The Books: Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader; “Two Assassinations and a Speedy Retreat Into Pastoral Nostalgias”, by Lester Bangs

Next up on the essays shelf:

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, by Lester Bangs

This is the second collection of Lester Bangs’ work, this one edited by John Morthland, a friend and colleague of Bangs’. It doesn’t have the same punch that the Greil Marcus-edited Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the first collection, (excerpts here), has. Some of the pieces show Bangs’ weaknesses as a writer more than others, although there are certainly a lot of gems here, which we’ll get to. There are also excerpts (three in total) of a rambling unpublished autobiography called Drug Punk that Lester wrote while he was in high school. He was also (apparently) working on a novel when he died, and there are some excerpts from that in Psychotic Reactions as well as here, but personally I feel that his high school work, fragmented as it is, is better. It’s working harder, it’s more fucked up (if that is possible), and there is an idealism there, drowned already in booze and pills, but an idealism that can’t be killed. Also, the dude was 16 when he was writing all this.

Your mileage may vary. There’s a piece here on Black Sabbath which is one of the finest things I’ve read on them. Bangs looks at the band from a Catholic perspective, which is pretty interesting. His piece here on Captain Beefheart is a classic. I found the essay on his trip to Jamaica and his interview with Bob Marley mildly entertaining but way too long. Regardless, he’s one of those writers that has a startlingly awesome sentence on almost every page, so it’s worth it to wade through some of this stuff. I imagine you would have to really really be a Lester Bangs fan to make it through his teenage book. I consider myself a fan. So I’ll post some excerpts.

The following “chapter”, or “fragment” from that teenage book is called “Two Assassinations” and details a couple of days in the life of teenage Lester and his girlfriend Andy. It is the beginning of June 1968. Valerie Solanis shot Andy Warhol on June 3, and Robert Kennedy was gunned down on June 6. These two “assassinations” (one attempted, one completed) are the context for a freaked-out Lester to wonder what the world is coming to. And, of course, two months earlier, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. 1968 was an annus horribilis if there ever was one.

Lester Bangs, at this point in his life, was a kid living in California. He had a picture of Andy Warhol on his wall, and he found the man strange and yet compelling. The blank-ness of him. Maybe he would get to New York some day.

And before he could process what the hell was going on with this strange blank-eyed icon who seemed to represent something to him, Robert Kennedy was shot, and his girlfriend Andy was screaming and crying on the phone, and the two of them huddled together waiting for more news as it seemed the entire world fell apart.

Here’s an excerpt. You can tell that teenage Lester has already hit the ground running after reading Kerouac and Salinger. He’s also already a full-blown speed freak. Racist epithets are included, so consider yourself warned.

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, “Two Assassinations and a Speedy Retreat Into Pastoral Nostalgias” by Lester Bangs

Andy called me to report through tears that Senator Kennedy was still on the operating table, seven hours since the shooting, she says they got him through the shoulder, neck, and one big corner clipped off the skull behind an ear, three bullets through the smiling young presidential hopeful, and she has sat all night in front of the TV speeding and crying, while I’ve sat puffing panting with the sustained sex joy of plumbing this my Mainline, jugular vein of memories, convictions of the head and reachings-out of heart all years for some crystalline totality, and this is it, I can’t cry this morning, even though America is disintegrating with a rapidity that’s even shocking some of the dissidents, with an immutable beam-cracking ruination exceeding the wildest projections of those wooly insurgents America internalized from Tom Paine Franklin and the rest, as I feel the total tornado of the cosmos whirling ’round me “like a Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath,” as all the Grossmont Junior College speakers used to say muckraking at tournaments until poor wop Jacuzzi’s millions-maker became a cliche representing the very epitome of our American “decadence,” I feel ecstatic chills swirling up and pouring down my limbs and trunk as a day and night of methedrine slowly flakes from me like dried paint flakes from the barnacled bow of a gargantuan ocean liner, all night these mounting hours Senator Robert Kennedy slowly dying on L.A. operating table of sterile stainless steel I’ve been plumbing this Mainline’s depths, new literature aborning in here my recent speed sessions, when that methedrine’s in my blood and that blood is in my head, something new, I keep returning in allusions to the Velvet Underground, no, specifically, Lou Reed, mind made it out of New York maelstrom halfway intact, now I pick up his messages thanx to the R&R Renaissance the massive push of record companies hustling like mad beetles after hog-slopping troughs brimful of dollar bills, remember Grand Guy Grand’s trick and people diving shamelessly into the massive vat of shit and piss and blood and pus and snot and come etc. after seasoning of U.S. greenbacks in the filth, everything flows in and lawd we’re all sittin’ pretty have been how long now? But confidentially although it shore aint no secret I feel the lid’s about to blow. Driving Andy to school. Suddenly, after half our transit done in silence, she says, “America is disintegrating, Les.”

“I know it,” I say. “I’ve known it for a long time . . . . All anybody has had to do for the past year or so was read the editorials in magazines like Life, or the Post, and they would’ve known the whole thing was falling apart.” When sheets like that start predicting imminent apocalypse and monstrous social earthquakes, you know the keg’s about to blow, because those mags are part of the Greater American Mainline at present, they shoot right out to reach in one way or another a majority of the populace every week, and the last thing they want to do is alarm Mr. and Mrs. America unnecessarily, to set the reactionaries to cleaning their ’76 muskets or alarm the milk-and-sports-page millions securely ensconced in their stucco dugouts with unfounded rumors of indigenous explosions expected to rip out the quiet keep-off-the-grass parks, the shady cement sidewalks leaf strewn cross the illusions of permanence in the initials of lovers now friends walking precincts on Desenex feet and varicose veins for the Republican party and the Next President of the United States (as is obvious by today, since last night) Richard M. Nixon, no, these serene town centers proudly perpetuating quiet cracker images from 1853 must not be torn up madly out of that storied earth like the vertebrae of some ironically smiling Jesus of brilliantine halo, after all, this isn’t France!

I said to Andy that I’d foreseen the seam-ripping of America’s frayed old frock coat, and I added, “I supposed it couldn’t be otherwise …” and she said “Democracy won’t work, it’s a shame but it just won’t work,” and I said, “The reason it’s falling apart this way is that the people of America have been living in the past too long … For too long we’ve broadcasted the American Dream on all networks as gospel and everybody’s been content … living in the past … The nation is falling now because its people haven’t been able to face it when the granite thunderbolt plows square into their upper plates, that the American Dream is only a dream, and that the American Reality is imperative, a powder-keg situation.”

She started crying again. I put my hand on hers where it lay on the seat and she pulled it away abruptly, with the first touch. “Oh, don’t try to comfort me, you. I know that you don’t understand … it’s the people like you … and that shit you read –”

“You mean the Free Press, and like that?”

“That crap, that filthy lying crap, and the crap those Right-Wingers put out, that’s what’s destroyed America!”

I won’t deny it, for all I know she’s pretty right, in fact I’m sure she is, those hysterical paranoid Left-er New Left idiots are just as much to blame as anybody. America, which is essentially our universe, is having earthquake-sized convulsions, choking, spitting up blood, reeling dizzily into some crumpling limp falldown of terminal disease, weaving back and forth on its knees moaning and clutching itself tightly in one wounded area after another, raving like a wood-grain-alcoholic crashing in the Bowery on his Last Go-Round, and I don’t have any answers, or even very many opinions right now, seems like all the factions in the brawl are starting to look like the very thing they’re opposing so desperately, so that even semi lucid and halfway rational New Leftists who can see in reasonably complete clarity the disastrous turn their politics and political organizations down to the last one have taken, must still sit tight keep their chops gritted and be ready for the impending fight, no matter what the consequences, perhaps because they’ve never really conceived of America falling into a continent of burning junk piles and primitive local control by brute force, meaning that perhaps they’re just bored with the same old scene, day after day, month after month, everything secure, bolted down, in order, safe for the cowering rodent-citizenry of elm-lined tract homes, maybe these cats just wanta see the entire structure fall or at least get shaken to its quick for once simply because it’s never happened before and, you know, man, like with their Che caps and half-ass homemade Mollies, why, they’re a Revolutionary Insurgent Liberation Army, can-you-dig-it?, ready to get out there by God and do some fucking Liberating! No matter if the cat’s never seen blood in his life before outside the movies, man, he will fight with the strength of twenty flabby imperialist racist middle-class WASP head of human cattle because he has the pure true Fire in his heart, and not only that he’s taken lots of acid! He’s strong! No, man, he sure ain’t gonna turn tail and run when he charges toward hand-grenade blasts which blow small bits of the flesh and blood and entrails of a woman and her three small children his way, what the fuck, what’s a little splatter of blood and guts on your sleeve?, and he won’t run when the cops come in with their guns blazing or even machine guns turning slowly in that street storefront wall to storefront wall; but he MAY run when he walks up to some big Jimmy Brown Quarterback-type black Militant spade boppin’ down the street of smoke and fire and death, and he sez, “Hey, man, whaddya say, ain’t the revolution outasight, how about, hey you want some grass?” and that big spade just slowly swivels his pumpkin-size head to take in this stupid eager-faced Honkey Hippy coming on like such a White Tom and pretty soon the spade sez: “Split, what boy, fo’ ah bus’ yo’ hair.” Real calm but real obvious in his sincerity too, just kinda standin’ there all lordly and amused hands on his hips legs spread and smilin’ easy but radiating a blistering solid blast of white hot hate out from his red eyes through those impenetrable shades designed to tell the person confronted nothing at all. Now if you think that white ex-Love neo-Political Longhair cat is gonna stand there and try to reason that thing out with that big spade, you’re just plain stupid, as stupid as ninety percent of the Hip and New Left Community (and I mean those that’ve been around long enough that they should know better, not these little high school punks just picked up on grass & acid last month) has gotten right now. And anybody lets themselves get that stupid is doubly dangerous: dangerous first to themselves, because they’re liable to get their heads busted, and dangerous to every single one of the rest of us, as dangerous as Lyndon Johnson or (yes, perhaps this is no time to say it but it was true) Bobby Kennedy before he was short or General Hershey or J. Edgar Hoover. They are dangerous to every one of us precisely because they are at this very moment playing with fire, I mean insurrection, when they don’t have the slightest idea how to control it or what it means or even that they are exacerbating the probability that a great many of us, certainly including them, are going to experience disruptions in our lives from which we may never recover, which we may not even survive.

The shooting of Kennedy last nite was something in the way of a final straw for me. I can see the great storms coming, but at this point I’ve given up hope on finding any sort of even temporarily pacifying solution. McCarthy is almost certainly out of the Democratic running for the presidency. Humphrey will most probably run against Nixon, & the latter will almost certainly win. Whatever else happens, I’m thru combing magazines and papers and pamphlets and what not in that vain effort to figure out what is going on in all those regions of darkness around. Fuck ’em all, squares on both sides.