The Books: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll; “Do the Godz Speak Esperanto?”, 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

Bangs’ 1971 essay “Do the Godz Speak Esperanto?” begins as a tribute to ESP Records, a small New York label which put out weird uncommercial records, jazz and random noise, and bands no one else would sign. They appear to be still kicking, and their tagline on their website is “You’ve never heard such sounds in your life.” Well, back in 1971, Lester Bangs would have agreed. One of the things you feel so strongly in Bangs’ work is the feel of the time: If you heard a record once that you loved, and it was on some small label and got no radio play, you would have to scour second-hand bins throughout the land in order to find it again. I’m old enough that I remember such things in terms of books. I had a long list of “books to keep an eye out for”, any time I went to the Strand, or a flea market, or any secondhand book shop in general. And I would always check. Because there was no Amazon, there was no Internet. You were on your own with your memories, and you hoped that you would trip over one of those gems from your past – but you had to be ready for it. The same was true for film critics in the days before VCRs. You had to have a photographic memory. If you saw “Citizen Kane”, it was probably once, at an art house, 20 years before, so you had to be able to memorize it, download it into your brain. You couldn’t go back and look at it for details. It would be lost. It had to stay in your brain intact.

So Bangs rhapsodizes about ESP Records. They put out an album called “Sing Along in Esperanto”, which gives the essay its title. But what he really wants to talk about, what he really wants to praise, is the New York band The Godz, who released a couple of albums on the ESP label.

In typical Bangs fashion, he praises in terms that make you wonder if he’s being serious. “It was so awful I dug it!” is one example from the essay below.

But he couldn’t get it out of his head. He listened to it again. And again. Until finally he realized that this was a great rock ‘n’ roll album, and he began to evangelize to his friends about it.

Although Lester Bangs clearly appreciated and loved good musicianship (his essays on Miles Davis shows that), he was frustrated at the time with bands being praised for their musicianship, because pretty notes and careful composing is not what rock ‘n’ roll had ever been about, and so the wrong cream was rising to the top: glorified studio musicians who knew their way around a keyboard, but did not have the heart of rock and roll still beating in their chests. The Godz were a band who started on a random day, banging drums, smoking joints and then decided to put out a record, even though they didn’t know how to play. Lester Bangs was like, “FUCK YEAH.”

The album was ignored by the music press, except for a couple of pieces commenting on the “incompetence” of the musicians, which, for Lester, was part of the beauty of it.

One of the things I love in the following excerpt is Lester Bangs’ point about apple pie and America and good old rock ‘n roll. This is one of the things his contemporaries often missed, or if they perceived it, shamed/scorned it. This was the late 60s, early 70s, remember, when to be intelligent meant you had to despise The Man and The Establishment and America and all that that signifies. I’m not saying Lester Bangs was a rabid patriot, but he understood that America being the birthplace of all of this upheaval, and that rock ‘n roll stars come from all kinds of backgrounds, not just gritty New York street backgrounds with hep-cat drug-user cred and all that … that a strong strain in any good rock band may very well have to do with “corny” things like love and Mom’s cooking and driving your wheels around on a Saturday night with your friends. Innocence, in other words. The innocence of the American dream, the innocence of love. It’s there, even in some of the downiest dirtiest blues songs, albeit inverted. Lester Bangs, above all else, hated posers, hated people who ignored where they came from, their own innocence, in order to seem cool and “over it” to their peers. He thought that it was that very attitude, represented by David Bowie (a hero of Bangs’ – and Bangs was very hard on his heroes) and others he calls out, that was killing the music industry, killing music in general. Killing our ability to perceive one another, be in one another’s presence in any meaningful way.

So yeah, be incompetent with your instruments. Sing about high school and prom dates. But be HONEST, whatever it is you’re doing. The Godz were honest.

Exhibit A (a song Bangs discusses in the excerpt below):

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

One thing to be said about them is that they may well be the most inept band I’ve ever heard. I’d almost grant out of hand that they’re the most inept recording band I’ve ever heard. And that they are the most inept band with three albums to their credit, I cannot deny. Why have they made three albums when so many great, talented, professional, musicianly bands get dumped unceremoniously after one? Because the Godz are brilliant, that’s why, and most talented professional musicianly bands are stupid and visionless and exactly alike. Also, perhaps, because most TPMBs don’t record for ESP.

So, the Godz are inept. They are also one of the most interesting bands to have survived from the first petal-kissing heydaze of Lovedelia to (presumably) the schizoid present. When I first saw their first album, Contact High, I jumped for joy. A new monster from ESP! Then I played it and thought, “Who the fuck do these guys think they’re kidding? This is the worst record I ever heard!” And after that I went around for about a year and a half assuring everybody that no matter what kind of atrocity tales they could relate I knew what the absolute worst record in history was because I’d heard it! But somehow the memory of that idiot caterwauling kept following me around like the shade of a vision, and one day in 1968 when I saw it remaindered I grabbed and bought it. Man, was it awful! It was so awful I dug it! Not like so-bad-it’s-good or any of that camp-kitsch shit – the Godz were onto something. I took it over to my nephew’s and he looked at it and said, “How’s this?” And I positively beamed, “Oh, man, is that ever lousy, it gets stars for lousiness!”

“Oh yeah?” he said, getting all excited. “Let’s play it!” After all, which would you rather audition first: Super Session and the new Butterfield album, or something that gets stars for lousiness?

Contact High, though nowhere near the Wagnerian grandeur of the Fugs, is nevertheless an album like no other before or since. I know, I can hear you snide simps who’d rather listen to what you’d like to call “real music” all out there snorting: “Yeah, because nobody else would wanta do something like that!” And you’re right. Most people are too stupid! They’d rather go learn Eric Clapton riffs. But the fact remains that the Godz did it and nobody else, and the record lives as an entity unto itself.

As such it is simultaneously a perfect artifact of New York in its period, and probably the Godz’ finest album. The only non-snazz aspect of the set is the cornball liner notes by one Marc Crawford: “This is the Godz’ truth … by four New Yorkers, who don’t give a good God-damn whether you dig it or not … But if you want to hear about love and the lack of it by victims unashamed, about hate and too much of it in the world … it is a new, honest, emotion-laden telling-it-like-I-feel-it kind of music, which is … very American, Lyndon Johnson and the critics notwithstanding … They don’t dig mom’s apple pie and I’ve never seen them in church on Sunday.”

Boy, they used to drag poor ole LBJ into everything. I bet if he was in now and some cat like David Crosby made a really fucked album and got called on it, he’d probably say that he was so preoccupied by Lyndy’s machinations that he couldn’t think straight. I don’t think the Godz would ever come on so defensive. They may not care whether you like it, but they know their music is great, and their whole oeuvre radiates that kind of positive vitality. Marc Crawford probably secretly thought it was shit, himself, superpseudointellectual radiclib that he reeks of. What’s more, the Godz don’t sing about hate or lack of love, because they know there’s too much negativism in the world already; not only that, I bet they do like mom’s apple pie and mom too because they’re too All-American not to. How could a real rock ‘n’ roller not like mom’s apple pie for cryin’ out loud? And the same goes for Church on Sunday – why’n the fuck d’ya think they called themselves the Godz? No, the Godz song is a joyous song of praise for the sun and the moon and all that lives between them.

Their first album, for instance, is a series of elemental celebrations, beginning with “Come On, Little Girl, Turn On,” a relatively lengthy (by Contact High‘s standards – I think the whole album’s only about twenty-one minutes long – but then why pad out a perfect production with a bunch of draggy filler?) song exhorting a sweet child of the city to partake of the sacrament for three whole minutes. With Jay Dillon’s great psaltery (ain’t that some kind of autoharp?), Jim McCarthy’s whinnying harmonica, and the generally rambunctious vocal, the song could hardly miss, even if its form is a bit anachronistic in terms of the Godz’ real symphonies.

A word should be said about the instrumentation and all that technical folderol. All of them sing, Dillon just plays psaltery here although he’ll add piano and organ on Godz Two, but Larry Kessler doubles on bass and violin (viola later). A John Cale he’s not – in fact he probably never had a less – in fact, he may never have practiced – but he sure can make that fiddle sing sassy! “Squeak” is his magnus opus, a grinding, grunging violin solo that sounds like he’s jamming a non-resined bow on the strings so hard they’ll buckling against the wood, so you get that great organic sawing creak. I once borrowed a violin from a friend for a few days; I used to play it by holding the bow still and moving the fiddle lightning-fast across it. I’m left-handed. After a while I was even better than Larry, but I never learned his sense of economy – he can grind one note till it sounds like Beethoven, but I’m always sawing all over the damn thing. Just the rambunctiousness of a beginner, I guess.

Jim McCarthy is the guitarist, but he also doubles on plastic flute and harmonica, both of which I play. As a matter of fact, I’m better than him, too, but I still really dig his work – I only wish I could sit in sometime. On the only non-original on the album, Hank William’s “May You Be Alone,” he fills in beautifully behind the straight shit-kicker vocal with a marvelous series of Ayler-like plastic flute flurries that squiggle off in all directions yet always remain absolutely appropriate. In Godz music, it’s almost impossible to play a wrong note. So what’s the point, you say, why can’t anybody play music like that, why can’t you or I? What makes them so special?

Well, theoretically, anybody can play like that, but in actual practice, it just ain’t so. Most people would be too stultified – after all, what’s the point of doing it if anybody can? – and as for you, you probably ain’t got the balls to do it, and even if you did, you’d never carry it through like a true Godzly musical maniac must to qualify. You’d just pick it up and tootle a few bars to prove something, and that’s entirely different. Me, I could do it because I have been years, even before I heard of the Godz. All it takes is insane persistence and a total disregard for everything but getting that yawp out of you if you gotta howl at the moon, and obviously most folks aren’t gonna howl at the moon just to prove a point.

But the Godz would! And not to prove a point, but because they like howling at the moon! Which is what sets them apart.