The Books: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll; “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review”, 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

Where to begin? The subtitle of this 1970 essay describes perfectly what is going on in this monster essay, 21 pages long, broken up into three separate parts. If I understand correctly, Lester Bangs, living in California still at the time, sent this essay to the “powers that be” at Creem and they printed the whole damn thing. This was clearly a sign to Lester: Creem are my kind of people. I am sure there are details I am missing, and no context is given in this collection for the whys/hows/wherefores of each particular essay (in a way, I appreciate that: it gives us Lester Unplugged, Unexplained). So. You need to really settle in and gear up to make it through the essay in one sitting. It is an onslaught of words, information, opinions (that often double-back on themselves), outright outrage, and pedantic explanations. Lester Bangs wants you to get it, all right? Because he feels that people “out there” are not GETTING it. “It” being what the Stooges and Iggy Pop are all about, and “it” being, in a much larger context, rock ‘n roll itself. Lester Bangs wants to place the Stooges into their proper context, and so he lays it out in exhaustive detail in part II of the essay, a sweeping history of rock ‘n roll (reminiscent of Jack Black’s extraordinary flow-chart on the blackboard in School of Rock).

Lester Bangs feels that people are not seeing the Big Picture. He feels that critics and audiences alike are too in-the-moment reactive to understand the vast movement in the culture, movement which the Stooges fit into and almost predict. He wants to show people that they can be “liberated” from just reacting to things in the moment with unthought-through opinions like, “This music is bad,” or “The Stooges latest album is boring/not as good as the first/monotonous” into a freedom of critical thinking and perspective. But you have to do the hard work to get to that point. Is the culture even up to that kind of analysis? Lester Bangs pours himself at the problem in the aforementioned onslaught of words.

The event which prompted this gigantic essay was the release of the Stooges’ second studio album, Fun House.

Critical reception was mixed and divided. Of course Fun House is now on most lists of the Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Albums Ever (not that lists signify everything), but you know, you can only react to things in the moment. There was a “moment” in time when a bad movie like The English Patient won every award. The culture doesn’t always get things right. And, of course, there are famous examples of movies that were shunned upon their release, or barely got released at all (like Citizen Kane), who now rule the Pantheon. So. There’s THAT for critical perspicacity. This is the way of the world. Mencken wrote about such things in his essays on classical composers. People did not greet Beethoven’s innovations with immediate glee and acceptance. Of course not. There were rumblings of alarm and there will always be rumblings of alarm towards anything that upsets the status quo. We like to keep things cozy and neat and understand-able. It appears to be part of who we are, as human beings. But eventually, individuals rise to prominence (usually posthumously), and then we congratulate ourselves for being a human race who produces such individuals (and hectors/shuns them while they are among us).

The final third of Bangs’ essay is the “review” of Fun House, which he goes through painstakingly, song by song. But, as per usual, he needs to get so much stuff out of the way first before he can even BEGIN to TRY to take on the album. This is classic Lester, which is why his “notes” for articles are often as interesting as the articles themselves. How can he even begin to review an album unless he talks about the history of rock ‘n roll and make people see what the hell is going on? How can he even begin to talk about Fun House until he fully examines/excavates who the hell Iggy Pop is, and where he comes from, and what he is about, AND what tradition he is in (because we all are from one tradition or another: Lester Bangs saw the culture as a FLOW, and never made the mistake that many of his more snotty contemporaries did in thinking that the youth culture of the mid to late 60s CREATED American culture. Bull shit, said Lester, pointing to countless examples). So Iggy Pop had to be dealt with, and seriously, as a phenomenon: what did he mean, what was he about, what the hell was going on?

Lester had some ideas about that. In the second part of the essay, he puts on a scholar’s helmet and lectures us on the history of rock ‘n roll. He seems to be talking to the kids who think the Rolling Stones created it all. In the context of those years, it is easy to see why that would be the case. The Rolling Stones sucked up all the oxygen in the culture. They were just one of those bands (few and far between, you can count on one hand the bands who dominate like they did). Lester, at this point, seemed to be getting annoyed with the Stones (he was a giant fan, and his annoyance came out of his Love for them: when Lester got angry, it was always because Love was present. In his more sarcastic reviews, where he dismisses this or that band, you know he doesn’t give a shit. It is only when he gets outraged that you know how much he loves the band in question). Or, let’s correct that: he seemed to be annoyed with Mick Jagger, and what was going on with him post-Altomont. (Bangs goes into this in some detail in his three major pieces on the Stones, included not in this collection but the second one.) Lester Bangs thought Mick Jagger was flailing around at this point, trying to be a member of high society or something, who the hell knows, and because the Rolling Stones were so huge, people were still staring at them, when they should have been turning their eyes to Iggy Pop. (Mick Jagger is a repetitive theme in Bangs’ writing. He even shows up in Bangs’ obituary for Elvis. Jagger is that type of lightning rod.)

As always, the essay needs to be read in its entirety; preferably, in one sitting. It’s almost unfair to excerpt it, but I’ll give it a shot.

There’s so much great stuff here, and his pontificatory history of rock ‘n roll is fantastic and will be gulped down by any music fan, but I liked the section on what it means to be a rock ‘n roll star. What is a star? What does it mean to have star quality? Why are some people stars and others not? Bangs knows that in this case, like so many others, “your mileage may vary”, but he puts forth what HE values, and what HE recognizes as essential qualities for a star. In short, he doesn’t want these rock ‘n roll stars to take themselves so goddamn seriously (this was his beef with Jagger at that moment in time; this was his beef with Led Zeppelin, always – it was his beef with folk musicians like Richie Havens, and etc.). He liked the Jokesters, the Tricksters, the Showmen, the Goofballs, the Extroverts, the guys who knew that all of Life was a bit of a fucking JOKE, son, so if you’re riding around in your limo with groupies sucking you off stop thinking that any of it is SERIOUS because the joke will be on you. That kind of self-serious macho cock-swinging rock star stuff drove Lester Bangs CRAZY. Not just because it was embarrassing to see grown men doing something silly taking themselves so seriously – but because it deadened the larger culture, it promoted narcissism and sociopathy and solipsism as a Valid Way of Being, and that … that … Lester Bangs, child of Jack Kerouac, could NOT abide.

Which brings us to … Alice Cooper with a pie smashed in his face, and what that has to do with Iggy Pop. The Alice Cooper incident Bangs describes, by the way, in all its lunacy, is on Youtube.

Lester Bangs hated the “trappings” of stardom and thought it hurt music, thought it hurt us as a culture. Well, that should be clear, in the following excerpt. And, in my opinion, Bangs’ comments are even more relevant today, when people become “stars” without having experienced a live performance, with no experience, in other words. So that then when they are confronted with a live crowd, with having to “put out”, many of these people flat out cannot do it. It makes me nervous to watch them. You need to have MILES on you before you can even begin to command the attention of a huge audience in any organic way. (Elvis didn’t need those miles, he did it instantaneously: but he is the exception that proves the rule.) Enough. On to Lester.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review,” by Lester Bangs

I’ve been building up through lots of questions and postulations and fantasies, so not one dullard reading this and owning a stack of dated, boring “rock” albums but no Stooge music can fail to comprehend, at which time I will be able to get on to the business of describing the new Stooges album. So here comes the payload. Now, to answer the last question first, because the final conclusion of all Stooge-mockers is definitely true and central to the Stooges: you’re goddam right Iggy Stooge is a damn fool. He does a lot better job of making a fool of himself on stage and vinyl than almost any other performer I’ve ever seen. That is one of his genius’s central facets.

What we need are more rock “stars” willing to make fools of themselves, absolutely jump off the deep end and make the audience embarrassed for them if necessary, so long as they have not one shred of dignity or mythic corona left. Because then the whole damn pompous edifice of this supremely ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll industry, set up to grab bucks by conning youth and encouraging fantasies of a puissant “youth culture,” would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off of it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience: “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” – he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful “Howdy-do” – or Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of supermusician ennui?

A friend and I were getting stoned and watching the TV eye’s broadcast of the Cincinnati Pop Festival the other night when a great (i.e., useless) idea struck us. Most of the show was boring, concentrating on groups like Grand Funk (endless plodding version of “Inside Looking Out” with lead singer writhing and barking and making up new lyrics like “Oh little honey I need your love so bad … c’mon, give it to me … oh, little mama” etc.) and Mountain (Felix Pappalardi spinning off endless dull solos in a flat distillation of the most overworked elements of Cream’s and Creedence’s sounds, while fat buckskinned Leslie West thumped guitar and reacted to Pappalardi’s piddle with broad, joyously agonized mugging, grimacing and grinning and nodding as if each and every note out of Papa’s bass was just blowing his mind like no music he’d ever heard before). Well, I watched all this monkey business with one eye scanning the bookshelf for a likely volume to pass the time till Iggy hit the tube, and when he did it was fine – not as good as watching Carlos Santana squint and Cunt Joe spell out “FUCK” in Woodstock, mind you, but a fine video spread anyhoo – but the part of the show that intrigued us the most came in Alice Cooper’s set (who, however gratingly shrill their amphetamine-queen hysteria, certainly can’t be accused of taking themselves seriously – come the revolution, they don’t get offed with Pappalardi and West and George Harrison and all them other cats), when Alice crouched, threw his billowy cape over his stringy mop like a monk’s cowl, exposing his hormone-plasticized torso, and crept duckwalking like some Chuck Berry from a henbane nightmare to the apron of the stage, where he produced a pocket watch, set it hypnotically in motion, and started chanting in a calm conversational tone: “Bodies … need … rest” – repeating it at same tempo till finally some (genuinely wise) wiseacre a few bodies into the crowd piped up, “So what?” Good question. What if somebody said “So what?” when Richie Havens started into his righteous “Freedom” number? Of course, the question is stupid since three dozen devout Richie Havens fans would promptly clobber the boorish loudmouth, if not off him completely (in line with the temper of the times, in which case he’d be post-mortemed a pig). But nobody gives a shit what anybody sez to A.C. least of all A.C., who was probably disappointed at not soliciting more razzberries from the peanut gallery, except that a moment later he got his crowd reaction in spades when some accomplished marksman in the mob lobbed a whole cake (or maybe it was a pie – yeah, let’s say it was a pie just for the sake of the fantasy I’m about to promulgate) which hit him square in the face. So there he was: Alice Cooper, rock star, crouched frontstage in the middle of his act with a fateful of pie and cream with clots dripping from his ears and chin. So what did he do? How did he recoup the sacred time-honored dignity of the performing artist which claims the stage as his magic force field from which to bedazzle and entertain the helpless audience? Well, he pulled a handful of pie gook out of his face and slapped it right back again, smearing it into his pores and eyes and sneaking the odd little fingerlicking taste. Again and again he repeated the gesture, smearing it in good. The audience said not another word.

The point of all this is not to elicit sympathy for Alice Cooper, but rather to point out that in a way Alice Cooper is better than Richie Havens (even though both make dull music) because at least with Alice Cooper you have the prerogative to express your reaction to his show in a creative way. Most rock stars have their audiences so cowed it’s nauseating. What blessed justice it would be if all rock stars had to contend with what A.C. elects, if it became a common practice and method of passing judgment for audiences to regularly fling pies in the faces of performers whom they thought were coming on with a load of bullshit. Because the top rockers have a mythic aura around them, the “superstar,” and that’s a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it’s the very virus that’s fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier which infests “our” culture from popstars to politics (imagine throwing a pie in the face of Eldridge Cleaver! Joan Baez!), and which the Stooges uncategorically oppose as an advance platoon in the nearing war to clear conned narcoleptic mindscreens of the earth, eventually liberating us all from basically uncreative lifestyles in which people often lacking half the talent or personality or charisma of you or I are elevated into godlike positions. Pure pomp and circumstance.

So now you see what I’m driving at, why the Stooges are vital, aside from being good musicians, which I’ll prove just as tangentially later. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself, to say, “See, this is all a sham, this whole show and all its floodlit drug-jacked realer-than-life trappings, and the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing.” Because it doesn’t. The Stooges have that kind of courage, but few other performers do. Jim Morrison, of late – how inspiring to see the onetime atropine-eyed Byronic S&M Lizard King come clean stumbling around the stage with a Colt 45 in hand and finally wave his dong at the teeny minions who came there to see him hold both it and his gut in and give them some more vivid production which communicated nothing real but suggested everything a fertile pube brain could dredge up! Morrison, def, does not get a pie in the face! He ‘fessed up! And even old John Lennon, who for a whole qualified for the first and biggest pie (to drown him and Yoko both in slush as ersatz as that which they originally excreted on the entire Western world), has set such a consistent record for absurd self-parody above and beyond the needs of the revolution (like saying, “I gave back the MBE also because ‘Cold Turkey’ was slipping down the charts” – a fine gesture. We won’t forget it later, either) that he too qualifies for at least a year’s moratorium from the creem guerrillas. But then there’s all those other people – George Harrison (a giant pie stuffed with the works of Manly P. Hall) and that infernal snob McCartney and those radical dilettante capitalist pigs like Jefferson Airplane (it’s all right to be a honky, in fact all the Marxists are due for some pies in pronto priority, but to wit on all that bread singin’ bout bein’ an outlaw when yer most scurrilous illegal set is ripping off lyrics from poor old A.A. Milne and struggling sci-fi hacks, wa’al, the Creem Committee don’t cotton to that, neighbor).

Similarly, Mick Jagger gets immediate pie-ority as a fake moneybags revolutionary, and in general for acting smarter and hipper and like more of a cultural and fashion arbiter than he really is. If Jesus had been at Altamont, they would have crucified him, but if Mick Jagger makes me wait forty-five minutes while he primps and stones up in his dressing room one more time and then blames it on some poor menial instrument mover, then me and the corps are goin’ stage ward with both tins blazing when he does show his fish-eyed mug. And he’s far from the worst offender – in fact, as a performing artist, he’s one of the least offensive around – his show, with its leers and minces has always been outrageous and foolish and absurd and transcendentally arrogant, yet pretentious only in the best possible way, a spastic flap-lipped tornado writhing from here to a million steaming snatches and beyond in one undifferentiated erogenous mass, a mess and a spectacle all at the same time. You won’t catch Mick Jagger lost in solemn grimaces of artistic angst, no sir! So he really is almost as good as the Stooges, in fact anticipated them, but I’d still hate to think of his tantrum if some grinning geek from down in the street tried to commandeer the sacred stage where he jerks out and rips off his rushes. In that sense, his whole show is another anachronism, though nowhere near as fossilized as most other rock acts, who will drown in creem and crust before we’re through. The plain fact is that 99% of popstars do not have the true charisma, style or stature to hold their bastion (Bastille) stage without the artificial support they’ve traditionally enjoyed. Most of them, were they splat in the kisser with a pie or confronted with an audience composed of sane people demanding calmly (crude militant bullshit is out), “What the fuck do you think you are doing? Just what is all this shit?” – most of your current “phenomenons,” “heroes” and “artists” would just fold up a stupefied loss, temperamentally incapable (by virtue of the debilitating spoiled-brat life they’ve been living, even if they ever had any real pizazz in the first place – the oppressor is fat and weak, brothers!) of dealing with their constituency of wised-up marks on a one-to-one basis. They simply don’t have enough personality, enough brains or enough guts, your average popstar being neither very bright nor very aware of much that goes on outside his own glittering substratum, half lodged in fantasy, where ego and preening vanity are overfed and corrode substance like a constant diet of cocaine.

But the Stooges are one band that does have the strength to meet the audience on its own terms, no matter what manner of devilish bullshit that audience might think up (although they are usually too cowed by Ig’s psychically pugnacious assertiveness to do anything but gape and cringe slightly, snickering later on the drive home).

Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting affront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what’s what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled stranger who’re seldom able to stare him down. It’s your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense Ig is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.

Here’s this smug post-hippie audience, supposedly so loose, liberated, righteous and ravenous, the anarchic terror of middle American insomnia. These are the folks that’re always saying: “Someday, somebody’s gonna just bust that fucked-up punk right in the chops!” And how many times have you heard people say of bands: “Man, what a shuck! I could get up there and cut that shit.”

Well, here’s your chance. The Stooge act is wide open. Do your worst, People, falsify Iggy and the Stooges, get your kicks and buffs. It’s your night!

No takers. They sit there, wide-eyed vegetative Wowers or sullen in a carapace of Cool, afraid or unable to react, to get out there in that arena which is nothing more than life, most often too cowed to even hurl a disappointing hoot stageward. And that is why most rock bands are so soporfically lazy these days, and also why the Stooges, and any other band that challenges its audience, are the answer. Power doesn’t go to the people, it comes from them, and when the people have gotten this passive nothing short of electroshock and personal exorcism will jolt them and rock them into some kind of fiercely healthy interaction.