Did Lester Bangs die in vain?

There are two ways to recall Lester Bangs -- if anyone outside a small circle of friends still does -- and both of them are accurate. The man boldly called "America's Greatest Rock Critic" in the subtitle of Jim DeRogatis' fine biography, "Let It Blurt," is revealed within its pages to be a clumsy emotional mess, a difficult and unhappy person equally allergic to bathing, self-discipline and romantic stability. Whether clouded or aided by the self-destructive habits that ultimately led him to leave this world in a New York apartment in 1982, Bangs was a man whose writing talent was not always in control or on display. Hell, even the editor of "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," the 1987 anthology of Bangs' work that is now the only place to confront it, admits in his introduction that "Lester often wrote poorly, passively ... quoting lyrics rather than saying what he thought."

Curious? From a 1974 Bangs piece for Creem that has so far eluded republication: "The first time I saw Wet Willie I got excited as all hell. You would too if you were in Macon, Ga., whooping it up deep Friday night down at Grant's Lounge call of the wildest bar this side of the frontier."

But when his insights matched his energy in the '70s, Bangs could be a revelation. At his best, Bangs was one of the few rock journalists -- but by no means the only one -- who could make you feel the urgent need to hear a record you hadn't known existed, or convince you that you understood the person who recorded it.

For my money, he was no Nick Kent (see his book of collected writings, "The Dark Stuff," for evidence), Nick Tosches ("Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll" or "Hellfire") or -- when he still deigned to write about music -- Richard Meltzer, the one predecessor Bangs acknowledged as an influence. But he rarely failed to entertain, and often did a lot more in a critical realm that was still being mapped and explored for what it could add to the noise of rock 'n' roll. "Let It Blurt" largely leaves the task of fitting Bangs into the critical pantheon to those who A) give a damn and B) are willing to do independent scholarship -- which safely describes its probable readership.

For a time, Bangs' intelligence, imagination and outsize personality -- as established in Rolling Stone, amply demonstrated in Creem and then buried in the Village Voice -- made him as big a media star as many of the musicians he wrote about. Yet he came across in print as a pal on a rant about some record he'd been spinning obsessively for a week -- or a musician he'd been talking to. Injecting himself into his stories let Bangs measure and describe his unmediated responses, sharing the awe and wonder he felt at the magic he heard.

As an interviewer, Bangs swapped fandom's geeky subservience for loyal opposition. He was the courageous emissary who kept readers in touch with their increasingly remote idols. Always ready to call their bluffs, Bangs faced his subjects -- like Lou Reed, with whom he conducted a lengthy and highly amusing pissing contest -- as a peer and expected them to do the same. But after a while, Bangs' Dutch courage became journalistic shtick. As he once observed, "I didn't contrive an image for myself, although for a while in every story it seemed like, 'Lester Bangs Gets Drunk and Insults Another Pop Star.'" (It's hard not to see parallels with Andy Kaufman, who also lived and created without ever noticing the line between acting genuinely weird and being irresponsibly obnoxious.)

As Creem often noted in a small ad seeking contributors, "Nobody who writes for this rag's got anything you ain't got, at least in the way of credentials." Bangs' dowry was fealty to the Beats, who inspired his personal voice and speed-fueled meanderings, and a love of jazz, a clear template for the free-form riffage of his careening literary improvisations. DeRogatis dryly questions the legend of Bangs writing a book about Blondie -- 96 slapdash pages of photos and profile that read like an interminable fanzine ramble -- in one weekend by raising the possibility that it may in fact have taken twice that long.

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Bangs was the precociously creative son of a devout Jehovah's Witness, raised in abject cultural poverty in Southern California. The discovery of music and Romilar cough syrup was his distinctive prescription out, and his underground railway was a freelance gig reviewing records for the fledgling Rolling Stone. He finally landed a staff job with the Michigan-based Creem, where he wrote hyperbolic articles like "My Night of Ecstasy With the J. Geils Band" (which involved getting onstage with the band to type a supposed review in real time and full audience view) and "I Saw God and/or Tangerine Dream." In the late '70s, he moved to New York, wrote for various publications, started a band, spent time in Texas and then came back north and died from what DeRogatis details as an unintended overdose of painkillers.

Apr 4, 2000 | "Let It Blurt" wisely avoids sentimentality and unwarranted subjectivity, instead bearing witness to Bangs' life (especially his efforts to launch himself as a musician) with facts rather than fandom. In what has to have been a labor of love, DeRogatis manages to remain sober and levelheaded. Bangs himself was never as devoted to the careful recitation of facts, exhaustive research or rational consideration of details as this book.

Until an afterword that indulges in some posthumous speculation, a justifiable polemic against the current state of music journalism and a consideration of whether Bangs wanted to die, the book walks a steady and confident line, avoiding moralization and judgment. DeRogatis keeps literary analysis to a minimum, and makes a virtue of what might have been seen as an oversight. In the preface, DeRogatis disputes an obituary writer's assertion that "if all you knew about Lester Bangs were articles that he wrote ... you knew him quite well," and provides enough information about Bangs' love life, minor arrest record, psychiatric treatment and prostitute pals to draw extra-literary conclusions about what came out of his typewriter.

Still, other than a premature and ignominious death, it's not much of a story, insignificant beyond the tiny universe of Bangs fans and devout rock mediaphiles. DeRogatis is both, twin dedications that date back to 1982, when a high school journalism assignment led DeRogatis to interview Bangs, who dropped dead two weeks later. DeRogatis went on to become an editor at Rolling Stone and is now the prickly and high-minded pop music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. (He's also a good friend, whose strong opinions and devotions I have not always shared.) Journalism has always been one of his beats, and an avowed goal of this book is to fit Bangs into the context of the rock press by providing some history of it.

Those of us who have been part of that history will undoubtedly read this book differently -- especially since DeRogatis exercises some of his own journalistic grudges in "Let It Blurt." He finds fault with the selections made for "Carburetor Dung," suggesting that the book's editor, Greil Marcus, and his crony, Village Voice senior editor Robert Christgau (the self-professed "Dean of American Rock Critics," described by Bangs in 1974 as "a pompous asshole"), had their own agenda. (For what it's worth, Christgau merits five citations in the index of "Carburetor Dung.")

In the book's afterword, DeRogatis quotes Vanity Fair media critic James Wolcott as saying Christgau and Marcus were jealous of their colleague "because Lester really reached readers ... Bob and Greil have their followers but they don't have the intense fandom that Lester had ... You can't imagine, like: 'Jeez, I wanna hang out with Greil Marcus.'" And as a carrier of the same self-expression torch that led Bangs to be barred from Rolling Stone's pages, DeRogatis undoubtedly enjoyed recounting Bangs' disillusionment and criticisms of the magazine, where he had his own unhappy experience.

They're not the only ones in these pages with unhappy experiences. DeRogatis interviewed me for "Let It Blurt," and used an anecdote about a Ramones feature Bangs wrote in late 1978 for Trouser Press, a magazine that I co-founded. As DeRogatis reports, Bangs resold the story to England's weekly N-M-E, where it appeared first. We never asked him to write for Trouser Press again. Luckily. DeRogatis writes that Bangs "disliked Trouser Press and the New York Rocker ... and considered them havens for young careerists and shills for the industry." (Bangs' scorn did not, however, prevent him from quoting several interviews from the New York Rocker for his Blondie book.)

It is no surprise that Bangs inspired others to become rock journalists; it's a drag how many of them practiced the self-referential tale telling that was, for him, a medium for incisive criticism, not a substitute for it. (That makes it all the more surprising at the tone of this biography, which has none of the drooling anti-hero worship that might be expected from a Bangs acolyte.)

The historical tragedy, as DeRogatis notes, is how Bangs and his kind were marginalized and then ostracized by the explosion of music journalism they engendered. As Bangs discovered at the increasingly "professional" Rolling Stone, freewheeling first-person hysteria was fine until people started to take rock criticism seriously as a business. Once mainstream media got into the act, the self-invented extremists got pushed off the stage.

What was once garret zealotry -- practiced by idealists driven to spew, destroy and proselytize -- is now well-paid product-shilling, adult-dream celebrity worship written by well-funded content providers, pushed by powerful flacks and neutered by timid editors. Even the largest and most established music magazines lack the spine to disagree with their readers. So Bangs died in vain. At least he didn't live to be disgraced by it.

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I bought a Rolf Harris album off Lester Bangs once. It was at some record convention in New York, and I remember thinking it odd that a big-time rock critic -- something I myself hoped to be one day -- would be selling his records. It also bothered me a bit that "L. Bangs" was scrawled in ballpoint pen on the back cover, but I had never heard the original version of "Sun Arise," a cool song Alice Cooper had covered, and I had bought a 45 of the oddball Australian's "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" as a kid, so the buck or three seemed a worthwhile investment. It was.