Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [165]
Now, the more I listen to this record, the more I’m impressed by two qualities it has in abundance: one is soul, and nobody has to tell you how hard that is to find in anything new being put out these days; the other is that, near as I can tell, this record does not fit into the territory. It creates its own turf and holds it masterfully. It's too steeped in jazz and gospel to be truly “German,” but of course it's still European through and through, enough so that more than one listener has laughed out loud. But they were laughing with pleasure.
What's more, I’ll admit in front that I have a special affinity for things that don’t quite fit into any given demarcated category, partly because I’m one of those perennial misfits myself by choice as well as fate or whatever. By profession, I am categorized as a rock critic. I’ll accept that, especially since the whole notion that one somehow has a “career” instead of just doing whatever you feel like doing at any given time has always amused me when it didn’t make me wanna vomit. O.K., I’m a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed “The Mau Maus of East Harlem,” and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: “He was promising …”). The point is that I have no idea what kind of a writer I am, except that I do know that I’m good and lots of people read whatever it is that I do, and I like it that way.
These notes may seem discursive but bear with me, we’re going somewhere, and you’re going to like it. This “career” business, like whenever somebody sees me playing music and says, “Is this going to be your new career?” always reminds me of an old Charles Bukowski story called “Would You Suggest Writing as a Career?” It's about how he gets up one morning with a terminal hangover, vomits, staggers off to make some godawful dawn flight to some Bo-Weevil U located in the Lower Left Dustbowl corner pocket where the li’l Cessna now verging on Aeroflot vomitorium is about to touch down in one of the quaintest, cutest, most dilapidatedly rustic little burbs in America: We Eat Outlanders, Utah, our nation's last remaining dry college town. After showing the great poet (it is a fact that both Genet and Sartre have called him the best writer in America) his lodgings for the evening (a gunny sack in the bottom of a defrosted ice chest), they usher him with all proper pomp, circumstance, and puncturing of left eardrums with Ticonderoga pencil lead into the Main Hall, where he commences to befoul the lobes of these assembled pilgrims who never progressed by reading about an hour and a half's worth of deadpan monotone descriptions of cunnilingus, fellatio, missionary positions (well, of sorts) with 80-year-old landladies blind in one eye and palsied on the knee and one little 4-year-old lass who I hope fervently was a product of his imagination rather than reminiscence, as well as every kind of drug-sex-drink-orgy and an exhaustive catalogue of various methods by which one may so Stradivarize the heartstrings of the L.A.P.D. that those dapper gentlemen will actually consent to put you up in a quite exclusive private club they have established for the edification of just such connoisseurs of the Cabernets and Beaujolais of Life as yourself.
The audience, who had never been past the outer rim of the Bowl in their lives, were properly appreciative of these picaresques set in such exotic locales as Pismo Beach, Hialeah, and the East L.A. Blood Donors