FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved
Books
by James MartinLET IT BLURT: THE LIFE & TIMES OF LESTER BANGS, AMERICA'S GREATEST ROCK CRITIC
by Jim DeRogatis
Broadway/Random House, 331 pp.A WHORE JUST LIKE THE REST
by Richard Meltzer
Da Capo, 591 pp.THE NICK TOSCHES READER
by Nick Tosches
Da Capo, 593 pp.Lester Bangs wrote about music, but to say he was merely a "music writer" is to fall horribly short of the mark. Until his death at age 33, Bangs conducted a one-man search for Soul with both hands, a flashlight and millions of cough syrup-soaked words. It only looked like he was reviewing Guess Who records.
In 1982, a precocious New Jersey high school kid set off for Manhattan to fulfill an "interview your hero" assignment for journalism class. At the time, Jim DeRogatis had no idea he would end up playing Boswell to Lester Bangs's Johnson – two weeks after the interview (before the kid had even turned in his paper!), years of substance abuse finally caught up to the legend's tired body.
DeRogatis went on to write about music for a living (he's the Chicago Sun-Times pop-music critic, and author of the psychedelic primer Kaleidoscope Eyes), never able to shake his meeting with Lester Bangs. Now, hundreds of interviews later, he delivers Let It Blurt.
It's no surprise that Lester Bangs sprang forth from a positively bizarre test tube: a Jehovah's Witness upbringing under the thumb of a domineering mother, a hard-drinkin' dad who mysteriously burned to death, teenage self-reinvention as a suburban Beat/beatnik hipster, an early (and lifelong) love for ’60s garage rawk and pharmaceuticals, and a pair of burning desires: (1) to capture music's power and rhythm on the printed page, and (2) to get the hell outta El Cajon, California.
Bangs's drive would take him to Michigan's Creem magazine and eventually New York City. Along with fellow scribes Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches and (to a lesser degree) John Mendelssohn, Bangs offered a firecracker antidote to the detached, academic musings of the so-called rockcrit "deans" (Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus). Dubbed the "noise boys" – in reference to both wild writing styles and a penchant for rowdy drinking and public urination (not even the gates of Graceland were safe from the latter) – Bangs and Co. parlayed the everyday rhythms of the street into smart, funny stuff that was dimensions away from the teenybop press-release prose which had previously defined pop music writing. Bangs's writings, especially his well-documented battles with too-kindred spirit Lou Reed ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," "How To Succeed In Torture Without Really Trying") bring to mind the Bukowski title Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit: impassioned, powerful, loud and messy.
Jim DeRogatis's prose takes a respectful backseat to that of his subject; when you're dealing with the madman behind lines like "tapdancing on the doorman's spats, stuffing a bulbous gherkin up ya sainted mudda's snooker," it would be futile to attempt otherwise. (The quote is from a Slade review, not that it much matters.) Like any good literary bio, Let It Blurt leaves the reader hungry to read its subject's writings. The posthumous Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung (1987) is a good start, but Bangs left such a huge body of uncollected work (magazine writings, unfinished books – plus surprisingly good but out-of-print books about Blondie and, errrr, Rod Stewart) that he deserves an anthology that at least aims to be exhaustive, no matter how impossible the task. Let It Blurt does, however, offer up one never-published nugget. "How To Be A Rock Critic" is funny and bitter, and offers some small insight into a complex man who was disgusted by the record industry yet dressed almost exclusively in promo T-shirts.
(There are signs that Let It Blurt is just the beginning of a LesterMania groundswell, and Bangs may yet get his full due. Cameron Crowe's upcoming, as-yet-untitled film is an autobiographical account of the writer/director's formative brushes with the legend, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as L.B.)
Richard Meltzer's A Whore Just Like The Rest ostensibly collects 30-plus years of "music writings," but as DeRogatis notes in Let It Blurt, "Meltzer wrote mostly about Meltzer, though sometimes he strayed from that subject long enough to address... various musical and cultural phenomena." As a writer, Bangs admitted a huge debt to his friend, and he's not alone: Meltzer's slangy, abbreviation-heavy, Beat-influenced prose singlehandedly revamped ’70s rock writing, and he may be the most copied stylist this side of Raymond Carver. Furthermore, he's cut a Forest Gumpian swath through 30 years of pop culture, writing the first American interview with Hendrix (asked an amused Jimi: "You were stoned when you wrote that, right?"), and co-founding Blue Öyster Cult (and in doing so gave unto rock ’n’ roll the gift of the mighty umlaut). Once you clue into the guy, he shows up in the darndest places.
(Ironically, given Meltzer's perpetual obscurity, pages 81-160 of the new collection are missing. Can't this guy ever catch a break?)
If you're already a fan, A Whore Just Like The Rest is essential, especially for legendary pieces like "Poems In Neil's Suede Pocket," in which the author reviews a concert he never attended, quoting his own poetry ("she insists / it's imported swiss") as that of Neil Young. Meltzer isn't for everyone, and if you don't dig "reviews" that confuse Railroad Jerk with Roland Kirk ("Even after a stroke paralyzed one side of his body, Jerk, by then billing himself as Rahsaan Railroad Jerk, courageously carried on"), if you're adverse to over-capitalization ("...we the peoples of N. York say GOOD RIDDANCE LIMEY DOGS!"), if intentionally clunky prose ("Wheaties now has larger flakes but there are no larger flakes than Marty Balin") makes your hair stand on end, then just keep movin'.
By virtue of being (a) well-paid and (b) not dead, Nick Tosches is easily the most successful "noise boy." He's earned a name (and big publisher advances) by writing two-fisted biographies of toughs like Dean Martin, Michele Sindona and Jerry Lee Lewis, and has a fallen choirboy's knack for wringing Old Testament drama from his subject matter. (Ditto for his two mob novels, Trinities and Cut Numbers.)
The Nick Tosches Reader contains excerpts from all his books – great reads each and every one, but mostly still in print and easily obtained. The Reader's real gold is Tosches' early material, previously uncollected magazine work that's fallen into the cracks of time. It's fascinating to see how Tosches (as writer) got to where he is today. Whereas Meltzer has stayed the same throughout his career (not to say he hasn't improved or that he's gone stale), Tosches no longer gives in to the goofy antics and tangents that characterize his cohorts' writings. But back in the good old days of public urination, Tosches was capable of writing a top-notch review of a non-existent album ("On the lighter, though no less arcane, side, there's 'Soft Leather Sphinctres'") and offering gap-toothed tips for a Reader's Digest version of the Bible (suggestions include "lighten up on the broads" and "tell us more about Jesus – hobbies, pet peeves, favorite color, that sort of thing"). Happily, the book concludes with a minuscule excerpt from the forthcoming novel In The Hand Of Dante – 12 words, and one of ’em is "bra" – proving that noise boys may get older, but (bless ’em) they never completely grow up.
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