The Books: Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader; “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber!”, by Lester Bangs

Next up on the essays shelf:

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

In 1972, Lester Bangs went to a Black Sabbath show in Detroit, to soak up the vibe, observe the fans, and also interview front-man Ozzy Osborne. Their album had hit the United States like a wave, and it was such a different scene from what had come before. It certainly wasn’t mainstream. Something else was happening. Lester, who had cut his teeth on the punk rock scene of the late 60s, felt that something different was going on here, both in the fans and onstage. He tried to puzzle it out in this piece, which is a lengthy multi-part treatise on Black Sabbath, Ozzy, and what the hell was going on.

Lester Bangs wanted music to connect human beings. Not necessarily in a positive “free to be you and me” way. We can also connect in our sense of isolation and despair and loneliness and pain. Whatever it was, he preferred music that expressed something, put it OUT (as opposed to held it IN), so that the diverse audience out there in the dark could take it in, ponder it, feel like they were not so alone. It’s why he was so anti-disco, although you could certainly make the case that everyone crowding onto dance floors, doing identical moves, is also a way of connecting. Who am I to say any different? I love a lot of disco. Lester also felt that mainstream culture sucked, and that music, if it was good, had to offer an alternative. Don’t just stand up there, sneering, and cutting your arms. (It was his main problem with the Sex Pistols. What is the POINT of what you are doing, besides a death-wish? If you hate the world so much, fine, so do I, but how about you offer an alternative? That was one of the reasons why Lester Bangs was so impressed by the Clash. He felt they walked the walk.) But whatever, Lester felt that the 70s were a wasteland in the music scene. A wasteland in American culture in general. The Stones were holed up in their own fame, doing insane tours where no one could get tickets, his heroes were all fuck-ups or checking out or morphing into something he did not approve of. He sensed some eruption in the music of Black Sabbath, a kind of despairing yearning to connect and express that was almost totally counter-culture, in its own way. And yes, there were the underpinnings of evil in the symbols and the lyrics (and the band’s name) and all of that stuff that seemed so threatening, so scary to everyone.

Lester was surprised when he went to the concert to see what a mellow crowd it was. Maybe even down. But it certainly wasn’t the rampaging blood-thirsty Satanists that he was expecting. And Ozzy? Ozzy seemed like a good guy who was a bit baffled that people were taking him seriously. He didn’t completely abdicate responsibility, but he also wasn’t a drooling evil wildebeest. Lester was fascinated by the whole scene. Maybe because he was so used to the decadence of the CBGBs scene, and the snarling rock gods like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed … he was almost charmed by these British blokes, who screamed onstage about God and insomnia and dark thoughts.

I am, quite possibly, summarizing it wrong. Or too simply. It’s a very long piece. I’m a Black Sabbath fan, although I was afraid of them in the 80s, because I’m Catholic and they seemed scary. Don’t judge, I was 14. Now, though, it is impossible to hear one of their songs come on and resist blasting the volume to 11.

For example.

ROWR.

I don’t read much music criticism, but this strikes me as a very thoughtful piece about Black Sabbath. Who else would theorize that the whole thing is very Catholic in nature? It’s not just using Catholic symbols as a wink and a snarky statement. It’s actually the landscape from which they sprung. Maybe that’s why I liked them so much, having grown up immersed in Catholicism. Lester Bangs saw Black Sabbath’s music as essentially positive, which – I’m just guessing – was against the tone of the time. As I said, I haven’t read a lot of critical commentary out there, and would be interested to hear how other journalists and music critics handled Black Sabbath. I sense positivity in their music too. Not “smiley face” positivity, but EXPRESSIVE positivity, the positivity of not only catharsis but truly ADMITTING how dark it gets sometimes, how bad it gets. There is a positivity in that too. Like Nirvana, who don’t have one “happy” song, but my God, is that music a life force. “Lithium”. Despite the opening phrase, which then immediately then turns on itself (“They’re in my head”), this is a song of despair. But LISTEN to that sound.

It’s not a negative sound, it’s a positive one, of young furious depressed men getting it OUT. You can’t manufacture that. People have tried, and they have failed.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt.

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber!” by Lester Bangs

Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists – like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious situation in an honest way. They are not on the same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate, subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who have looked around and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward offering alternatives.

In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that given the current paucity of social leaders worth investing even a passing hope in, the coalition made up of the young and the free-form wing of the Left should turn to the ancient notion of the shaman, the holy madman whose prescriptions derived not from logic or think tanks or even words sometimes, but from an extraordinarily acute perception of the flux of the universe. Well, we’ve reaped Roszak’s script in spades by now, there’s a shaman slouching on every corner and tinhorn messiahs are a dime a dozen. Some are “political” and some are “mystical” and some are building their kingdoms on a “cosmic” stew of both, and each seems to have his little cadre of glaze-orbed acid casualties proselytizing for him.

Then there are also the cultural shamans, Dylan being the supreme artifact: Biblical, rooted in the soil and tradition and his own Old Testament brand of conscience. Burroughs too, of course, and his “Hassam i Sabbah” is nothing more than a particularly malevolent form of shaman, while the “Nova Police” are the benevolent regulation agency out to save the universe from addiction and control. Burroughs has been one of the foremost moralists in American literature; his work amounts to a demonology for our times, portraying the forces currently threatening our planet’s survival as evil gods operating from without.

Where Black Sabbath fits into this seeming digression is that they unite a demonology not far from Burroughs’ (if far more obvious) with a Biblical moralism that makes Dylan look positively bland, although they can be every bit as vindictive as Dylan with the Jehovan judgments.

They are probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent.

They may deny all this: Ozzy Osborne responded to a question about how the band’s concept came about with a vague “I don’t know, I met the guys, we got together and rehearsed for about two years, starved, bummed around hoping for a break and it just happened. You relate to me that it’s about doom or something, but I can’t relate it to you because I’m in the middle of it.”

It really doesn’t make any difference how conscious they may be of what they’re saying, though. The message is there for anyone with ears, and it’s unmistakable. The themes are perdition, destruction, and redemption, and their basic search for justice and harmony in a night-world becomes more explicitly social all the time. On their first album that quality only appears in one song, “Wicked World.” But the prevailing mood is a medieval sense of supernatural powers moving in to snatch the unwary soul and cast it into eternal bondage.