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By Root 935 0

sets as the more bodies inside made greater the need to air out. With no flash-mob mentality or YouTube clip-load rushing everyone forward in random abandon, the slower pace of print and word of mouth allowed the scene to develop organically, roughly coalesce into what Brian Eno would call “scenius,” the genius of a communal mind in group neurotransmission. There was a buzzy atmosphere of something happening but no bent ceiling of overriding importance or heavy expectation to suffocate impulses before they could give themselves a try. Rising to the moment can be overrated, unless we’re talking fifth-set tiebreaker. CBGB’s taught me that some of the most momentous performances occur when not much is on the line, nothing’s immediately at stake, and the rest of the world dissolves until there’s only us campfire girls gathered. Television’s insomniac second sets, late into the a.m. after most had headed home—if splinters of Verlaine’s solos don’t flash before my eyes before I die, I’m going to feel cheated.

Since this is The Village Voice, I will now insert my obligatory cross-cultural reference in record review (cf. past works of Messrs. Wolcott, Carson, Hull, etc.): Alfred Kazin said of Louis-Ferdinand Celine that …

—Lester Bangs, “A Bellyful of Wire”

I knew Lester before I met him, talking to him on the phone long-distance in his role as one of the editors of Creem, the rock magazine located in Birmingham, Michigan, between the bicoastal, bipolar musical power points and yet exerting a journalistic-critical-cultural goofball influence as infectious in its parodic whammy as Animal House or Mort Drucker’s movie parodies for Mad magazine. “Talking to him” is a slight misnomer, since Lester did most of the talking; he nearly always did the bulk of the dialogue, like an all-night DJ in a record-strewn booth with an inexhaustible bag of spontaneous bop and enough stimulants on hand to make it to dawn with mind and mouth still going. I did some reviews for Lester at Creem, including one that still makes me happy to discover tucked away on the Internet, a review of Eno’s solo electronic album Discreet Music, its ambient sounds and its gentle wash of alpha waves not yet the New Age wallpaper for every yoga class, massage studio, and meditation enhancer. “This must be the first piece in Creem that quotes Balanchine,” Lester said. I had cited Balanchine’s Apollonian quip, “Some like it hot and some like it cold, and I like ice cream,” and unlike so many other editors Lester didn’t ask for references to be trimmed because the readers wouldn’t “get it.” (Today it’s assumed the average reader won’t get anything that isn’t TV related.) Creem was a great place to write because they gave your enthusiasms galloping rein (pro or con), appreciated humor that ricocheted out of nowhere, and didn’t fly-bugger every comma in your copy or try to get you to round off your opinion phrasings, “like those fuckers at Rolling Stone,” as Lester said.

But there was one oddity to Lester’s nocturnal calls: he would sometimes repeat in successive conversations, once three times in a single week, anecdotes that he had told me the previous time we spoke. From distinguished old bores who had sat at many captain’s tables, this might not have been unusual, but Lester wasn’t old and almost never a bore, at least for the first hour. The initial time it happened, I just let him unfurl it as if I hadn’t heard it before, figuring he talked to so many people he had simply forgotten. Then it happened again, and this time I thought it might be some kind of put-on, like an Andy Kaufman routine, testing how far he could take it. I didn’t interrupt this time either, going along with the gag. Only it wasn’t a gag, it was some other inscrutable sub-modality of performance. All people repeat themselves, there are dreaded hostage takers who entrap a dinner party or casual get-together with the same vine-covered story they’ve told since Moses was beardless, but what was different was that Lester wouldn’t stop even after you said, “Oh, yeah, you told me about that,”