You gotta love the late Lester Bangs, who departed this mortal coil in 1982. He remains the greatest rock critic who ever lived, by dint of his Gonzo-style journalism, scathing wit, and refusal to accept the premise that it was the critic’s duty to praise (and hence help sell) the music he was reviewing. No, he called them like he saw them, and wrote exactly what he believed in a miraculously entertaining prose style that transformed “mere criticism” into true literature. As Greil Marcus wrote in his introduction to a 1987 posthumous collection of Bang’s writings entitled Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, “Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.”
As for me, I think his genius shone most brightly in his contentious interviews, conducted late at night and with both parties very wasted, with Lou Reed. Bangs had a love-hate relationship with Reed, and he channeled it into hilarious essays like “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or, How I Slugged It Out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake.” It’s a landmark of bile and vitriol, as is the equally wonderful “James Taylor Marked for Death,” but neither is mean for meanness’ sake. No, both demonstrate a sense of moral purpose that infused all of Bangs’ writing.
Before I move on to the subject of this review, to wit Lester Bangs and the Delinquents’ 1980 LP Jook Savage on the Brazos, I would just like to quote a tiny fraction of what Bangs had to say about Lou Reed. “Who else,” asks Lester, “would get himself as fat as a pig, then hire the most cretinous band of teenage cortical cavities he could find to tote around the country on an all-time death drag tour? Who else would doze his way back over the pond in a giant secobarbital capsule and labor for months with people like Bob Ezrin, Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce to puke up Berlin, a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressing album ever made?” And things go radically downhill from there, with the two snarling and sniping viciously at one another until both were too wasted to continue their scabrous dialogue.
Bangs played with several bands in his lifetime—including “Birdland” With Lester Bangs, a band he claimed to have been tossed out of because he was “too fat”—and recorded an incredible John Cale-produced single with Robert Quine on guitar entitled “Let It Blurt.” As for the Delinquents, they were from Austin, Texas, and included Andy Fuertsch on lead guitar, Brian Curley on bass, Mindy Curley on keyboards, Becky Bickham on rhythm guitar, and Halsey Taylor on drums. Bangs, sang lead, and played harmonica.
Robert Christgau called Jook Savages on the Bravos “Velvets meet Voidoids in Austin,” and I suppose that’s as good a description as any, although on the anthemic “Life Is Not Worth Living (But Suicide’s a Waste of Time)” the sound is more alt-country than punk. And several other tunes are more country than CBGBs. On “Life is Not Worth Living” Bangs, adopting a kind of redneck yowl, mocks nihilists (and himself, in part) with the words, “You call yourself a nihilist/Just because you’ve read [Louis-Ferdinand] Celine/Put cigarettes out on your wrist/Still won’t be James Dean.” As for the guitar solo, it’s so meandering it’s wonderful, a piece of Art Brut that suits the song’s ragged contours wonderfully. The LP opens with the herky-jerky paean to never going out, “I’m in Love with My Walls.” Fuertsch again plays some excellent and spiky guitar while Bangs, whose voice is thinner than I thought it would be, does a more than adequate job of letting it blurt.
“Accident of God” reminds me a bit of X, thanks in large part to Becky Bickham’s backing vocals, but nobody would mistake Fuertsch’s freaked-out garage primitivism for Billy Zoom’s supersonic rockabilly propulsion. Curley comes in on organ as Bangs stutters and repeats himself, while on “Legless Bird” Bangs opens with some cool blues harmonica while the song establishes an irresistible groove. “That’s alright/Don’t you worry about a thing/Cuz the legless bird/Just sleeps on the wing,” sings Lester, once again adopting a redneck croon, while Fuertsch plays some great guitar. As for “Nuclear War” the sound is definitely that of CBGBs punk, speeded up and reckless, with Fuertsch producing a wonderful caterwaul of a solo while Bangs tries out some vocal tricks.
“I Just Want to Be a Movie Star” boasts a lovely guitar line that’s so purty you’ll want to feel it up, while Bangs heads for Alabama on the vocal front. It’s great the way Bangs shouts, “Movie star!” before Fuertsch and Bickham play some total noise that I love more than my Redd Kross set list. This one is Bangs’ best performance, and it demonstrates beyond a doubt that he had a future as a rock vocalist, should he have chosen to go down that path. And the best part of the song is the way it goes on and on, allowing Bangs to do some wild free-associating along the way.
“Grandma’s House” is both a Dale Hawkins cover and a slow-paced hillbilly shuck, on which Lester plays it straight. It soon becomes apparent that this hillbilly idyll is actually a kind of murder ballad, which helps to explain, I would think, why Bangs chose it. “Kill Him Again” takes us back to New York and the Velvet Underground; over a rumbling bass Fuertsch plays some Lou Reed-flavored guitar, while Bangs, the voice of calm, sings, “Come on, boys/Let’s kill him again.” In terms of subject matter he anticipates the bloodthirsty songs of Killdozer, although Killdozer would never have added the melodic middle section, on which Bangs croons instead of simply declaiming. As for Fuertsch, who was definitely Bangs’ secret weapon, he plays some very cool guitar, and I mean cool as in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, baby.
“Fade Away” is a punker, or more properly a garage rocker, and once again features Curley’s organ, which runs beneath the melody like a buried power line. Meanwhile Fuertsch is up to his usual hijinks, and Bangs sounds, well, perhaps too unenthused for the song. Where’s all that passion you poured into your writing, O ghost of Mr. Bangs? “Day of the Dead” is another very melodic tune that deserves to be better known. “I want it all,” Bangs repeats over and over, while Fuertsch plays a guitar figure very reminiscent of the ones produced by a certain Mr. Lou Reed. Meanwhile, “Give Up the Ghost” is a thin and herky-jerky rocker on which Bangs pours on the vocal mannerisms while Fuertsch plays a guitar riff guaranteed to win personality contests before going into a totally Velvets flurry of dissonant notes.
Lester Bangs died too young, at the same age as Jesus (33), not that I’m making any comparisons. He accomplished much, but would no doubt have accomplished much more; he had rough plans for more than a dozen book projects, may well have found himself in another rock band, etc. etc. But his legacy speaks for itself. I have picked up Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung hundreds of times, and always with pleasure, and the same goes for a subsequent collection of Bangs’ writing, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, which was published in 2002. If you haven’t read either book, you owe it to yourself to pick them up. And if you haven’t listened to Jook Savages on the Brazos, the same goes.
Because Bangs’ music was an extension of his writing, and vice versa. Like Hunter S. Thompson, Bangs’ writing is a delirious romp across the wastelands of American culture; whether he was gratuitously assaulting Tangerine Dream (“I decided it would be a real fun idea to get fucked up on drugs and go see Tangerine Dream with Laserium”) or speaking seriously about his mission on this earth (to Lou Reed: “The real question is what to live for. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art’s sake, corny as that.”) Hell, REM didn’t toss his name out there for nothing. Once there was a great writer, and a great musician to boot, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see his likes again.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
