, I am not a Lester Bangs expert, and I am also not a music nerd. I clearly have eclectic tastes, and I love music, but to love music like Lester Bangs did is a whole other level. Music was his air, his water, his sunshine. Without it, there was no Lester. My brother is that kind of music fan. (And a fantastic writer too, by the way.)

Here is what I gather from his writing (I have not read the biography of Bangs that is out, and I have not read much critical appreciation of Bangs written by other people, so I am coming at this merely from the two Bangs collections): Lester Bangs was a jazz fan, mainly, in high school. He was born in 1948 so he had a 1950s childhood and a 1960s adolescence. Too young, perhaps, to thrill to what was coming out of Memphis in the mid-1950s, but that was the landscape of music he grew up in. So the 60s came, and music languished (at least he felt it did, he was not into folk music, or political folk hippie-types), until punk rock exploded out of London and CBGBs and exciting stuff started happening that was new and fresh and thrilling and dangerous, what rock ‘n’ roll should be. By that time, he was writing for Rolling Stone on a freelance basis, and eventually his stuff that wasn’t published in Rolling Stone (it was too out there, too long, too personal, too crazy, what the fuck Lester, how do you have the balls to write like this?) found a home at Creem, via Dave Marsh. Basically, Lester sent them a 20-page personal “review” of The Stooges album, which wasn’t even really a review, but a call to arms and a personal diary – and they published the whole thing. So Lester knew that Creem was his new home. So eventually he ran Creem, becoming an editor, and he moved to Detroit, and then moved to New York in the mid-late 70s, where he started writing for the Village Voice (as well as a host of other little music magazines). He was fully enmeshed in the New York “scene”, having public spats with the likes of Lou Reed and others, writing “fan” books about Blondie, and forming his own band. He was an exhibitionist, he was a drunk, he was a speed-freak. His drunken shenanigans were legendary (he wrote about all of this himself), and his hangovers were crushing. People who know his work well point out the difference between the Creem stuff and the Village Voice stuff. He was a “professional” by the time he got to the Village Voice, with experience, he worked on his pieces, editing them, etc., working over his drafts, although his copious notes for reviews often ran to 30, 40 pages (these, too, have now been published, and my God, they are fascinating). You read the review in question, and it’s professional and erudite and well-written, and then you read the 40 page note-fest for said review and you see how the only way for Lester to write a brief review was to get all of that stuff out of the way FIRST).

His opinions are now famous. The final line of his Elvis obituary still has great reverb, so much so that Bruce Springsteen based his whole keynote address at last year’s SXSW on it. The problem with opinionated writing is that people reading it will dismiss it based on the irrelevant fact of whether or not they agree with said opinion. Like I said, this is a huge error. Whether or not you disagree or agree with Alexander Hamilton, for example, is totally irrelevant (or, not totally: if it helps you engage with the issues, then that’s great): he should be read and absorbed because he was a Master at the English language and a Master at rhetoric and argument and you cannot understand the American political landscape without understanding Alexander Hamilton. End of story. The same is true of Tom Paine, a controversial figure, or Edmund Burke, or any of these other cantankerous talented rabble-rousers. Christopher Hitchens. Camille Paglia. P.J. O’Rourke. These people have a literary style that is undeniable, entertaining, engaging, infuriating, and their opinions often blistering and obnoxious, their rhetorical savvy so daunting that you have to “get your shit together” to come up with a retort. That’s why they’re so much fun, that is why they are valuable to their culture. It’s just such a huge mistake to keep yourself safe by only reading and applauding those who seem to hold “correct” views, views with which you agree.

My point is: His arguments are there to be engaged with. Obviously he WANTED to piss people off. Those are valid reactions. But because he said one mean thing about Elvis having contempt for his audience is no reason to dismiss every other brilliant thing he said about Elvis. I think Lester Bangs got Elvis “right” on such a primal level that his arguments still stand, and still remain a monument. If you are going to dismiss him, you had better have a good counter-argument, in other words.

Perhaps this is all about being a “formalist”. How do you separate form from content? I don’t know, and I don’t know if it’s possible (or even advisable). However, one can watch Triumph of the Will and think both: 1. Damn, this is disgusting AND 2. Damn, this is effective and gorgeous propaganda. Both are true. Of course at some point you cannot divorce form from content (Triumph of the Will being a perfect example). The reason it is disgusting is BECAUSE it is so effective.

Is it possible to admire form if you don’t like the content?

Does anybody fucking care?

So. What does this have to do with Lester? Example: I actually love James Taylor, and yet I also not only appreciate but adore Lester Bangs’ diatribe against everything James Taylor represents in his magnificent gigantic essay about The Troggs, entitled, unbelievably, “James Taylor Marked For Death”. I also can see Lester Bangs’ point about Taylor and his ilk. I really can. It doesn’t take away from my love of James Taylor. Please. My opinions aren’t that shallow.

Lester Bangs was obviously influenced by Kerouac, not only in style but in drug choice, popping bennies and pouring his thoughts into the typewriter as fast as he could type. Much of this stuff appears to be a first draft. Friends say that he did edit, especially later when he wrote for the Voice, but his earlier stuff feels “fresh off the presses” in a way that is still startling and immediate. And unmistakably speed-induced.

The title piece in this collection, put together by friend/colleague Greil Marcus, starts out with a fantasy, of elderly Lester Bangs sitting surrounded by his grandchildren, all of whom pester him with questions about Music in Days Gone By, starting off with, “What’s all this shit about the Yardbirds?” Granddaddy Lester starts to try to explain to his chilluns what the Yardbirds were about, and what 1965 was all about (this piece was written in 1971), but then gets sidetracked, as he always does, by talking about a band called Count Five, and their mind-blowing album Psychotic Reaction.

The imaginary grandkids keep interjecting, trying to get him back on the Yardbirds track, but once Lester’s imagination leaves the station there is no stopping it. Now he’s all Count Five, Count Five, and how he was drawn to the album, but repulsed by it, he didn’t want to buy it, he had to buy it, back, forth, back forth, this goes on for pages. The Count Five album was in his mind, his soul, his autobiography, his whole life was in that album. Bangs discusses later Count Five albums in an in-depth way (and, hilariously, all of these albums are made-up: they do not exist, except in Bangs’ alternate-universe imagination). Bangs never tips his hand. If you did not know that these albums were fictional, you would be scouring second-hand bargain bins for the vinyl evidence of them. So obnoxious, but so totally Lester.

I’ll say a couple more things about Bangs and then we’ll get on to the excerpts.

He actually is very difficult to excerpt. His stuff is meant to be read in its entire.

I also find him difficult to read in short spurts. Each essay must be read in one sitting, otherwise you lose your way. This is part of the bennie-fever for sure (I have felt the same thing with Kerouac’s stuff and its scroll-like push of energy). Even his longest essays demand to be read in one sitting, if you can hack it, because the drive/push/objective of each piece pushes it along until it comes to some kind of ringing conclusion, either revelatory, condemning, or hilarious.

Lastly: Lester Bangs was magnificent at “endings”. His endings should be studied by aspiring writers.

Okay, so here’s an excerpt from “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung”, which just can’t quite get around to the Yardbirds.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll, “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” by Lester Bangs

I tried and tried to buy the Psychotic Reaction LP – I’d go down to the Unimart stoned on grass, on nutmeg, vodka, Romilar or coming glassy-eyed off ten Dexedrine hours spent working problems in Geometry (I was a real little scholar – when I had the magic medicine which catapults you into a maniacal obsessive craving for knowledge), I tried every gambit to weaken my resistance, but nothing worked. Shit, I had a fuckin’ split personality! And all over a fuckin’ Count Five album! Maybe I was closer to the jokers’ jailhouse than I ever imagined! On the other hand, what else could I or any other loon from my peer group ever possibly become schizoid over but a lousy rock ‘n’ roll album? Girls? Nahh, that’s direct, simple, unrationalized. Drugs? Sure, but it’d be them on me, “Yer gonna pay for messin’ with us, boy!,” not my own inner wrack of dualistic agony. Nope, nothing more nor less than a record, a rock ‘n’ roll album of the approximate significance of Psychotic Reaction (who could contract barking fits from a Stones platter, much less the Beatles?), could ever pulverize my lobes and turn my floor to wormwood. I knew, ’cause I had a brief though quite similar spell of disorientation once over the Question Mark and the Mysterians album! I was at a friend’s house, and I was high on Romilar and he on Colt 45, and I said, “Yeah, I bought the Question Mark and the Mysterians album today,” and suddenly the equilibrium was seeping from my head like water from the ears after a sea plunge, a desultory vortex started swirling round my skull and gradually spun faster though I couldn’t tell if it was a breeze just outside or something right between the flesh and bone. I saw my life before my eyes, and that is no shit – I mean not that I saw some zipping montage from birth to that queasy instant of existential vertigo, but that I saw myself walking in and out of countless record stores, forking over vast fortunes in an endless chain of cash-register clicks and dings at $3.38 and $3.39 and $3.49 and all the other fixed rates I knew by heart being if never on the track team unquestionably an All-American Competitive Shopper, I saw litter bins piled high with bags that stores all seal records in so you won’t get nabbed for lifting as you trot out the door. I saw myself on a thousand occasions walking toward my car with a brisk and purposeful step, turning the key in the ignition and varooming off high as a hotrodder in anticipation of the revelations waiting in thirty-five or forty minutes of blasting sound soon as I got home, the eternal promise that this time the guitars will jell like TNT and set off galvanic sizzles in your brain “KABLOOIE!!!” and this time at least at last blow your fucking lid sky-high. Brains gleaming on the ceiling, sticking like putty stalactites, while yer berserk body runs around and slams outside hollering subhuman gibberish, jigging in erratic circles and careening split-up syllables insistently like a geek with a bad case of the superstar syndrome.

But that’s only the fantasy. The real vision, the real freaking flash, was just like the reality, only looped to replay without end. The real story is rushing home to hear the apocalypse erupt, falling through the front door and slashing open the plastic sealing “for your protection,” taking the record out – ah, lookit them grooves, all jet black without a smudge yet, shiny and new and so fucking pristine, then the color of the label, does it glow with auras that’ll make subtle comment on the sounds coming out, or is it just a flat utilitarian monochromatic surface, like a schoolhouse wall (like RCA’s and Capitol’s after some fool revamped ’em – an example of real artistic backwardness)? And finally you get to put the record on the turntable, it spins in limbo a perfect second, followed by the moment of truth, needle into groove, and finally sound.

What then occurs is so often anticlimactic that it drives a rational man to the depths of despair. Bah! The whole musical world is packed with simpletons and charlatans, with few a genius or looney tune joker in between.

All this I saw whilst sitting there in the throes of the Question Mark and the Mysterians frieze, and more, I saw myself as a befuddled old man holding a copy of the 96 Tears album and staring off blankly with the slack jaw of a squandered life’s decline. And in the next instant, since practically no time had elapsed at all, my friend said with obvious amazement: “You bought Question Mark and the Mysterians?”

I stared at him dully. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I realize that this sounds rather pathological – although I never thought so until laying it out here – and the Freudian overtones are child’s play, I guess. But what I don’t understand is what it all signifies. Don’t get the idea that my buying of and listening to records per se has always been marked by such frenzy and disorientation, or even any particular degree of obsession and compulsion. It’s just that music has been a fluctuating fanaticism with me ever since – well, ever since I first heard “The Storm” from the William Tell Overture on a TV cartoon about first grade. And riding in the car through grammar school when songs like “There Goes My Baby” would come on the radio, and getting a first record player in fifth grade, and hearing for the first time things like John Coltrane and Charlie Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and the Stones and feedback and Trout Mask Replica. All these were milestones, each one fried my brain a little further, especially the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady did that, and a very few others. They’re events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it’s not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.

So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds as well for many other people, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver’s seat while AM walloped you on, alone under headphones with vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac postmidnights, or just to sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America, slapping on sides and feeling good.