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
London calling … and Lester answered.
It was the 1970s, and disco reigned supreme, and Lester Bangs was disenchanted with the music scene and with American culture in general. The giants he had looked up to – Iggy Stooge and Richard Hell and Lou Reed – were cavorting with Bowie and the other Limeys, and the Rolling Stones were holed up in their own stardom, and Lester just did not like the way the wind was blowing. The bands coming up now were all just pale imitations and it was making him a curmudgeon. Well, he already was a curmudgeon. He was born a curmudgeon. Maybe that’s what happens when you have a broad outlook, when you understand that Now is not necessarily the best, which is the attitude of most youthful people. But, hell, I grew up watching black and white movies, and I knew very early that Star Wars was not the best movie ever made, because I had seen movies from the 30s and 40s, and while I could appreciate the New, I certainly didn’t dis the Old. Having that perspective can make you cranky, no matter how young you are. Lester Bangs could be a scold, even in a short little record review. He wanted artists to stop being such assholes, he wanted them to be REAL.
He wrote an obit for Sid Vicious (and he had covered the murder of Nancy for the Village Voice), and he lets Sid and the Sex Pistols have it. The way he saw it was: the Sex Pistols were presenting a negative view of life, and Lester didn’t disagree. Life in many ways sucked. But how about presenting an alternative? How about, through your music, pointing the way to where we should be going? That’s what he felt in all good rock music, and he didn’t feel it in the Sex Pistols. He felt just a bunch of punks being jerks to their fans and jerks to everyone. Is that a model for life? Lester didn’t think so. He wanted music that helped us to connect, helped us to BE with one another, even if it was aggressive and dark, and he didn’t see that going on in the Sex Pistols.
But the Clash was another story.
Lester traveled to England to bum around with the Clash for a week or so, hanging out and seeing their shows. Lester out of his comfort zone always brought interesting results. The press the Clash was getting at the time was rather of the “Oooh, these guys are scary” brand. And the mohawks and the piercings … Why were these people DEFACING themselves like this? And what was with their fans? Who slammed into each other during Clash shows? It was being presented as the end of the world, a sort of Clockwork Orange mindset that was deeply frightening. Of course that was all part of the publicity machine going on, but Lester wanted to go see it for himself. Were these guys promoting anarchy? Were these guys promoting violence? Or was something else going on?
This piece (from 1977) is quite long and was originally published in two installments; it is a tour diary, his observations of 5 days or so hanging out with the Clash and their fans. What Lester saw was not what he expected. He found the band members to be sweet and considerate young men, solicitous towards their fans, letting them travel around with them, making sure they had a room to crash in. The vibe of the whole scene was gentle and enthusiastic, and while Lester loved those dark rock gods like Lou Reed, he also just wished that human beings were more GENTLE with one another, dammit, and he also didn’t want to see an entire generation check out into an “I’m so jaded and over it” mindset. He didn’t see that going on at all with the Clash, and that is the theme of the piece, how pleasantly surprised he was by the entire “scene” over there in England.
He says that the Clash could act as a “model for a New Society”, and because he’s Lester, you know he’s serious. Or, serious in the moment he was writing those lines. He looked around him and saw kids in mohawks slamming into one another in music clubs, and he also saw their sweetness. He observed the members of the band, and there were moments where they seemed to deny their responsibility to what was happening. In other words, if you’re gonna wear a mohawk, then MEAN IT. Don’t do it because everyone else is doing it, because that is cowardly and that is not what we are about. But if you MEAN IT, then you have a spot underneath our tent with us. And so, to Lester, he saw in this a dedication to being Real. That the look and feel of the Clash was organic, not fashionable. It represented hope for the future. Especially if his current rock gods were glamming out under the influence of David Bowie and suddenly doing stuff to seem relevant and hip or whatever the hell was going on there.
Again, one has to factor in Lester Bangs’ disenchantment with basically all of culture at that moment to get where he is coming from in regards to The Clash. You feel his relief, his almost childlike relief when he realizes, “These guys MEAN this. This is not an act.”
I love the Clash. I still remember pogo-ing around like a lunatic at high school dances to “London Calling”, an odd image when you consider what the song is about, and who I was, who we all were who were into them. And the hair still rises on my neck when I hear the opening of “London Calling”. It is a call to arms, a call to something, anyway. It’s in the music. It IS frightening. It MEANS it.
I also love them for this. That album cover is a clear positioning of themselves, a clear announcement of intent, the ballpark they wanted to be in.
Lester says straight up at the beginning of the piece, “I know jack-shit about the English class system.” But what he did know was music and culture. The piece ends with him talking to a fan who suddenly reveals she’s a grade school teacher, and Lester, watching her jump away across the dance floor, is blown away. There’s a naiveté in Lester: you get the sense he’s being hanging out in downtown New York for too long. Big world out there. The people who flock to CBGB’s are not the only people in the world. And the Clash is bigger than just their regular fan base, the kids with mohawks and zippers inlaid in their cheeks. If this music is reaching a small-town elementary school teacher, then yes, there is hope for society.
Here’s an excerpt.
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll
Having bummed out almost the entire population of one room, I took my show into another: the bar, where I sat down at a table with Ellie and Paul Simonon and started in on them. Paul gets up and walks out. Ellie says, “Lester, you look a little tired. Are you sure you want another lager…?”
Later I am out in the lobby with the rest of them again, in a state not far from walking coma, when Mick gestured at a teenage fan sitting there and said, “Lester, my room is full tonight, can Adrian stay with you?”
I finally freaked. Here I was, stuck in the middle of a dying nation with all these funny looking children who didn’t even realize the world was coming to an end, and now on top of everything else they expected me to turn my room into a hippie crash pad! I surmised through all my confusion that some monstrous joke was being played on me, so I got testy about it. Mick repeated the request and finally I said that Adrian could maybe stay but he would have to go to the house phone, call my hotel and see if there was room. So the poor humiliated kid did just that while an embarrassed if not downright creepy silence fell over the room and Mick stared at me in shock, as if he had never seen this particular species of so-called human before.
Poor Adrian came back saying there was indeed room, so I grudgingly assented, and back to the hotel we went. The next morning when I was in a more sober if still jet-lagged frame of mind, he showed me a copy of his Clash fanzine, 48 Thrills, which I bought for 20p, and in the course of breakfast conversation I learned that the Clash made a regular practice of inviting their fans back from the gigs with them, and then go so far as to let them sleep on the floors of their rooms.
Now, dear reader, I don’t know how much time you may have actually spent around big time rock ‘n’ roll bands – you may not think so, but the less the luckier you are in most cases – but let me assure you that the way the Clash treat their fans falls so far outside the normal run of these things as to be outright revolutionary. I’m going to say it and I’m going to say it slow: most rockstars are goddamn pigs who have the usual burly corps of hired thugs to keep the fans away from them at all costs, excepting the usual select contingent of lucky (?) nubiles who they’ll maybe deign to allow up to their rooms for the privilege of sucking on their coveted dangers, after which often as not they get pitched out into the streets to find their way home without even carfare. The whole thing is sick to the marrow, and I simply could not believe that any band, especially one as musically brutal as the Clash, could depart so far from this fetid norm.
I mentioned it to Mick in the van that day en route to Cardiff, also by way of making some kind of amends for my own behavior. “Listen, man, I’ve just got to say that I really respect you … I mean, I had no idea that any group could be as good to its fans as this . . . .”
He just laughed. “Oh, so is that gonna be the hook for your story, then?”
And that for me is the essence of the Clash’s greatness, over and beyond their music, why I fell in love with them, why it wasn’t necessary to do any boring interviews with them about politics or the class system or any of that because here at last is a band which not only preaches something good but practices it as well, that instead of talking about changes in social behavior puts the model of a truly egalitarian society into practice in their own conduct.
The fact that Mick would make a joke out of it only shows how far they’re going towards the realization of all the hopes we ever had about rock ‘n’ roll as utopian dream – because if rock ‘n’ roll is truly the democratic art form, then the democracy has got to begin at home, that is the everlasting and totally disgusting walls between artists and audience must come down, elitism must perish, the “stars” have got to be humanized, demythologized, and the audience has got to be treated with more respect. Otherwise it’s all a shuck, a ripoff, and the music is as dead as the Stones’ and Led Zep’s has become.
It’s no news by now that the reasons most of rock’s establishment have dried up creatively is that they’ve cut themselves off from the real world of everyday experience as exemplified by their fans. The ultimate question is how long a group like the Clash can continue to practice total egalitarianism in the face of mushrooming popularity. Must the walls go up inevitably, eventually, and if so when? Groups like the Grateful Dead have practiced the free-access principle at least in the past, but the Dead never had the glamour which, whether they like it or not (and I’d bet money they do) the Clash are saddled with – I mean, not for nothing does Mick Jones resemble a young and already slightly dissipated Keith Richards – beside which the Dead aren’t really a rock ‘n’ roll band and the Clash are nothing else but. And just like Mick said to me the first night, don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ‘n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society . . . I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for a prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since. And perhaps that nothing in the world ever seemed to hold even this much promise.
It may look like I make too much of all this. We could leave all significance at the picture of Mick Jones just a hot guitarist in a white jumpsuit and a rock ‘n’ roll kid on the road obviously having the time of his life and all political pretensions be damned, but still there is a mood around the Clash, call it whatever you want, that is positive in a way I’ve never sensed around almost any other band, and I’ve been around most of them. Something unpretentiously moral, and something both self-affirming and life-affirming – as opposed, say, to the simple ruthless hedonism and avarice of so many superstars, or the grim tautlipped monomaniacal ambition of most of the pretenders to their thrones.
What he said.
Ibid.