Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [19]
Buy this album if you’ve gotta lotta money or don’t care much what you blow your wad on, but don’t pass up any of the really cosmic stuff like the Stooges for it or the shadow of Blind Lemon Jefferson will come and blow his nose on your brow every night.
Rolling Stone, June 7, 1973
Dandelions in Still Air:
The Withering Away
of the Beatles
Name me one Sixties superstar who hasn’t become a zombie. Dylan doesn’t count, because he's been revivified, at least in terms of being a hot contender, by Blood on the Tracks. And Lou Reed is a professional zombie who can cackle in the grooves instead of up his sleeve. But Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker, Steve Stills … they’re all washed-up, moribund, self-pitying, self-parodying has-beens. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the four splintered Beatles may well have weathered the pall and decay of the Seventies the worst.
One by one, in order of descending credibility: Paul McCartney makes lovely boutique tapes, resolute upon being as inconsequential as the Carpenters which in itself may be as much a reaction to John's opposite excesses as a simple case of vacuity. You could hardly call him burnt out—Band on the Run was, in its rather vapid way, a masterful album. Muzak's finest hour. Of course he is about as committed to the notion of subject matter as Hanna-Barbera, and his cuteness can be incredibly annoying at times. If he was just a little more gutsy, he might almost be Elton John.
Lennon, as ever, seems Paul's antithesis. He’ll do anything, reach for any cheap trick, jump on any bandwagon, to make himself look like a Significant Artist. His marriage to Yoko was culture-climbing that revealed a severe and totally unexpected inferiority complex. Of course, John's been staying drunk a lot, making a public spectacle of himself with such shameless élan that Lou Reed is gonna have to hustle his ass or lose the crown: Kotexes on the forehead, standing on tables in nightclubs screaming “I’m John Lennon! I’m John Lennon!” disrupting the stage acts of his peers in a manner more befitting Iggy Pop or perhaps the famous Lenny Bruce-Pearl Bailey incident in Vegas.
Somehow you have to feel affection and even a curious sort of admiration for John as he engages in these escapades. In spite of the fact that they amount to a stance that might best be summed up as I Am Pathetic, Therefore I Am Charismatic (lifestyle is Art, said John and Yoko, so now he's Fatty Arbuckle, having left his Coke bottle on the train in A Hard Day's Night), which itself has become trite in these dunced-out and depleted times, there is a curious mangled echo of the Olden Spirit of Beatle Mischief in all this public idiocy.
His records, of course, are something else again. Paradoxically, in spite of his lurching stabs at social significance, he moves closer to Paul's mode of technically clean, spiritually piddling hackwork with each album. He sings about scars in his face on the barroom floor, but without much conviction anymore, and his instrumental surroundings are more blandly competent every time out. Walls and Bridges constituted a schlocky parody of the tortured artist writhing in a sterile sanitarium of his own design, and the fact that it reached Number One and spawned hit singles is disheartening in that it will certainly not encourage him to strive for anything