Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [115]
“It's a gay bar,” he says.
I see, that makes sense, that all the old avant-garde watering holes would turn into places where old faggots hang out, except that it's more than that, it's the French sense of clammily melodramatic gloom and defeat which comes from, among other excuses, taking it up the ass in two successive world wars. So I start trying to get ‘em riled, yelling “We’re surrounded by beatniks!” and “Is there an Existentialist in the house?” But it did no good, they just kept sitting there dying. I was beginning to wonder about this apparent contradiction between the open-endedly buoyant spirits of everybody in Les Variations and the suffocating, pretentious, ostentatious misery all around us, but the answer may lie in the fact that Les Variations are mongrels, nomads, gypsies even. Yowza dey done come up de Mediterranean from their native Morocco, and they were the first rock group ever in France to break that country's pop charts out of the stranglehold of traditionally bathetic ballads and third-rate Elvis imitations like Johnny Hallyday
Almost literally an overnight sensation, they have given French kids something to rally around besides whatever scrapings of America they can get their mitts on. And believe me, those kids are hot for what we got. For instance, did you know that in France there is a Robot A. Hull11 Fan Club? That's right, and I even dredge myself up from the absinthe to take in a record store where they sell such things as bootleg disques of the Flamin’ Groovies (major cult over there), Lou Reed (depicted with fangs on the cover), and a godawful jam between Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, and Jim Morrison, who did not sing but played the drums (cover of this one a classic: skull a la Grateful Dead except with Hendrix ‘fro and do-rag, and down in the lower left hand corner is an actual blood stain smeared on each copy of the album jacket). This same store also carries large stacks of dog-eared back issues of Creem, going at undoubtedly astronomical prices, and the clientele of this establishment and numerous others like it, I learn, consists of a teenage French underground who call themselves Les Punques and do such things as wear black leather jackets, listen to old MC5 records, and read Creem.
It is out of this miasma of miscegenation that Les Variations have arisen like some brash beacon, first flashes of national pride as a stake in the rock dream, and it's in Paree's storied sleaze palace the Olympia that I finally get to see them strut their stuff. I’m up for it and more than ready to see a little bloodletting, being hep to the legendary hooliganism of Parisian audiences, who may like rock ‘n’ roll but only incidental to coming to break the hall to pieces. Les Variations are somewhat alienated by all this, being partisans of the pure musique as they are. Marc says: “I love the audience in America, because they can understand the music much more than in France. Here when you play they don’t understand shit, they just come here to boogie, but not to boogie in the right way, just to break some beer cans on the head of each other. When you just give them the rhythm it's okay, but you can’t play anything soft or like that, but in America you can make them understand because they’re more cultured in the music.”
So Les Variations gives them the rhythm, Jo Leb shouting something that sounded like “Je suis un singer dans un rock ‘n’ roll band,” running to the apron of the stage and edging back. Marc studiously avoids anything soft, tearing out riffs that reminded me most of the sorts of exchanges Fred Smith and Wayne Kramer used to get in in the old MC5. Maurice just stands