Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [169]
Like those old doo-wop records that made li’l Eno's wig flapjack, these recordings serve perhaps their most important and heartening message in reminding us yet again that they can invent all the synthesizers, computers, phase shifters, distortion boxes, 980-track boards, and what have you they want—I use all that stuff myself, whenever somebody's foolish enough to let me get my hands on some of it—but there never has been and never will be any substitute for the pure soul and directness of the human voice, rolling up outta that throat so tremulously glad to be the official megaphone for that temple of unending mysteries and delights simply known as you and me. So spend those few bucks on this (if ever there was) one-of-a-kind platter, check in on these sauerbraten bashos’ stopsout pearlpure whoopup, then let yourself loose, throw back your head, and yawp out a joyful noise unto the Lord or whoever else you wanna annoy. I’ll be right there beside you.
Written 1980 as liner notes for Comedian Harmonists’
album that went unreleased until 1999.
(Published posthumously in The New York Times, September 5, 1999)
Bye Bye Sidney,
Be Good
Since he's now finally dead, and I never met him outside of watching him stumble waxen-eyed through police headquarters while I played investigative reporter for The Village Voice the day Nancy Spungen died last October, my main memory of Sid Vicious remains what it was then: something photographer Joe Stevens said to me while Johnny Rotten was staying at his apartment in the aftermath of the Pistols’ American tour almost a year ago: “Well, Sid is kinda like this giraffe you throw the pills up to. A dying child.”
Joe is a friend of mine, more or less, but I couldn’t help noting at the time how offhandedly he said those words. And believe me, I’m not saying I was less offhanded than anyone else. When Sid finally did what he had been trying to do to himself for years, I immediately called up Robert Christgau at the Voice to see if I should write about it, which might have paid my rent, although I did say that I had deeply mixed feelings. Christgau said he thought the whole matter as re the Voice should be over and done with by a couple of paragraphs he was about to write himself, and that was that. But Sid died Friday, I’m writing this on Monday, and I do feel I have something to say. I’m probably not going to pay my rent anyway till the landlord turns up the heat in here.
We all had a bit of Sid's hide I guess, but wasn’t he such a willing victim? The Gary Gilmore of rock ‘n’ roll. I was taking care of a former girlfriend who was down with bronchitis this last weekend, and she observed: “This thing has really affected you, hasn’t it?” I guess it had. So we watched the news, which locally runs for about an hour and a half in New York, and no mention of Sid. We started to joke about it: “Well, I do guess gas station fires in New Jersey and how to grow your own organic artichokes are more important.” Later we caught him doing “My Way” on Cronkite's nightly national spot. Walter told us that Sid's manager had said he was going to be “the next John Travolta” (and of course Malcolm McLaren would and did say that) but Walter, father figure to a nation of media junkies, summed it up unequivocally: “Punk rock died before Sid Vicious did.”
I thought Bob Quine of Richard Hell's Voidoids put it better back in October. I called him up after hearing Dead Boys and other CBGBites muzzle on about how death and attendant publicity might put a damper on their scene. Bob said yeah Richard was all upset. Susan Springfield of the Erasers later wrote me a letter re my Voice piece: “How can you use this poor guy to pay your rent,” etc. etc., and in fact I did use that money to pay the rent, big deal, in fact big deal to the whole thing