"Some sliver of authenticity from the truckloads of stinking garbage"

After reading Lester Bangs' collection, you have to wonder: What would the legendary critic, who believed that music mattered, make of today's Britney and P.Diddy ludicrousness?

By Andrew Leonard

Sep 3, 2003 | I was sorely tempted, after reading the first 50 pages of "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste," a new collection of ranting and raving from the late, much-lamented rock critic Lester Bangs, to pull out my old Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter from the closet where it is moldering and start BANGING away. Because you can't really pound on a computer keyboard, no matter how hard you try, and in tribute to Lester (and I feel like I can call him Lester, because I know that if I started knocking back shots of tequila with him in a seedy bar we would be on a first-name basis forever after just 10 minutes of hollering about the relative cultural significance of 'N Sync vs. the Backstreet Boys), I knew that I needed to make some NOISE, I needed to get all worked up in a frothy, gibbering frenzy of excitement and start "slashing away at the typewriter until occasionally a great clot of keys would become hopelessly entangled, would refuse to untwist and fall back into their berths from the action of my whiplash fingertips and my energy would explode in fists pounding on the frame of the machine."

I can see some blank looks out there. There are some of you reading this who are going, what the fuck? This guy is talking about a typewriter? What crypt did he just limp out of? And why should I care about a dead writer who killed himself with his own excess just like some stupid bloated '60s rock god and who has already had one collection of his writings published anyway ("Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung"), back some 15 years ago when maybe somebody still remembered who he was or his speed-and-alcohol-infused babblings retained even a modicum of relevance?

Well, I'll tell you why you should care. Because Lester cared, goddammit. Lester believed music mattered, and even in this age of facile overproduced musical commoditization, of Britney Spears and Toby Keith and p-diddy-puff-daddy ludicrousness, of manufactured controversy and preprogrammed stardom, of music-as-fashion and fashion-as-cultural-critique, even now we should still be furrowing our brows and raising our voices and slamming our fists on the table and declaiming to anyone and everyone in earshot that music still matters. Sure, it might be harder than ever before to push our way through the shrouds obscuring us from the real shit, to try to pry out some sliver of authenticity from the truckloads and truckloads of odious stinking garbage that surrounds us at every remove, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the effort. And it does mean that now, more than ever, we need Lester.

"Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste" is jampacked with Lester at both his most cogent and his most incomprehensible. Lester was not the kind of writer whose prose was amenable to careful editing -- there's a reason one of his favorite words was "emetic" -- and there are plenty of occasions when whatever cocktail of uppers and downers was impersonating his muse led him right off the deep end into swirling streams of consciousness that would make even Jack Kerouac blanch. But there are enough nuggets, enough gems lavishly strewn about to make this collection of essays, record reviews, profiles, travelogues and autobiographical tidbits essential reading.

If you're a fan already, you need this book like a junkie needs a fix. Lester on Black Sabbath is a revelation, Lester on punk is magisterial, Lester on Jamaica is a tour de force of brutal honesty. He's profound, just plain silly, incisive, and ecstatic all at the same time; when someone types as fast and as much as Lester Bangs did between 1969 and his death (at age 33, the fucker!) in 1982, a lot of ground gets covered -- from Captain Beefheart to Blondie, from Sid Vicious to Wet Willie -- tales of race and class and alienation and a kitchen sink's worth of everything else.

He can be mean. On the post-breakup Beatles: "If he [Paul] was just a little more gutsy, he might almost be Elton John"; on Jefferson Starship: "The Marin County Cocaine Casualty Musical Auxiliary"; on the entire state of California: "California has in the course of the Seventies managed to convince itself and at least part of the rest of the world that this 'pleasure,' 'happiness,' 'contentment' stuff might actually be attainable on a day-to-day basis. All you have to do is sign an affidavit forswearing forever any resistance to being a moron." (And even he couldn't have imagined Arianna vs. the Terminator!)

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