Lester Bangs - Classic or Carburetor Dung?

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― Tim Ellison, Thursday, 19 April 2007 00:19 (6 years ago) Permalink

Also, good non-anthologized pieces include "Free Jazz Punk Rock" from a 1980 Musician, and a long interview with Brian Eno in the same magazine.

Supposedly he was planning on writing something along the lines of A.B. Spellman's Four Lives In The Bebop Business, with Eno as one of the...um...four lives.

― Sara Sara Sara, Thursday, 19 April 2007 02:08 (6 years ago) Permalink

Yeah I would've loved that, I think.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 19 April 2007 02:59 (6 years ago) Permalink

yeah those Musicianpieces were great. the classic "stone" stuff by Lester Bangs that I can excavate from the canyons of my mind:

"The Carpenters And The Creeps" (1971) a live review of the Carps that incorporates autobiography and actual music criticism, becoming a tour-de-force summary of then-current pop scene. Tightly written, too.

review of some Jack Kerouac paperback reissues around the time of his death, a hommage to beat at the height of hippiedom (1969)

the Janis/Jimi riff (late 1970) I think may have occurred during a piece abt something else, but it was definitely the only moment in the history of the publication where the virutes/values of the counterculture were questioned.

and his record reviews 1969-71 were the main event, not only for the writing but musical insight, at the point Lester was like his disciple Xhuxk Eddy in this respect: he listened to everything w/fresh ears including a lot of stuff that other critics didn't take seriously.

that's another reason post-1976 Lester bums me out, he's so jaded.

I've got xeroxes of this stuff but they're BURIED in storage bin :-(

but hey, I forgot that my all time favorite Bangs piece is included in Mainlines:"Bob Dylan's Dalliance With Mafia Chic."

― m coleman, Thursday, 19 April 2007 10:57 (6 years ago) Permalink

ha ha, yeah the "Mafia Chic" story is amusing because Lester spent about 100 times longer thinking about "Joey" than Dylan did.

I think that the Eno piece is on Perfect Sound Forever...

Who were the other "lives" Bangs was planning on covering in his proposed "Four Lives" book. Quine, maybe?

― tylerw, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:25 (6 years ago) Permalink

I think Marianne Faithfull was one of them. There was a list in the foreword to PR&CD, which stated that three of the four lives were set and the fourth was up in the air.

― C. Grisso/McCain, Thursday, 19 April 2007 14:27 (6 years ago) Permalink

3 years pass...

From "Lester Bangs - Last Interview" by a then-17-year old Jim DeRogatis:

Do you think there's a danger of rock 'n' roll becoming extinct?
Yeah, sure. Definitely.
What would there be to take its place?
Video games.

― NYCNative, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 10:42 (2 years ago) Permalink

now if only JDR had taken this^ to heart...

― gravity tractor VS asteroid B612 (m coleman), Tuesday, 8 March 2011 11:33 (2 years ago) Permalink

seriously,"video games = death of rock" was a popular music-biz meme ca.1982

― gravity tractor VS asteroid B612 (m coleman), Tuesday, 8 March 2011 11:35 (2 years ago) Permalink

Now that the music-playing game genre has been declared dead, I wonder how many adherents moved on to actual guitar playing.

― bendy, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 12:03 (2 years ago) Permalink

Have to say I never cared for either his writing style or, all too often, his musical tastes.

― Lee626, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 12:22 (2 years ago) Permalink

1 year passes...

A couple of posts on Facebook alerted me to the fact that it's the 30th anniversary of his death. I'm guessing there are one or two older posters here who can say they met him. I interviewed Chuck and Marcus in '86; I'd like to think that if I'd started a little later or he'd lived a little longer, I would have tried to interview Bangs (and succeeded, I imagine--he seemed extremely accessible). I didn't start reading Creem till '80 or thereabouts, so I'd read very little by him before the first book came out--really only some Rolling Stone reviews in an early-'70s collection, and some RS reviews later in the decade, when Paul Nelson was publishing him regularly. I tried to write like him early on, and of course it was egregiously wrong. Blaming him for the misdeeds of people like me makes no sense.

― clemenza, Monday, 30 April 2012 22:43 (1 year ago) Permalink

3 months pass...

Haven't read it yet, but a New Yorker contributor on Bangs's influence on her:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/how-lester-bangs-taught-me-to-read.html

― clemenza, Thursday, 23 August 2012 13:51 (8 months ago) Permalink

that is a really, really fantastic article. i don't think i've ever actually seen anyone else -- apart from marcus in his intro to the bangs collection -- actually pin down what i love(d) about bangs's writing so much (haven't read him in a while): even at his silliest, he was a genuinely thoughtful, reflective writer. likening him to DFW is really inspired: i don't know why i didn't think of that before.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 25 August 2012 05:08 (8 months ago) Permalink

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