Lester Bangs - Classic or Carburetor Dung?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I didn't think this was great, but I am glad it got made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDBcmNDyOc

Early on, I found the cutting of the interviews way too fast; I had doubts about the voice-over excerpts all the way through. (I don't know if it was just the way they were read, or whether it wasn't going to work regardless.) Bangs's friends back home are a very likeable group.

Thought young Lester looked like Jake Gyllenhaal.

http://sandiegotroubadour.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Lester-Bangs-YEARBOOK.jpg

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/lester_bangs_posthumous_ballot

Wonder if Mark Shipper wrote that ballot -- he did the "From the Cloud of Lester Bangs" notes in PR&CD.

wish Robert Quine's I Heard Her Call My Name Symphony was a real thing

From the Creem mailing list:

LESTER BANGS AT 75

Lester Bangs is more than a genius, a savant, a beautiful soul, and the north CREEM star in the nighttime CREEM sky: he is also the rock critic that people, gun to their head, can name. In tribute to both his unfettered brilliance, and his name recognition, CREEM is celebrating Bangs in the way that he would appreciate most: hyperbolic praise, borderline slanderous revisionism, and by attempting to sell enough t-shirts riffing on our dead friend to fund a statue of Lou Reed made entirely out of ketamine.

Do we come to praise Lester Bangs? Bury Lester Bangs? Or did we just run out of money for the year and needed to bring in our December issue for under ten grand, and some Lester Bangs hoo-ha seemed the smartest way to do it? (The dead don’t do much, but they do work cheap.) And if it’s the latter, how did Lester Bangs know to plan his 75th birthday at the same time to save our asses yet again?????

Find out when The Lester Bangs Issue starts shipping December 1.

Until then, subscribers can log in to read all of Bangs’ original CREEM writing in our archive. Study up.

he is also the rock critic that people, gun to their head, can name

highly suspect there's only ppl who can name several music critics and ppl who can name none, not ones who can only name Lester Bangs

Bangs is the only one who appeared as a named character in a hugely successful movie, though

I'm having trouble thinking of a rock critic who has appeared as a named character in even a low-budget indie straight-to-vhs bomb.

Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs
Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom

Bangs is the only one who appeared as a named character in a hugely successful movie, though

I could be annoying and say those ppl could then probably also cite Cameron Crowe but point taken.

and Ben Fong-Torres (is he a critic? I dunno). I didn't recall that Bangs showed up in that movie, too

Yes but did Lester Bangs ever knock on stranger's door and ask to inspect their underwear do commercials for washing powder like Danny Baker did?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF4FVzLcWD4

I could be annoying and say those ppl could then probably also cite Cameron Crowe but point taken.

This is true, but the character in Almost Famous isn't actually Cameron Crowe, even if he is clearly an analogue for the writer/director of the movie. Forgot about Ben Fong-Torres and now reminded of his reference to his "old lady" in that movie.

"Best" appearance by an erstwhile rock critic playing a fictional role must go to Jann Wenner's performance as Mark Roth in Perfect.

It's news to me that Creem is even around

It was relaunched last year by the son of the original guy, and some other folks.

It's also a pricey, subscriber-only boutique magazine now.

They advertise on Instagram a lot

It's also a pricey, subscriber-only boutique magazine now.

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Wednesday, October 18, 2023 9:37 AM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i think walgreens shrinking magazine section would be a tough go business wise

this was great
https://www.creem.com/fresh-creem/creemains-hot-chocolate-creem-reviewed-simon-frith

The best part of the revival is for a lesser subscription fee than for hard copies of the new mag, you get access to high-quality scans of issues and specials from the original run.

yeah that's super cool i need to do that

i had this complete rolling stone CD-rom box set that was every page of every issue, not sure if it would still work on a modern computer

I believe the Playboy Interviews set doesn't work on modern computers. Not sure about the Mad Magazine set.

XP I don't think they will. I checked out remaindered copies of that RS collection at Half-Price Books shortly after I got a new PC laptop before Xmas 2010, and it was already too advanced an OS for those discs.

That laptop initially ran Windows 7, and iirc the Rolling Stone discs topped out at XP or Vista.

Not sure about the Apple requirements, but c'mon man...

On a related note, a friendly reminder that scans of every regular issue of Spin are on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books/about/SPIN.html?id=kic4tNzhZF8C

I never got into Spin; I think I was just a little too old to be in its target demographic.

OTOH, Musician was in my sweet spot during the same era.

I remember Lester did an article summarizing various drugs. I was about 12 at the time, it felt so subversive.

i had this complete rolling stone CD-rom box set that was every page of every issue, not sure if it would still work on a modern computer

I have this installed on Windows 10 and it works. I had to copy all of it to my hard drive rather than use the CDs, and I believe archive.org has a slightly updated/patched version of the .exe file. This thread may help out a bit: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/rolling-stone-40-years-of-rolling-stone-magazine-on-3-searchable-dvd-roms.889870/

(I just use "print to PDF" rather than using the application interface anyway).

To state the obvious, Bangs would have a hard time navigating the waters today. Unless he'd be someone to adapt quickly--there were signs of that later on. So really, no idea.

Laughing at the idea of a 75 year old Lester Bangs being asked to rank the 50 best Dua Lipa songs

It's impossible to say what Bangs would be like today. He died at 33, so almost his entire output was the emotional and spiritual diary of a man navigating his twenties in print and to a degree in public, with music as a soundtrack/springboard/excuse. I don't like much of his writing (though I do like the Miles Davis pieces that others upthread seem to dislike), but I'm extremely doubtful that someone who was as much of a twitching exposed nerve ending as Bangs would be the same person at 75 that he was at 30.

I actually meant more his style. And the things he wrote. Adapting to that end of it, no, it's laughable--pretty sure he'd be primarily writing books.

So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that One Direction were certainly far more than a group of five talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The One Direction were most of all a bop. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the ‘20s is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Harry Styles serving cunt into poetry. Frfr, baby.

He might have liked Dua Lipa ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence" is pretty much the best look ahead to social media I've ever read.

I'm having trouble thinking of a rock critic who has appeared as a named character in even a low-budget indie straight-to-vhs bomb.

Will you settle for Dave Marsh appearing in a low-budget indie horror movie?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385639/characters/nm1482842

"Best" appearance by an erstwhile rock critic playing a fictional role must go to Jann Wenner's performance as Mark Roth in Perfect.

...which he managed to parlay a couple years later into a reoccurring role as a government attorney on Crime Story.

I'm extremely doubtful that someone who was as much of a twitching exposed nerve ending as Bangs would be the same person at 75 that he was at 30.

I mean some of my favourite stuff of his is the more melancholy later work where he was negotiating with the asshole he'd been when he was younger, and trying to find a way to finesse that earlier energy into something more thoughtful and humanistic. The mea culpa element of White Noise Terrorists is definitely powerful. I love the spewing-lava-gush of his earlier stuff, the torrent of word and thought and amphetamine-induced-articulacy, but I'll stan harder for the more humanist stuff in his later work. And the Miles piece in the second anthology is one of my favourite pieces, not least because he seems to locate the emotion in those records, the pain and the sadness.

If Lester Bangs was alive today he'd probably have a smartphone :O

Post under “technological/practical backwards steps……”!