LESTER BANGS 1948-1982

LESTER BANGS 1948-1982

FEATURES

Lester Bangs—rock critic, author, part-time musician and full time personality—died on April 30th in his apartment in New York City. I can’t tell you how he died, since autopsies in this town take up to three months, and I can’t tell you why he died, since whatever did happen, it certainly was not by design. I’d spoken to him by phone earlier that day, making plans to get together over the coming weekend, and his state of health—both mental and physical—seemed the best it’d been since I’d personally known him, and that dated back to 1973.

Before ’73, I basically knew Lester Bangs the way countless others did—as readers, and as such, consequently, fans of his heartfelt, fanciful, witty, incisive and (in all senses of the word) hysterical reviews, features and essays on matters pertaining to rock ’n’ roll. His work began appearing on national publications in 1969 (while he was well on his way towards dropping out of college in Southern California, where he’d grown up), and I think the first article of his I remember reading was a review of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica in Rolling Stone that summer. It was still the infant’days of rock criticism, a time when anyone especially into the music scoured newsstands and underground bookstores for any reading material about rock ’n’ roll, and whenever you found a rock magazine back then, there was almost invariably a Lester Bangs byline somewhere inside.

In 1971, Lester ran off to Detroit to join the staff of the yet unfocused CREEM; in no time, his thoughtfully irreverent and exuberant consciousness began permeating the pages of the magazine, and it was primarily through his energies, and the excited, exciting influence he had on his co-workers, that CREEM became more than one more music-oriented publication. For the five years he worked here, each issue that was published was sure to include some Bangsian opus or other, and it was Lester’s unique ways as both a writer and thinker that made it possible for him to wax equally rhapsodic and passionate about subjects as greatly distanced as, say, the Velvet Underground, whose accomplishments he detailed and explicated in a way that even those who’d never heard them could comprehend, and the Count Five, the trashy one-hit garage band he immortalized by simply inventing the long, fruitful career they never had. To many people Lester Bangs was CRE . Though he never wrote another piece for the magazine after he left its editorial ranks in 1976, he continued to win the Readers’ Poll as rock critic of the year, just as he always had before.

During the last six years, Lester lived in New York, working hard, trying to cope—with other people,, with the big, monstrous city, with his image, with everything. The last few years had been particularly productive: he’d put his money where his mouth was by recording first a single (“Let It Blurt/Live”), then an album (Jook Savages On The Brazos), works he was proud of, and rightfully so; written a characteristically internalized biography of Blondie; co-authore~d, with friend Paul Nelson, a book on Rod Stewart; and had only recently turned in the manuscript for yet another book—this one a collaboration with rock archivist Michael Ochs—tentatively titled Rock Gomorrah. He’d started thinking seriously about putting together a collection of his older works, and he was also contemplating some time off to start on a novel, when death claimed him as an unwilling victim.

As I said before, I’d known Lester Bangs since 1973, when we met at the first (and only) rock critic convention in Memphis, Tennessee, and our relationship solidified and grew steadily as the months and years rolled on. I felt quite fortunate to have been one of his closest friends in New York, and equally fortunate that he 1) thought enough of my writing to publish me in ’73 at a time when I barely knew what I was doing at the typewriter, and 2) recommended me for the job of record review editor as he exited CREEM in ’76 when I barely knew what I was doing with other people’s copy. And yet, even if all you knew about Lester Bangs were articles that he wrote, I’d have to say that you knew him quite well, because there was really little difference between the words he wrote and those he spoke. He was, I would have to say, a true artist, someone who was their work, who was exactly the same both on and off the printed page. We all share rather equally then, jn the loss of him, just as we’re all much better off for his having been among us for awhile.

Billy Altman New York City