Lucking Out - James Wolcott [76]
(I had friendly hellos with Laughner, who was a big fan of Television, and was shocked during the concert intermission for something at the Academy of Music when I entered the men’s room and a voice reverberated, “Hey, Wolcott!!!” issuing from someone unrecognizable. “It’s me, Peter.” “Oh, hi, sorry, you caught me off guard.” What had caught me off guard was his smile, which was missing several front teeth since we last spoke, an almost hillbilly grin that hollowed out his cheeks and that I thought might be the result of heroin use, since junkies crave sweets like crazy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood, though, joviality not being something most junkies display, so I didn’t know what to think, my drug-addict knowledge being almost entirely conjectural.)
I don’t want to accuse Lester of cynicism, because other people’s motives are always a murky soup, but I do think there was a dollop of calculation in his decision to hit the CBGB’s stage and unload both barrels, a decision partly derived from the carnival blur of seeing all these bands that he thought sucked to the rotting rafters grandiosely flailing around up there, figuring, “If these tadpoles can do it, why can’t I? I’ve got as much gall as they do, maybe more.” His boots were also following in the footsteps of Patti’s ballet slippers in seeking to translate rants and reveries into shamanistic incantations, though where Patti massaged her spirit fingers in the air as if summoning the ghosts of everyone she had read, Lester seemed intent on being more of a barrelhouse bellower, a rough blueprint of the profane preacher-man Sam Kinison would uncork. Lester’s rock-auteur itch fell somewhere between a lark and a headfirst lunge, and there wasn’t the sense that he was willing to work at it—it was attention he seemed to crave, and a shot at asteroid impact. Lester’s recording and performing phase is so well documented in Jim DeRogatis’s Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic that I only want to mention an incident from that flurry that laid a lane divider between us.
It had to do with his obsession with Idi Amin, the vicious, dictatorial president of Uganda in the seventies, whose full name was Idi Amin Dada, which must have appealed to Lester’s surrealistic humor, how could it not. Torture and genocide flourished under Amin, who was also rumored to practice cannibalism; in his insane caprices and delusional grandeur, Amin was like something out of an EC horror comic crossed with Heart of Darkness—a monster-buffoon. It wasn’t that Lester approved of Amin—he would later bracket him with Hitler as a prodigy of inhumanity—but he would often start scatting about Amin, and the more he scatted, the more it became an impersonation, a tour of the palace of Idi Amin’s babbling mind accompanied by beer burps. I never found this particular channel on Lester’s radio band of funny voices a diverting romp, not because I was offended by its Ubu Roi shtick—I just didn’t find it comical or satirical enough. At times Lester’s voice veered into Bela Lugosi territory, not that anybody expected him to be Gore Vidal’s match as a master of mimicry. This serves as the preamble to what happened after the first or second show of Lester’s that I caught, when at some point during his set he started with the Idi Amin stuff, and even more grotesquely exaggerated onstage for an audience, his verbal blackface took on minstrelsy overtones that he may not have intended but served no put-on purpose if he had. Afterward, he asked me what I thought of the show, and I said something along the lines of “Not quite white enough,” my admittedly maladroit, overly dry ironic way of suggesting he might want to tone down the Idi Amin rap. I should have been more plain and explicit, but he knew I didn’t mean he should literally act more white onstage, as if he had ruffled my Valkyrie wings. The matter would have remained a minor nuisance between us if he had not written something for one of