Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [1]
The first was his ability to move his most electric thoughts from the brain to the page without interruption. As a music writer myself, I’ve heard great improvisational players declare that when they’re at their best, they don’t create music so much as music passes through them and out their instrument. Having shared an office with Lester, I can remember sitting there in awe, watching him write, literally, as fast as he could type. Of course, this sometimes created inferior as well as superlative work, and of course, I can also picture him (albeit less frequently) slumped head down on typewriter, trying to think of what to say next, and how to bend the language to his will. But surely this ability accounts for the sheer rollin’-and-tumblin’ energy of his work. It also explains how he could write such a delightfully scathing putdown of an album, such as the MC5 review that appears in this book, only to decide later that the same LP is an all-time classic, and be equally credible both times; how he can use the same criteria to praise the Miles Davis of the Seventies that he’d earlier used to condemn that very same music; that's also why he was so unselfconscious about making so many confident predictions that have, with time, turned out to be so wrong (plenty of them occur in these pages). And it's why I wanted to bunch together a few of his pieces involving travel; to my mind, some of his most spontaneous and explosive writing came when Lester was plopped down in a relatively new or foreign place and simply turned loose to record what he saw and heard. In that situation, his sense of wonder could elevate the obvious into revelation, translate the ordinary into the extraordinary, launch into amazing moral and ethical tangents, and find humor in the most serious places and/or a dark underbelly where humor was intended. And do it all so breathlessly it left a reader with jet lag.
The second point concerns how rock writing has changed since the days when these pieces were done. This subject is debated virtually any time two or more rock critics wind up in the same room, especially if they’re at an industry event like South By Southwest; the arguments usually revolve around the fact that there are so many more music writers than ever before; around the way it's become a recognized profession in such a short time, and geared, not coincidentally, toward consumerism and the music industry's notion of publicity rather than toward journalism and/or criticism; around how much more difficult it's become, and the concessions a writer has to make to the PR machine, to get face time with interview subjects; around how effortlessly music journalism mutated into celebrity journalism. These are all good and true insights, and I’ve made them myself at various times, but the single factor that strikes me most after months of immersion in Lester's work is that rock critics don’t fantasize these days. Period. ‘Nuff said.
Nearly all the previously published writings collected here first appeared in publications that were outside—and often way outside— the publishing mainstream at the time, and that mainstream has become even narrower since (to the extent that some of these pieces probably couldn’t even get published in today's fringier periodicals). At the time of his death, after about thirteen years as a professional writer, Lester's name was known only in fairly small circles. Since then, as what's acceptable from a writer has come to be defined ever more conservatively, Lester's own stature has risen, proving