Pills and thrills
He was called the world's greatest rock writer. Twenty years ago this month, he swallowed a cocktail of drugs, fell into a coma and died. Nick Kent remembers the brilliant, tortured Lester BangsNick Kent
GuardianFriday April 12, 2002
Although his name is already starting to be listed among the ranks of the elite late 20th-century literary trailblazers, Lester Bangs - the fragile-hearted, drunken bozo word-magician who took rock criticism to a giddy height of vicarious readability - had not published a single book of outstanding merit before his death on April 30, 1982, from an accidental drug overdose, at the age of 33. He had put his name to two quickie rock biographies of Blondie and Rod Stewart - both entertaining, but scarcely ground-breaking modern literature - that have long been out of print.
Bangs's untimely death gave him a literary credibility he was unable to attain during his lifetime. His only available work, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - a posthumous anthology of articles from magazines and previously unpublished rantings, edited by Greil Marcus - has been selling steadily since 1988, the same year his name was blurted out adoringly by Michael Stipe on REM's It's the End of the World. Since then Bangs has become a rock myth, a typewriter-trashing Jim Morrison who helped invent the whole punk rock aesthetic.
Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century, the curious cult of Bangs has gained many converts. Kurt Cobain's diaries, soon to be published, include long passages in which the Nirvana singer directly addresses Bangs's spirit, seeking advice on how to become a better musician. The year 2000 saw the publication of his first biography, Let It Blurt - The Life and Times of Lester Bangs by Jim Derogatis. Shortly after it was published came the release of the film Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's autobiographical account of his time as a teenage writer for Rolling Stone, when he was guided by Bangs's downbeat and invariably intoxicated words of wisdom. Bangs, if he were he still alive, would certainly have had reservations about being depicted in a film where the spirit of 1970s rock'n'roll is evoked through a scene in which a fictional rock band bond on their tour bus by singing along to an Elton John track. Nevertheless, Philip Seymour Hoffman pulls off a complicated feat by letting us see Bangs's big romantic chump heart beating under his belligerent-looking black leather jacket and ragingly cynical rhetoric.
When you watch Hoffman as Bangs - hungover and chain-smoking in a cramped apartment, yet selflessly shepherding a 15-year-old reporter through his first breakthrough feature - you are suddenly face to face with the full measure of the man: the tender-hearted, penetratingly intelligent, infuriatingly illogical individual behind the gonzo fright-mask. Bangs's friend, the great contemporary writer Nick Tosches, captured the essence of Lester better than most when he wrote, some years after Bangs's death: "Behind all the new-wave bad boy infamy, he was Paul Anka's 'Lonely Boy', an innocent, a country bumpkin...He was a romantic in the gravest, saddest, best and most ridiculous sense of that worn-out word. He couldn't merely go to bed with a woman; he had to fall in love with her. He couldn't merely dislike something; he had to rail and rage against it. None of it was real but in the end, the phantoms of all that crazy love and anger, since they weren't his to command, conquered him."
He was born Leslie Conway Bangs on December 13, 1948, at Escondido Community Hospital in southern California. His mother Norma was a fanatical Jehovah's Witness who took her son with her most weekdays as they went from door to door, trying to convince their neighbours of an imminent apocalypse with placards reading "What Is Your Destiny?" and "Do You Know What Time It Is?" His father, Conway, was an ex-jailbird who couldn't control his taste for alcohol; he was affectionate towards his son but often disappeared for weeks at a time on ruinous drinking binges.
In 1957 he vanished, never to be seen again. "Your father is dead," Norma Bangs told her nine-year-old boy during a car ride in an eerily emotionless voice. "He burned in a fire, but don't worry, he had The Watchtower and Awake! beside his bed. He'll be all right because in the end he was with God." When Bangs was 11, a middle-aged man living in a trailer coerced him into having sex on a number of occasions in exchange for bubble gum and comic books. "Everybody comes from a fucked-up family," Bangs used to say to anyone who blamed their personal misfortunes on bad parenting. "I'm the living example of not using that as an excuse."
Bangs became obsessed with music at the start of the 1960s. He later wrote: "My most memorable childhood fantasy was to have a mansion with catacombs underneath containing, alphabetised in endless winding dimly-lit rows, every album ever released." His tastes ranged from soundtracks to jazz. "It all started with Miles [Davis] for me," he would claim. "Birth of the Cool and Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain: music from depths of feeling few men can touch."
At that time, rock'n'roll held no interest at all for him. "For me it was always Mingus - Mingus and Kerouac. Those were my saints." When he first heard bassist Charlie Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he later recalled experiencing the divine cacophony of "babies being born, taxicabs honking, couples fighting, the cries of lonely anguish that no one else hears in solitary rooms, children laughing, insurgents and guerrillas clashing, people of all sorts crying, shouting and whooping for joy, stunned at the crossroads, and some of them dying."
Bangs worshipped the Beat generation. It was his greatest regret in life that he had not been born 10 years earlier, so that he too could have been a dharma bum roaming wild around 1950s America in the company of charismatic wild cards like Neal Cassady. "Kerouac came roaring down each new highway like a man possessed," Bangs would later enthuse. "Moving on not from a sense of disenchantment, but with a voracious and insatiable hunger for experience." At 13 he changed his first name from Leslie to Lester because he felt it made him sound more masculine, and took a class in creative writing. He began churning out short stories that clumsily aped the deadpan ghoulishness of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. "I used to dream about a critic writing somewhere that I was possessed of a demonic style, burning with insane ferocity," he wrote. "But where to score demonic ferocity in the ice-cream and television world of El Cajon, California?"
In January of 1964, Bangs heard the Beatles for the first time and immediately lost his jazz-snob detachment from pop culture. The Rolling Stones were an even greater revelation - "a supernatural visitation, a cataclysmic experience of Wagnerian power that transcended music". Living with his apocalypse-obsessed mother was beginning to feel "like being wrapped in wax paper on the shelf of some musty, overheated old thrift shop". He got himself banned from the local chapter of the Jehovah's Witnesses and embarked on a two-year spree of drug-taking that nearly turned him into a teenage vegetable.
After being forced to witness a grotesque gang rape at a Hell's Angels party, Bangs vowed to straighten out and began studying journalism, only to drop out of college just before his 20th birthday. He briefly played harmonica with a rock band known as Thee Dark Ages. In early 1969, he wrote a negative review of the MC5's debut album Kick Out the Jams and sent it to Rolling Stone's San Francisco offices, accompanied by a letter that - as he later recalled - read: "Look, fuckheads, I'm as good as any writer you've got in there. You'd better print this or give me the reason why!" To his amazement, "they actually printed it. That was the beginning."
Bangs contributed a number of provocative reviews for the magazine, and did a remarkable job reporting on what it was like to be one of the crowd at the Rolling Stones' notorious Altamont free concert. However, the editor, Jann Wenner, never believed in him as a writer and refused to let him loose on any major features. Bangs turned to other outlets, most notably Creem, a monthly rock magazine launched in Detroit in 1970. The editor welcomed his increasingly eccentric rantings about music and never changed a word. Truly mind-boggling texts bearing Bangs's byline started to appear - his appreciation of the Troggs, for example. It ran to almost 40,000 words. Sometimes he would simply invent a record or a film and then devote thousands of words to describing its bizarre appeal.
As a lover of music, Bangs had excruciatingly limited taste. He didn't have much time for the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds because their songs were too serene and joyful. Bob Dylan held little interest for him. Instead, he worshipped the Velvet Underground and the Stooges for the way their music openly addressed life's ugliest aspects.
In late 1971 Bangs left his mother's California home to live in Creem's communal household in Michigan. Eighteen months later I met him for the first time. Like Cameron Crowe, I had been deeply inspired by Bangs's singular approach to music-writing at the outset of a new decade. As a teenager I had read all the so-called major rock critics of the era, such as Greil Marcus and Paul Williams, but their stylistic range was too limited; they wrote about music. Bangs was different. What he wrote was invariably deeply musical in itself. His paragraphs all had a driving, relentless beat and a keen sense of poetic flow that mirrored a great jazz saxophonist madly improvising mercurial melodies one after the other. Also, unlike his critical peers, he could be wickedly funny.
In January 1973 I flew to Michigan, using money I had made writing features for the New Musical Express, and went straight to the house Bangs shared with other Creem staffers. I told him I needed him to teach me how to write to the best of my capabilities. His response was typically generous. "OK then," he said, and for the next two months I became like his shadow, accompanying him around Motor City in his broken-down car that smelled of stale beer.
Many nights we'd drive all the way to Canada - he had a girlfriend living there - and I listened spellbound as he spoke for hours about such crucial issues as love, life, art and the best products to buy over-the-counter from American pharmacies to get rid of a bad hangover. When a deadline loomed, Bangs would take speed and lock himself away for long, frantic spells. By the time he had finished, his room would look - and smell - like a bullfight had just been staged in it. He was one of the funniest men I ever knew. He could make a room full of people laugh so hard and helplessly they'd beg him to stop because they were in too much pain.
By the same token, Lester Bangs was one of the loneliest people who ever walked the face of the earth. He was like a needy kid around women, and rarely managed to sustain a relationship for more than a few weeks. Like his father, he struggled with chronic alcoholism all his adult life, a condition not helped by his simultaneous abuse of tranquillisers and painkillers. He had a little army of admirers writing him fan letters from obscure suburban towns, but the people he really wanted to connect with were the musicians he revered in print - many of whom regarded him with baleful contempt. I went with Bangs to his interview with Lou Reed, his ultimate hero, in the spring of 1973; Reed could hardly bear to sit in the same room with him. Shortly afterwards his beloved Iggy Pop called him a fool to his face and told him to shut up on their first meeting.
Bangs wanted to be viewed as a great writer, yet he was gaining notoriety as a gonzo journalist - a phrase he couldn't stomach, because it reminded him too much of his nemesis Hunter S Thompson. He was wasting his time writing about people who looked down on him as though he were a disturbed stalker.
In 1977 Bangs left Creem and moved to Manhattan, just as the punk-rock revolution pioneered by the Ramones and Television was starting to create media interest. Bangs rightly saw himself as an ersatz patron saint of the movement - he had been calling for a punk uprising in popular music since the end of the 1960s - but had a hard time getting accepted by this extremely image-conscious new breed. "When I think of Lester," Richard Hell would later recall, "I see a big, swaying, cross-eyed, reeking drooler, smiling through his crummy stained moustache and trying to corner me with incessant babble somewhere in the dark at CBGB. He was sweet like a big clumsy puppy, but he was always drunk and the sincerity level was pretty near intolerable. All you could do was tease him and use him."
Bangs hoped that New York would provide him with the inspiration to write the literary masterpiece his admirers were all waiting to read, but by the late 1970s his drinking and drug abuse were destroying too many brain cells. He became a regular contributor to the weekly Village Voice, for which he wrote some of his finest work. However, he still complained to his friends that "ever since I left Creem, I don't have the close one-to-one contact with my audience that I enjoyed there". He formed a group called Birdland and wrote songs with Robert Quine, a brilliant guitar player who went on to work with Richard Hell and Lou Reed. He enrolled in a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous but kept on binge-drinking. He moved to Texas but returned to New York in an even worse state than he'd left. He just couldn't seem to grow up.
As the 1980s began, Bangs still lived alone in a bear pit of debris and booze-soaked vinyl, like an adolescent kid who had just moved out of his parents' house. In 1981 a fire raged through his Manhattan apartment and he narrowly escaped his father's fate by running for the door in his underpants. He spent most of that year researching and writing a book entitled Rock Gomorrah. On the day he completed the final draft and delivered it to the publishers, Bangs, despite feeling as though he was coming down with a flu bug, was determined to celebrate. He was alone as he washed back a number of pills - Valium and Darvon, an over-the-counter cold remedy - expecting to sink into a sweet chemical daze. Instead the pills catapulted him into a coma from which he never awoke. It was a shockingly senseless way to die.
Had he lived, Bangs might have sorted out his substance abuse problems, found a tender-hearted soul mate, left the self-involved rock'n'roll circus far behind and moved to the country, where he might have written several mind-blowing novels, for which he would be hailed as one of America's pre-eminent literary geniuses. At least, it would be nice to think so. But Bangs was never going to find that state of inner peace and spiritual balance, because of his childhood experiences. His therapist even told him that the reason he adored such extreme rock music, dripping with feedback, was because the sound directly triggered images of his father burning alive in his imagination.
Certainly, rock criticism has never recovered from his passing. The genre quickly fragmented - much like the music it was reporting on - and most of the old school became content to pen windy, academic appreciations of their old favourites: the Beatles, Hendrix, the Sex Pistols, etc. No one wanted to rock the boat anymore or kick up the dust like Bangs used to. No one has tried to take his place, because they all recognise that what he achieved was unique and impossible to duplicate. His detractors will tell you he was just an overrated drunk, but they said the same thing about Jack Kerouac. Bangs and Kerouac were genuine soul-brothers from different eras - both damaged by suffocating mothers, both obsessed with music and literature as twin avenues for spiritual transcendence, both chronic alcoholics and hopeless romantics incapable of sustaining a healthy love affair. Kerouac saw God's face in the sculpted mountains of Big Sur; Bangs heard God's voice in the feedback orgies of Sister Ray.
"I'll probably never produce a masterpiece," he once proclaimed. "But so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning which is my own and that Sound - if erratic - is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer than write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere re-reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows towards one last raving feedback pirouette."
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