Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [2]
All of this has, finally (and thankfully), made it possible for American culture to take Lester more seriously as a writer. But that's come at a price, and it's one that Lester himself often wrote about. The best-known, bull-in-a-china-shop Lester—who was always dangerously loaded, who could be so insulting and malicious as well as self-destructive, who could be oblivious to the people around him, who was a Falstaffian clown and then grimly serious most of the time—the kind of guy, in short, some unfortunates like to live through vicariously—has stuck in the public fancy. The Lester who could stay up hours calmly giving or taking personal advice, who could be deferential and accommodating and even accept rebuke and try to act on it constructively who seemed neither doomed nor damned though certainly driven, who had an expansive lust for life and a sense of humor and (sometimes even, and for no apparent reason) cheerfulness to match it, who could actually be counted on, dammit, has become even more obscure than he was while alive. To some extent this is inevitable, especially in someone as contradictory and conflicted as Lester. And certainly nobody in his right mind could minimize the former Lester; he was there for everyone to see, is well documented in these pages, and did, make no mistake, manage to kill himself accidentally at age thirty-three. But if nothing else, I hope that making so much of his work available again will, in addition to reconfirming that he was one of the most worthy chroniclers of his times, illuminate once again the Lester who made a pretty good friend. And as long as he's receiving all this added recognition, I’d like it to extend to his work again, too. Given that one of his pet themes concerns romanticizing, or reducing to their most colorful caricature, pop figures (especially those who die young) rather than looking harder at the totality of their lives and the work that brought them to prominence in the first place, it's the very least a book such as this should do. Especially for those readers who weren’t around at the time.
More than a few of Lester's friends and fans were instrumental in bringing this anthology to fruition. Ben Catching, who is Lester's nephew and the executor of his estate, signed the necessary documents to make it happen and then, as always, turned me loose to handle it as I saw fit. Ben and his wife Midge, their daughter Karen Hildebrandt and her husband Tom and their son Matty, have all been good friends and good hosts to me when I visited, and I’ve also come to know Lester even better through them. As the estate's literary coexecutor (along with myself), Billy Altman has helped handle Lester's affairs for two decades now and likewise pitched in on various aspects of this project.
As editor of Lester's first posthumous collection, Greil Marcus is a mighty tough act to follow. But he made my job easier by providing all manner of practical advice and encouragement and serving as a conscientious sounding board when that was what I needed.
Many of the pieces in this book were first gathered by Greil from various sources when he began compiling Carburetor Dung back in the Eighties, and he thanked those people in the Introduction and Acknowledgments to that book; since I used ‘em too, I second that emotion. Quite a few more of Lester's writings have been unearthed in the years since then, and for getting those manuscripts and letters to me or putting me in touch with people who had them