Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [141]
Yeah. I am. Because they’re cold. I may have played real dogshit some gigs, and cut some tracks that were too smooth for my taste. But I was loose. There was something bigger than me sweeping me along and it killed me in the end, but some pretty incredible music came out of it at times, too. My only regret is that I wonder how much of it, under the circumstances, was really my music, when you get right down to it. If a fucking lightning bolt strikes you, and out of it you get a masterpiece, well, is it you or the lightning bolt? And if in the final analysis it's just no contest. You know you lost control, you let the music and the life play you, and that's why you went under. But it really happened, it was real fire and real dues, and nothing can erase that. It should be pretty obvious by now that I consider my life and my art a failure, but it was an honest failure.
What bugs me is these cats now—no bolt. And no them either! I don’t mind people copping my riffs, but they’re like a buncha fuckin’ college students! Most of my riffs Icopped off somebody else, but then I went on and played and forgot about it. I didn’t sit around with seven candles burning in a shrine to Chuck Berry. So who even cares if cats like this Trower or that guy in Canada succeed or fail, what's the fucking difference? There is more happening in any bar on Friday night when the dance floor's full, than in all those cats’ albums and concerts put together.
What's even worse is that they missed the biggest lick of all, the thing that was so discouraging to me—that I saw the end of it coming. I don’t mean rock ‘n’ roll or popular music or even heavy metal—just the end of the particular experimental, technological branch we riffed out on and sawed through. There's got to be something else. Because one thing I learned while killing myself was that a hell of a lot of that shit was just sound and fury kicked up to disguise the fact that we were losing our emotions, or at least the ability to convey them. Most of Electric Ladyland and the second album sound real cold to me now. I don’t know what it sounded like to me then, because I was too spaced out to make any accurate judgment except that it had all the ingredients, I got some rocks off especially in things like “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the albums were relatively slick and I knew they would sell.
I guess that's what I was trying to get at before when I talked about the missing component. I just forgot how to feel unless I was getting electric shocks or something—and after a while even electric shocks began to feel all the same. And even saying it like that doesn’t really explain it. It's really THE great mystery, for everybody Out Here. And nobody's come up with any solid answers yet. So when you get back, when you publish this, if anybody comes up after that and tells you they got some kind of a line on it, I don’t care how thin it is, well, you’d be doing me the biggest favor of my death if you’d pass it on back. I’d like that more than anything in the … cosmos.
[He laughed again, briefly, then stared through us into some sort of distance. It was obviously time to go.]
Creem, April 1976
Reprinted in New Musical Express, May 1, 1976
from Notes on Austin
Austin, laid-back and somewhat indulgent as it is, might be a terrible place for a New Yorker or anyone who wants to move and shake culture or corporations but it's an undeniably great place to start a band, as I recently learned. No paranoia, no career hang-ups, no star trips (well, not usually), no heroin, no your drummer informing you at Thursday's rehearsal that he's just gotta play with this “Smoke on the Water” copy band Friday night instead of with you at CBGB's because he says he desperately needs the money even though he lives with his parents in Westchester. None of that kind of stuff. I met this band called the Delinquents, we said, “Okay, let's do it,” I took my lyrics and guitar down there and we wrote three songs the first rehearsal