Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [140]
And it ain’t that I don’t still got my chops. I do. Everybody's too fucking hung up on chops, though. I think the only studio album I really burned all the way was my first one. And that's after practicing night and day, year after year, trying to learn it all and do it better, coming up hard and fast and paying dues and busting your chops and out to whip ass on everybody, when suddenly one day I discovered somehow that I could be fuckin’ Segovia and if that some other weird component is missing, then I might as well be Louie Shelton.
What is that component?
I wish I knew. I know I lost it somewhere. I take consolation in the fact that just about everybody else came up same time as I did too. Maybe we all just got too high.
How do you feel about people like Eric Burdon and Buddy Miles, whom some observers have accused of cashing in on your name or their association with you, after your death?
Listen, once you kick out you tend to let a lotta bad shit just go under the bridge. Fuck it, I hope they copped a few extra bucks. Besides, nobody lives forever, and I’m gonna have to sit down and have a serious talk with old Eric whenever he gets up here, in lieu of busting his face open. It's actually amusing, and besides, he really didn’t know any better. Buddy Miles is a different case—I’d be afraid of getting my ass kicked, but anybody racks up as many bad records as that cat's probably gonna end up in the first coal cart to Hell anyway, so hopefully I’ll never chance to see his fat face again.
Ever see any of the others who kicked off close to the time you did, hanging around up here?
Nah I hear about them once in awhile, but I don’t hang out with ‘em. You wouldn’t either. Morrison—I heard all about him, although I didn’t see it. He put up such a big stink how he wanted into Hell and wasn’t gonna accept anything else and how if they put him Here instead he was gonna make ‘em all wish he’d never died, and on and on….
I identify with him on a certain level—we both came along at the right-wrong time, right to become figureheads, wrong in terms of longevity. We were like the test models for crap like Alice Cooper and David Bowie. We both got suckered, but I like to think he got suckered far worse than I did. He, like, had more complicity in his own destruction. I like to think I just got more confused, and basically confused musically as much as in life, until it was all too much of a mess and there was no way out. I let too damn many people intimidate me, for one thing, because I knew I was off but I never had the simple street smarts to figure just maybe they were off too, maybe ten thousand times worse than me, so I just kind of ended up laying myself in everybody's hands. I mean, I was really an innocent, man. It's embarrassing in retrospect, and it wasn’t comfortable then.
What about Janis?
I was hoping you weren’t going to ask me that. Jeez, you fuckin’ journalists, always after the next lurid headline. Well… she was pathetic there and she's pathetic here. It's not her fault, but she doesn’t do anything, particularly, to try to improve it, either. That's all I got to say about that.
How do you feel about being a hot chart artist still, and record companies overdubbing other accompanists on your old tapes?
My records still selling is just like Jefferson Starship being more popular than Jefferson Airplane—quality has nothing to do with it, it's just people hanging onto things they know were good and represented something once, instead of taking a chance on a dubious unknown artist.
As far as the overdubbing goes, I feel almost as much indifference there. It sounds weird and egotistical for a dead guy to crow about how he was actually a one-man show, especially since his old sidemen really have no means of retorting, so obviously the smart position for me to have is no position. Why don’t you go ask John Coltrane the same question, and see if connubial fidelity extends beyond the grave. You seem