Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [139]
Yeah, but it's cool, see, because there's nobody I’m more ruthlessly critical of than myself. I was a good guitar player, no Django but I did manage to come up with a few new riffs and a few new ideas about how to finger or get some weird noises outa the thing. But there ain’t much percentage in ego-tripping when you’re dead, so I gotta cop that that was about it. The songs I wrote that had actual melodies, that you could hum or have a real zinger cover, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. “Angel” I’m still proud of, as a composition, and a couple others. But the rest is mostly just metal riffs, with mostly jive lyrics that I talked instead of sang. I got a lotta credit for introducing “advanced technology” or whatever they’re callin’ it these days to rock, but the thing that almost everybody missed was that once the distortion and technology became a “required” part of the whole style and, like, institutionalized, then it was all over. Because technology is cold—so's technique, for that matter—and humans are hot. Or at least they should be. Because the emotion behind the distortion is the whole thing. And what we didn’t realize was that all of us cultivating distortion so much was just digging our graves, emotionally speaking. And literally too, I guess, in some cases.
Because as time went by I began to realize that what people craved was just noise. Now, I took a lotta care with my own albums, the first three anyway—they were very carefully produced, all that shit. They were tight. But I was beginning to really, really wonder. Because when I listen to Are You Experienced?, at least half of what I hear and remember is just this really crazy pissed-offness that can’t make no sense out of nothing. It's there in the lyrics and in the music too. Because that was where I was at the time. When I said, “Ain’t no life nowhere,” I meant it! Meanwhile I’m thinking Do they expect me to bring the can of lighter fluid in my pocket onstage every night? Obviously something is wrong somewhere. Well, what was it about distortion that started bothering you so much?
Well, like Graham wants blues, so do the fans, but Graham don’t want distortion and they do. He thinks that's shit, and blues is “real.” Well, I don’t know what the fuck is “real.” I never exactly did. Like, do I play two chords or three or just fuck around with tremolo and feedback and make funny noises and burn my guitar and swallow the strings and cannibalize my sidemen and then stand there alone on the stage with the buttons poppin’ off my shirt like Brock Peters singing “John Henry” and “Cotton Fields” and a selection of work songs personally recorded on Parchman Farm by Alan Lomax? See, it seems to me when I look back that there was something larger that I always really, really wanted to do, but I could never quite get a firm grip on it.
On one level I’m really glad I got out when I did. Because it's like Kennedy, see, a legend—everybody can sit around saying, “Well, gee, nothin’ happenin’, but if Jimi was around now, he’d show us where it was all goin’ next!” But they’re wrong. I wouldn’t have a fuckin’ clue what to do now, if I was so unfortunate as to be “around.” I’d probably be just like the rest of ‘em, repeating my same shit over and over until everybody is as bored as I am and we mutually agree to call it quits and I’ll go sit in the islands and listen to reggae or something. Or maybe, what would be even worse, I’d be one o’ the ones that keeps grinding out the same old shit and doesn’t know it: “Yeah, Jimi, your new album Toe Jam Asteroid is the absolute best thing you’ve ever done!” “Yeah, like, dig, I’m hip, pops … just be cool.” Yeah, that's how I’d cop out, come on as a real jive throwback spade wearing shades all the time, a little hat and cigarette smoke, the old Lonely Unapproachable Jazz Musician routine, sitting around in smoky clubs, sidewalk cafes, talk nothin’ but bebop jive shit. “Yeah, cool, ah, that was a wiggy scene. Later.” [He breaks up laughing.] The Thelonious Monk of the wah wah. Either that or just go hide and do