FOR MANY of us foolish enough to pursue a living through dancing about architecture, sorry, scribbling about rock n roll, Lester Bangs was the main man.
Next time some snotty rocker derides the act of writing about music as, at best, gutting the golden goose, show him Bangs star-spangled Astral Weeks essay, or his epic exegesis on The Stooges Fun House, or the scabrous James Taylor Marked For Death , and defy him or her to come up with a tune which aspires to such high (and Lester got pretty high) art.
As Greil Marcus wrote in the intro to Bangs posthumously edited greatest hits collection 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. That s the crux of it. Lester wasn t merely a critic in the narrow sense he fed off the music just like his beloved Kerouac, using it as fuel for prose. The notion of barring him from the scribes VIP lounge in heaven because he chose popular music as his subject matter makes about as much sense as Miller being disqualified for writing about nookie.
So, it s only right and proper that Let It Blurt: The Life And Times Of Lester Bangs, penned by Kaleidoscope Eyes author, US rock critic and rabid Flaming Lips fan Jim DeRogatis, should make a substantial case for our hero as an artist in his own write (ouch!) rather than a culture vulture subsisting on the princely droppings of musicians. But by the same token, the niggling doubt that rock n roll reportage ain t real writing seemed to plague Lester all his life: he was forever talking about sleeping with Mailer s Bitch the Great American novel (the various drafts of All My Friends Are Hermits he produced in his final days probably came closest to fulfilling that ambition), or else writing poetry and songs, even going so far as putting a succession of bands together. (As a singer, it s said Lester made a great writer, even though his album Jook Savages On The Bravos has been hailed as a seminal influence on Uncle Tupelo and the No Depression/alt-country cadre, and Voidoid Bob Quine was impressed enough to become a collaborator).
But in the end or pretty close to it, when a teenaged DeRogatis interviewed Bangs in 1982 mere weeks before his demise the writer admitted that, all trash aesthetics aside, he believed rock n roll to be great art. A point reinforced by the Oscar Wilde quote in Let It Blurt s intro: Is criticism really creative art? Why should it not be? It works with materials and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry?
To the biographer s credit, Let It Blurt is not the flimsy, speed-written one-take portrait you might expect of any hack impressionable enough to get sucked into Bangs head-flux (and God knows it s hard not to feel his fevered syntax on yer hind). No, DeRogatis gives him the full literary biog treatment, interviewing hundreds of suspects, climbing the family tree, rifling through notes, tapes, books, even interrogating Bangs shrink in order to nail his subject no mean feat given that the good doctor reckoned Lester had about 150 personalities.
Only problem is, as with most literary biogs, Let It Blurt is hardly a barrel of laughs. It s mostly a downer of a tale about a gifted guy whose life was screwed from the off (a Jehovah s mother, a father who died by fire), who evolved from being a child obsessed with music and books into a man-child alcoholic with a penchant for cough mixture and smashing inhalers to bits in order to suck on the wick inside and then sit up all night speed-writing classics like John Coltrane Lives .
To his credit though, Lester was no advocate of the artist as a bottle-sucking incapable being babied by some poor wench in the service of a spurious Lord Byron trip. When he died in April 1982 in New York, due to respiratory and pulmonary complications brought on by flu and ingestion of Darvon, it was no kamikaze climax. He had much work left to do.
In the end, over 33 years on this earth, Bangs wrote his heart out, just like John Coltrane blew, Luke Kelly sang and Lenny Bruce talked theirs out. Let It Blurt: The Life And Times Of Lester Bangs is not a cheerful read, but for anyone with an interest in rock n roll and the empty page, it s compulsory and compulsive stuff.
Let It Blurt: The Life And Times Of Lester Bangs is published by Bloomsbury at #9.99.