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
Along with Lester’s obituary for Elvis, this is probably his most famous piece. His “feud” with Lou Reed come to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex here, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a complex and devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. These guys were his heroes, and he never forgot that, but he also was annoyed by the layers of interference between the stars and regular guys like him. The hoops you had to jump through to even get to the interview process, the press people, the handlers, the people hovering around the outskirts of the interview, making sure Lester didn’t say anything upsetting. Lester could see all this in operation in the music industry and he hated it. Why did musicians do this? Why did they armor up, against everything they stood for? Why do they suddenly act like they’re too good to hang out? Are they “above” answering questions?
You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise.
Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. Or Keith Richards. Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 15 or something like that that he would die if he kept it up. And he did. He RACED to the bottom, his addiction was that advanced.
Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene (I suppose of any scene), and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take, Lou as the leader and Lester the submissive acolyte. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is BORED by polite chit-chat. This is LOU REED I’m talking to, I gotta get him to say some stuff, so let me be as rude as I can, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes; this resentment was in full swing during this interview.
I read this and want to go home and take a shower and a nap. I want to tell everyone to stop staying up all night, and stop popping bennies. I want to make them dry out. It makes me NERVOUS. Music writing today does not sound like this. Music writing of any day. This was published in Creem in 1975 and was instantly notorious. It was one of the many many many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. He was not alone. Lou Reed was his hero. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. It was one of Lester’s favorite albums, but he had to just keep writing about it in order to understand it, to be with it. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BULL. SHIT. shall we” – he is extremely obnoxious. But, if I can make a guess, and back to my original point, he hated the armory of stardom, and he hated these downtown New York guys suddenly acting all rock star-ish and standoffish, and maybe if he lobbed obnoxious bombs in their path it would shake them out of complacency.
As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. I mean, that’s what I gather from reading this piece, which can only be understood fully if you preface it with the thought: Everyone Here Is On Drugs.
But drugs notwithstanding, both make a lot of sense, and I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester.
And one other thing: with all of the drunken shenanigans, Lester Bangs was a deeply moral writer. He’s almost a fuddy-duddy, in fact. He wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle. Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct and he feels no responsibility for it. But Lester isn’t having any of it. Remember: he, too, was following Lou Reed’s lead, even down to the sunglasses he wore. Was he trying to say to Lou Reed, “YOU made me act like this. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for it.” It’s kind of like the press holding Marilyn Manson to account for the Trench Coat Mafia, and there are countless other examples. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture, and Lou Reed was the Grand Pooh-bah.
The piece is long. Here’s just one excerpt. Also: “Insectival”, Lester?
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll
I figured I’d better change the subject. Behind Lou’s bed was a cassette-deck emanating an endless stream of the kind of funky synthesizer Muzac that Herbie Hancock snores up. “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?”
“That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.”
“I’m telling you that–”
“You don’t know, you’ve never listened.”
“– that Bowie” — and here I began to sing in loud Ezio Pinza baritone – “ripped off all his shit that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!”
“What does Iggy have to do with it?”
“You were the originals!”
“The original what?”
I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with a totally unexpected blast at the Pop: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is … stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while … I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and he was never any good anyway….”
Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin. I decided that I’d had enough of this horseshit, so I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?”
He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rap Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. All speedfreaks are liars, anybody that keeps their mouth open that much can’t tell the truth all the time or they’d run out of things to say. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do – hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams …?”
The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, shit, man!”
“Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. Closing in for the kill. Show you up, punk. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself. You were probably stupid and didn’t even put ’em through cotton. You could have gotten gangrene that way …”
Then he’s pressing me again, playing dirty. “What’s an Obetrol?”
I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood or Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time! The first time–”
“What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone, for the fifteenth time. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out.
But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.”
The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some cake paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s A-heads and there’s speedfreaks … Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with cake paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of–”
“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?”
“No … You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. Plus you’re poor. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…”
“The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting an old Ralph J. Gleeson column for some reason. I was getting a little dazed.
“No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…”
I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously macho Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album, which I had been wearing all evening] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Focus in on shriveled body sprawled on the bed facing me with Thing behind him staring at beehives on the moon, Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day with telephone wires humming overhead, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months.
“Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?”
He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, shook his head.
“Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”
“That’s three percent out of a hundred songs.”
“Like with all this decadence and glitter shit – none of it would have happened if not for you, and yet I wonder if you –”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.”
“What’s decadent about that?”
“Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.”
“You. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just fulla shit. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.”
I let it pass. The true artist does not stoop to respond in kind to jibes from an old con. But he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated, no, stood for and exploited, for so many years. It was like seeing a dinosaur retreating into an ice cave. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance and apparently ready to clean up as much of act’s exoskeleton as it took to hit the big time (But you shoot up onstage. But it’s only a rock ‘n’ roll show. This isn’t Altomont. Or the Exploding Plastic Inevitable), he was brushing it all away like dandruff off his black street-punk T-shirt. “I dismissed decadence when I did ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” Grand sweeping statements like this are the kind of bullshit to which this pop star is particularly prone. Like all the rest of them, I guess.
“Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….”
Barbara interrupted, “Lou … it’s getting late.”
Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He was a petulant kid, up past bedtime, not exactly whiny, still insectival, but also blatantly pampered, cajoled, looked after, leashed, nursed, checked unless he chose to make a scene and possibly blow his cool. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.”
“But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.”
“Oh,” replied Lou, hardy old bastard, blow winds blow and all that, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album.
Jesus.
How exhausting must it have been for Barbera or anyone else listening to this interview? I see want you mean about needing a nap. Funny as shit tho
You’re right. It’s hilarious.
Insectival?? Why does that make me laugh so hard? And comparing Lou Reed’s eyes to copper coins in desert sands with telephone wires above? What??
I know! I read this when it came out and I could not stop laughing. I still can’t. Bangs had a way of describing Lou, that was like no other.
Actually, his eyes were kind of like copper pennies. Strangely I know what he means.
// Bangs had a way of describing Lou, that was like no other. //
Trying to imagine Lou Reed’s feelings being interviewed by Bangs. Like, how would he describe Bangs? Did he ever speak about it, do you know?
The Lou Reed pieces – like the Rolling Stones pieces – are documents of increasing anxiety and depression – frustration on the part of Bangs, too much emotion! He can’t let it go, whatever it is. I love that about him.