Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [149]
Of course my musical tastes hit a brick wall everywhere I went out there. In San Francisco, I was invited to guest-deejay at a new punk club called the City. I played Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the Contortions, Public Image Ltd., Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and my own single. I cleared the dance floor. They hated absolutely all of it, except (this is not self-promotion, believe me) my single, which has a sort of funk riff, which brought two couples onto the floor: one was a straight couple who’d obviously wandered in here thinking this was a disco and this was the closest thing to disco music they’d heard all night—all I remember about them aside from their jerky dancing was that the guy wore a red vest and reminded me of a bartender in a particularly low-rent swinging singles joint; and, way across the floor, there was this one psychotic girl who’d been dancing this horrendous amphetamine-OD mutation of the Grateful Dead ecstasy dance to every record anybody played all night, by herself of course, and when I put on “Let It Blurt” some slimy guy jumped up and started dancing after her, trying with zero subtlety to engineer some kind of pickup. I think he actually succeeded, in fact. Which reminds me that I didn’t meet anyone in either Frisco or LA. who was involved in any kind of ongoing, stable, monogamous relationship. Not so different from New York, of course, except that out there they think it's just ducky that they are apparently congenitally depersonalized, which may or may not be better than the neurotic flare-ups that occur from time to time in this town when people attempt the impossible, i.e., getting truly close to any other human. It occurs to me now that I actually heard less of that nauseating talk about the need for “space” out there than I ordinarily do here (just to get the set straight, let me say that I have never and will never use that word in that context/application: to me “space” is one of two things: where astronauts are, or a word preceding “out” and meant to describe how I am often feeling; the wretched hovel where I type these grousations is not in any sense my “space”—it's my apartment, and don’t you forget it)—probably because there's so much more of it out there that you could walk around the most densely settled urban areas for days without ever encountering so much as a human asteroid.
The last leg of my trip took me to San Diego to visit my family. My mother is aging and ailing and endeavored to manipulate me into feeling guilty for those facts. After all the “whatever” ozone I’d experienced in San Fran and L.A., such ground-level neurosis was a positive breath of fresh air, and I greeted it wryly. I also spent a couple of evenings drinking beer with my nephew, who proudly showed me his collection of heavy metal LPs by groups like the Scorpions. I was speechless. Finally I managed to stammer out something about New Wave. “You mean punk rock?” he spat. “I hate that shit! I read all this garbage all you rock critics wrote about it and you fuckheads actually managed to convince me to go out and buy an album by some group called Devo! It was a piece of shit! I’m never buying a ‘New Wave’/‘punk rock album again!”
I tried to explain to him that rock critics were not exactly a united front, that I hated Devo too, that he might find that he liked, say, the Ramones and Clash if he checked them out—“I especially hate the Clash!” he hissed. “All that bullshit written about them in all those magazines! All that ‘You’re out of it if you don’t like this’ horseshit! All that ‘the only group that matters’ crap! I never wanta hear those fuckers! And it's your fault!”
I gave him a copy of London Calling anyway. His response: “I’ll file it under ‘C’.”
Oddly enough, he did like The Metal Box by Public Image, Ltd. But then, at that time, he had