Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [152]
The solution/alternative? Well, alcohol helped. But alcohol, as strong as its rep is, will not save you from Middle American death drag: you need something more obliterative than any drug, or at least copacetic with prefrontal spongism. Ergo: heavy metal, which I had sampled previously, but found extensive recourse to that miserable winter. Every night that season I had a ritual: About five o’clock I’d head down to the “party store,” pick up a half gallon of Gallo Port, then back to the old farmhouse to consume it while listening to all of Black Sabbath's first three albums in a row. This was my regimen for months. It worked, too.
Later I even found it within myself, that following spring when I’d discovered Quaaludes in the way People magazine discovers new Wonder Bread faces today, to trumpet and even actually like Grand Funk. Deep Purple—you bet, Pops! All of ‘em… oh, ‘twas a grand season indeed, best typified by the fact that one of the biggest AM hits was “Slipping into Darkness” by War, then Exile on Main Street came out and confirmed all our retreats into the murk, and heavy metal was the Sound of the Hour and also the answer because when you want to shout but can hardly speak it's mighty handy to have all them loud machines do it for you as you wham out, however sluggishly, your own nullasthenic frustration in what somebody less decimated and hence a sucker might deem “power chords.” Ahh, but the power is all in our nerves, and being the troopers we are when they are shot we just catarrh on. Dig it, I know fairies wear boots but the only heavy metal album that broke the mold and shot down an entire generation was the Stooges’ Raw Power. I said it then and history has been kind to my fat mouth. But for some of us who pass for you and I in the guise of some united generation, for those of us who lived it, heavy metal will live forever, like the first time we realized that listening to our records and splintering them under our stomping boot heels and eating the black shards might be one and the same thing. An iron lung filled with smog, oppression/depression cultivated like Mister Charlie's cotton field by willing handkerchief heads, it was a party to end ‘em all, La Dolce Vita without pillow fights.
Gig, November 1977
Everybody's Search for Roots
(The Roots of Punk, Part 1)
The “roots” of punk. Hah! That's what we’ve come to. It's kind of like including Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Looked at in one way, you could assume (perhaps much to your relief) that the mere existence of articles like this means that punk is dead and gone. It's like Leslie Fiedler, author of Love & Death in the American Novel, wherein he postulated that all American literature from Melville and Twain on down was closet-homoerotic (Huck and Jim were asshole buddies y'see, and I don’t have to tell you what goes on amidships while Ahab waits for sperm whales like Godot). (His next book was called Getting Busted: it was about pot; at the rate he was going he should be writing this article instead of me.) As I was saying Mr. Fiedler sat down one day to review four massive tomes on the History and Significance of Comic Books in Contemporary American Culture for the New York Times Book Review, and after giving each its just deserts, he wrote something along the lines of so here I sit with these four tomes piled by my typewriter, and I wonder just what it means, and why why why why why…
In other words it's harder ‘n hangnails to be a deviant or even have a little moronic fun these days without some codifying crypto-academic or (worse yet?) the fashion industry (seen the recent Macy's ads for punk couture?) swooping down to rape your stance and leave you shivering fish-naked