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

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

I never met anybody who didn't like Rumours It got played a lot around my house in the year of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' and 'White Riot,' and I think the reason why so many people who got airsick of being in the same room with Eagle records might find songs like 'Dreams' bringing them to tears was that Fleetwood Mac transcended FM Hollywood, not only by playing and singing with open-eyed passion but by articulating the painful questions of love (and the real answers that hurt). 'Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they're playing' may have been obvious, but that was its very purity: you had been there, and could remember all too well when you first learned you can't change anybody.

On top of all that, both Transformer and the single from it are enormous hits. Lou Reed is not only a legend: he's a star. In one of the interviews he did last summer, Lou said: 'I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room.' ¶ He was right. You sit yourself down, and sure enough you become aware pretty fast that there's this vaguely unpleasant fat man sitting over there with a table full of people including his blonde bride.

The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephemeral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock 'n' roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I'd like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn't stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural resources.

George Harrison belongs in a daycare center for counterculture casualties, another of those children canceled not (so much?) by drugs this time but something perhaps far more insidious. His position seems to be I'm Pathetic, But I Believe in Krishna, which apparently absolves him from any position of leadership while enabling him to assume a totally preachy arrogance toward his audience which would be monumental chutzpah if it weren't coming from such a self-certified nebbish.

Paul McCartney makes lovely boutique tapes, resolute upon being as inconsequential as the Carpenters which in itself may be as much a reaction to John's opposite excesses as a simple case of vacuity. You could hardly call him burnt out--Band on the Run was, in its rather vapid way, a masterful album. Muzak's finest hour. Of course he is about as committed to the notion of subject matter as Hanna-Barbera, and his cuteness can be incredibly annoying at times.

If Lou Reed seems like rock's ultimate closet queen by virtue of the fact that he came out of the closet and then went back in, it must be also observed that lots of people, especially lots of gay people, think Lou Reed's just a heterosexual onlooker, exploiting gay culture for his own ends. And who knows but that they may be right.

Maybe that's why the old Beatle albums are so irritating today that just now, as I was playing Rubber Soul while writing this article, I took it off to type in silence, and my friend working nearby agreed that what once was ecstasy, the heart's rush of being in love for the first time, had through some curious process become a mere annoyance. The Beatles today are out of time, out of place, out of sync with a present reality that isn't particularly grim (from this chair, anyway) but neither is it exactly amenable to certain types of artifacts.

One does wonder, however, what Gallo would have made of Dylan's tribute to him; and one receives a possible answer in [Donald] Goddard's book, where Gallo's ex-wife describes borrowing a hundred bucks from Joey's father to buy records so that the Prince of Brooklyn, always a fan of contemporary music, could catch up on what had been happening in soundsville during that decade he'd been away reading [Wilhelm] Reich in the slams: 'He got especially mad over a Byrds album called "Chestnut Mare" that I wanted him to hear. "Listen to the lyrics," I said. "They're so pretty, and so well done." "I don't want to hear any fags singing about any fucking horse," he says--and he's really venomous. "It's not about a fucking horse," I said. "If you'll listen, it's about life." But he doesn't want to hear about life either. . . . Next thing I know, he jumps out of the bathtub, snatches the record off the machine, stomps out in the hall stark-naked and pitches it down the incinerator.

But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he's having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that's why: either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him. When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as it was about its subject matter, and I remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose key was the ridiculously spiteful 'Idiot Wind,' I found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome; I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: 'Goddamn, he's still got it!' Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan.

If you feel yourself responding cynically when someone relates that 'Dylan's returned to protest songs' as if it's exciting news, it just may be that your instincts are in healthy working order.

I never met anybody who didn't like Rumours. It got played a lot around my house in the year of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' and 'White Riot,' and I think the reason why so many people who got airsick of being in the same room with Eagle records might find songs like 'Dreams' bringing them to tears was that Fleetwood Mac transcended FM Hollywood, not only by playing and singing with open-eyed passion but by articulating the painful questions of love (and the real answers that hurt). 'Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they're playing' may have been obvious, but that was its very purity: you had been there, and could remember all too well when you first learned you can't change anybody.

While I still don’t wanna hear how everything is hunky-dory like a lot of those disco people and Barry Manilows are trying to sell us, I’m just completely fed up with cheap stupid nihilism especially when it starts acting trendy. I know society is sick and life is getting more complicated by the second, but if all you’ve got to say is get fucked life sucks you stink I stink who cares I’m bored whip me beat me kick me there's nothing else to do then I think you and everybody else would be a lot better off if you just kept your fucking mouth shut in the first place, not to mention your self-destructive habits to yourself instead of parading them around like The Red Badge of Courage or something. And this isn’t like If You Can’t Say Anything Nice Don’t Say Anything At All, it's more like… why restate what's been said and refuted already?

Why are you talking to them, they're not important! Brownnose this one! He can HELP you!

Someone I deeply love was committed to a hospital mental ward and almost the bigtime cuckoo's nest last year; I went barging out there like some halfassed Sir Lancelot, she eventually got herself out, but when I walked into that place I saw the most graphic evidence of what society can do to people, and just how totalitarian this supposedly free society can get when some administrator arbitrarily decides that you're not quite fit to mingle with the rest of the herd. What I saw in there was a whole bunch of people who as far as I was concerned were not crazy at all. Well, there was one guy who though George Benson was sending him telepathic messages, but then that guy used to get raped by his uncles every day when he was about four years old while his father just sat there and cried. What I'm saying is that what I saw in there was a whole bunch of people who were just frightened literally out of their wits, and with good reason. There are some people who are like dogs who have just been beaten and beaten and beaten until it really seems kind of awesome that there's anything left at all. ¶ Meanwhile the staff treated them with a mixture of contempt, condescension, and bored patience.