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

Been having a wonderful discussion on Facebook about Lester Bangs (I do miss the days when all comments happened on my site, but I’ve learned to let it go! Sort of.), prompted by yesterday’s excerpt. His work means a lot to so many people and it’s so fun to hear from everyone, especially those “who were there” in the late 60s, early 70s, who felt what was happening in music, sensed it, were paying attention to it, and who read Lester voraciously, anything they could get their hands on. Although much of his stuff does have a “you had to be there” sensibility (many of the bands I’ve never even heard of), that is also a huge part of its motor, its drive, its appeal. Maybe it’s me, but I feel the recession-grime-“malaise” of the 1970s surrounding his pieces, I can taste the bitter black coffee, the air pollution, the grit of it all, the nation’s exhaustion. That was Lester Bangs’ landscape. And he was fearless in how he approached the written word (yes, driven on by benzedrine, that’s a given), and fearless in what he revealed about himself in some of these reviews.

If I could put a word to it, I would say that what he was most fearless about revealing was his desire for warmth and kindness. That may seem odd to say, especially since so much of what he wrote was ragey and rant-y – but in the middle of all of that emotional chaos was a plea for human beings to continue to try to connect with one another. That was why he “turned on” bands when they got too big for their britches: he felt they cut themselves off from the wellspring of humanity that was right in front of them in their audience. His columns on the Rolling Stones in the 1970s are all about that, and they are extremely angry, of course, but what he seems to be mourning is how far away we all were getting from one another. Again, as always, I go back to his famous last paragraph in the obituary he wrote for Elvis:

If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

Lester Bangs hated narcissism and solipsism. He hated the desire to be “cool” and “hip”. He wanted engagement. He wanted Truth. He was a taskmaster, and you couldn’t get away with faking it for Lester, he would see right through it. Additionally, if you dismissed him based on the fact that he disliked your “object of reverence” – then that was just a sign of the negative times, of our self-absorption, of our lack of engagement with one another (and therefore, with the culture at large).

So even as he’s basically screaming at Lou Reed in prose, or Mick Jagger, or Miles Davis, saying “What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you see what the problem is?” – what he is also revealing is his heart, his soul, his darkness. He doesn’t leave that out of it. For Lester, that was the whole POINT. He never makes the mistake of thinking that criticism is “objective” (which gives so many critics that pompous tone). He always knows he’s just spouting off what’s going on for HIM. He has the confidence, the boldness, to believe that his voice is worth hearing, that his thought process is interesting and worth sharing. It takes balls to write like he does. For me, it’s not the opinions that are startling and memorable: it’s the HOW of it all. And it’s also his courage in letting us see WHY this music (whatever it is) meant so much to him.

He could not stand hep cats, who did stuff because it was “in”. In his various columns on Miles Davis he goes OFF on the coked-up hipsters who think Miles is “cool” and necessary to have in any record collection. How could anyone listen to some of the early Miles Davis stuff and not be a sniveling sobbing wreck by the end of it? Miles Davis wasn’t COOL. He was HOT and full of ANGUISH and Lester FELT that anguish, dammit!

“Astral Weeks” is the second piece in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and it’s a doozy. A record review (sort of) of Van Morrison’s album of the same name which came out in 1968. This piece was written 10 years later, so it’s a contemplation on what that album meant to him at the time. As I said before, Lester Bangs is hard to excerpt: his stuff has a flow and a drive that makes his essays, however long, feel like one body of water, turbulent perhaps, but always one thing.

But what the hell, he’s still worth excerpting. Here he is on “Madame George”, one of the songs on the album.

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

“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.

The setting is the same as that of the previous song – Cyprus Avenue, apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire, into moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies. It’s an elemental place of pitiless judgment – wind and rain figure in both songs – and, interestingly enough, it’s a place of the even crueler judgment of adults by children, in both cases love objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult lovers. Madame George’s little boys are downright contemptuous – like the street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, they’re only too happy to come around as long as there’s music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on George’s affections when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow.

What might seem strangest of all but really isn’t is that it’s exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George most pathetic – age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash his love – that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn’t simply “fallen in love with love,” or something like that, but rather – what? Why, just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human – that’s one of the ultimate messages here, and I don’t by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman.

You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that’s loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we’d rather wave generously walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that someone who victimizes him- or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved. Where I live, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. And I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.

There is of course a rationale – what else are you going to do – but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, “S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can’t accept that we’ll never know.” Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but it’s hardly the end of the world; it’s not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as faces of life. Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you’ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes’ problems., until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannikin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch – but then again, to tilt Madame George’s hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to go only the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we’re alone together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn’t make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. That’s why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. Viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. Because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.