The big Bangs

In calling Reed a bibulous bozo or Jim Morrison a bozo Dionysus, Lester was really talking about himself. As he once wrote, it's "not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet." In passage after passage, whether extolling or plundering, he seemed to be examining his own foolish excesses as well as his imaginative originality. "The palooka with irony is also the nicest guy in town and man enough to show it," he once wrote of David Johansen. "It's no longer enough to be a hostile ugly yowling asshole," he said of the Dead Kennedys. He accused Miles Davis, in his electronic period, of producing"half-thawed cryogenic doodles."

The tough inquisitor sometimes seemed too gleeful about lopping off heads. But his reason for shredding records was to seek the source of the cancer running through them, "praying for a cure." Bangs wouldn't allow artists to phone in performances. He'd cite an entire catalog of albums and songs to prove his point, to hold them to higher standards. Lester insisted that his book about Blondie be unauthorized, reasoning that getting too buddy-buddy with the band would make him a recruit to the cause, whereas a lack of cooperation allowed objectivity.

Band members didn't necessarily agree. "His idea of not doing a fluff piece was being a bitch," says Chris Stein of Blondie. "We were doing a book at the same time, 'Making Tracks,' and so he got cranky about it." Stein describes a series of photos in the band's book of Lester carrying singer Debbie Harry on the beach with his hand groping her ass and his tongue hanging out. "I just think every picture is worth a thousand words," Stein says. "He criticized her for using her sexuality while lusting after her at the same time. All I can say about Lester's comments on us is that I wish he were around to see Britney Spears."

Commenting about the hypocrisy of "boy critics and the male rock 'n' roll establishment," Stein adds, "I think there was a lot of buried agenda Lester wasn't even aware of himself. And I don't know how much he believed all the stuff he was writing. I think he was just trying to stir up shit."

Questioning Blondie's steely demeanor, Bangs wrote: "The main reason we listen to music is to hear passion expressed. What does it say about us to dote on emotionally neutral art?"

When Bangs began performing with his own band, Stein recalls, his response was different. "Lester came up to Debbie after a show saying, 'Oh God, I didn't know how hard it was.'"

Bangs informed the Mekons, then a fledgling English punk band, that their music was swill. "We acknowledged it as a pretty accurate description," says guitarist Jon Langford. Impressed with the response, Bangs owned up to the send-up, and volunteered to write liner notes for the next album. He made superlative proclamations, calling the Mekons "the most revolutionary band in rock 'n' roll" and "better than the Beatles." Then Bangs added that, in fact, he'd never heard the album "and I never will." He never did, says Langford.

After cutting some drunken venom about Virgin Records, the British music magazine NME and erstwhile heroes like Brian Eno and John Lydon, Bangs' stamp of approval garnered attention, and the band reconsidered its decision to break up. (As alt-rock veterans know, the Mekons are still together today.) "Lester ruined my chances at a straight life," Langford laughs.

Bangsian spew is an acquired taste. It's not always worth slogging through 40,000 words on the Troggs. But the appeal of Lester's prose doesn't just stem from its gonzo style. Sometimes it's jazz improv or anthemic rhythmic beating or Wagnerian noise. Consider his characteristic trashing of Canned Heat as "nondescript clinkletybonk tibia-rattling in pursuit of yeehah countryisms," which got him banned from Rolling Stone magazine.

"He seemed like a frustrated songwriter," notes Robby Krieger of the Doors, not an uncommon complaint about critics. Rereading Bangs' piece on the Doors' swelling popularity a decade after Jim Morrison's death, Krieger chuckles, since another two decades later he's touring Doors repertoire with keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Reflecting on the line, "[It's] going to set rock 'n' roll standards for a long time to come," Krieger sighs: "How prophetic."

Krieger says he liked Bangs' writing, and offers faint praise: "I think he thought his articles were more sophisticated than anything he was writing about." But he takes exception to a remark about the Doors song "The End" being a joke. "Jim was funny as hell, but not with the music," he says. "That he took seriously. It was some of Jim's most introspective writing." For Lester to call Jim Morrison a buffoon, he suggests, betrayed a lack of perspective on himself.

Asserting that artists wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, Bangs showed his own demons publicly. His songs with his band Birdland voice the vulnerability that mitigated the wisecracker's pontification. Bangs' writing, says John Morthland, "was always about him, the music and his relationship to that world. They weren't separate things." At the time of his death, Lester was in transition, Morthland suggests, seeking something with as much meaning as music.

The last time I saw Lester I suggested he quit rock 'n' roll to write the Great American Novel. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," he answered. Some of his fiction is featured in the anthology, giving a clue as to what lurked within.

The various portraits of Bangs span from the kind, quirky rock guru in Cameron Crowe's film "Almost Famous" to the self-indulgent, pained poet of Jim DeRogatis' biography "Let It Blurt" and the impossible genius in the 1987 anthology "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," edited by Greil Marcus. The Bangs enigma can't reconcile his complexity -- the ridiculous romantic and earnest friend with the unruly belligerent, the irrepressible innocent with the idealistic visionary.

Beyond the inexhaustible adjectives, Lester's writing speaks volumes. I'm relieved, after all these years, to read writing that's "like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head." Grateful it's around for others to discover, I'm amazed by Lester's mercurial mind and potent insights, startled by the immediacy, clarity and substance of the prose. To be reminded how it's done. Mind you, it's still true that small doses go a long way. It's sad to wish for more too late, but this surviving legacy is some compensation for our loss of the pig and his pastry.

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