CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

GENIUS OF LOVE

PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG

Lester Bangs/Edited by Greil Marcus

by

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Bill Holdship

by

"Apparently nobody ever bothered to inform nine-tenths of musicians that music is about feeling passion, love, anger, joy, fear, hope, lust, EMOTION DELIVERED AT ITS MOST POWERFUL AND DIRECT IN WHATEVER FORM, rather than whether you hit a clinker in that third bar there. I frankly wouldn’t expect most musicians to be able to figure this out for themselves, as you’d think anybody could, because it is a fact that nine-tenths of the HUMAN RACE never have and never will think for themselves about anything. Whether it’s music or Reaganomics, say, almost everybody prefers to sit and wait till somebody who seems to have some kind of authority, even if it’s seldom too clear just where they got it, comes along and inform them one and all what their position on the matter should be. Then they all agree that this is gospel, and gang up to go persecute whatever minority might happen to disagree. This is the history of the human race, certainly the history of music... ”

—Lester Bangs, 1981

Lester Bangs was the greatest rock ’n’ roll writer this world has ever known. Almost anyone who’s written seriously about rock ’n’ roll or American popular culture (he once wrote that "putting ‘popular arts’ and ‘America’ in the same sentence sounds almost redundant’’) during the past 15 years owes him a debt. Of course, so many writers have done bad impersonations of him over those years, it’s sometimes hard to remember how great he really was. But he was the best. No one will ever write about music (and certain aspects of life, because that’s what he was really writing about) any better than he did. Because—screw the rock ’n’ roll part of it— Lester Bangs was one of the greatest writers the world has ever known. Period. His stuff belongs in a time capsule, as people should be able to look at Lester’s words many years from now to understand what a large part of 1970s society was really all about. Like many of the world’s greatest artists, Lester

vividly portrayed (and constantly struggled with) that thin line between nihilism and believing that something mattered. And like most of the world’s greatest,artists, Lester almost always concluded that there was something in this world worth caring about—and he wasn’t just talking about music here, but the things that music often symbolized for him: important things like emotion, compassion, love.. .life.

Throughout high school and college, I idolized Lester Bangs. I used to wait for his stuff in CREEM every month the way kids today probably wait for... uh, the latest from Motley Crue or U2. He defined rock ’n’ roll as much as any historical musical figure— and he eventually came to be a living symbol of the music itself. Through his writing, he opened up a whole world that many would have never known existed otherwise, championing then-obscure artists like Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, early Bowie, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Iggy and the list goes on. He created (directly or indirectly) the punk explosion of the late ’70s, not to mention the magazine you’re currently holding, back when CREEM was the greatest rock ’n’ roll magazine in the world.

Psychotic Reactions is Greil Marcus’s long-awaited anthology of some of Lester’s greatest hits. And there’s plenty of them here—from his legendary fictional history of the Count Five that gave the book it’s title

to the classic CREEM battles with Lou Reed, the powerful and moving Los Angeles Times tribute to John Lennon, his tragicomic retrospective of past New Year’s Eves, and the famous Village Voice Elvis obituary which remains the second greatest Presley piece ever written. Marcus has done a fine job here; Psychotic Reactions is a wonderful tribute to his deceased friend. Of course, most Bangs fans will undoubtedly think of omissions, be it his infamous CREEM interview with the then-dead Jimi Hendrix, a review of The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl that appeared in Circus, his “rock is dead” statements in the 1981 Village Voice critics’ poll, his description of “rock as art” in the Blondie book, or perhaps an article that you discovered in some obscure magazine somewhere that spoke directly to your personal pains, pleasures and passions. The book also excludes his earliest record reviews for Rolling Stone, which reveal how straightforward his approach was when he was first honing his craft.

But you can’t include everything, and as Marcus makes clear in his beautiful introduction: “This book is my version of the work Lester Bangs left behind. It is not a summary, or a representative selection, but an attempt to make a picture of a man creating a view of the world, practicing it, facing its consequences, and trying to move on... What I have done is to try and find the work that at once stands on its own and tells a story. One can read this book as an anthology, skipping from here to there and back again, but a story is what it is to me: the story, ultimately, of one man’s attempt to confront his loathing of the world, his love for it, and to make sense of what he found in the world and himself.” And he succeeds splendidly.

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Perhaps it’s because I’m older now, but what I found most ironic in reading Psychotic Reactions is how much Lester grew and evolved as a writer after he left CREEM. Don’t get me wrong—the CREEM stuff is still thought-provoking, hilarious, brutally honest and prophetic (it’s especially amazing to read this book and rediscover how much he saw, foresaw and understood, whether it was about Geraldo Rivera, Bob Seger, Teddy Roosevelt or David Bowie)... but the world just seems so different now. Lester came of age at a time when it was possible to really care about popular music. (I mean, can you imagine having your life saved by Bon Jovi or Madonna?) At any rate, the post-CREEM material (the aforementioned Elvis obit, a piece on racism in punk, etc.) now strikes me as the mature work of a man coming to terms with life.

The best thing about Psychotic Reactions is its inclusion of some previously unpublished work, including an apt assessment of his own career and image written right before his death, and a short story entitled “Maggie Mae” which relates the fictional events that led to Rod Stewart writing the song of the same title plus a whole lot more written between the lines. Very best of all are some unpublished notes for his review of Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway: Journals & Arrivals Of American Musicians. Earlier,

I mentioned that Lester’s Elvis obituary was the second best thing written about Presley—and that’s only because this is probably the best, no matter how much it will undoubtedly offend some of Elvis’s more dogmatic fans. Lester fantasizes that they’ve exhumed Elvis’s body for another autopsy— and he manages to ingest the fatal drugs that were in Elvis by eating part of the rotting corpse, thereby fulfilling the ultimate Elvis fan fetishism, not to mention a premise straight out of Freud’s Primal Horde theory.

I mean, this is literally eating the King. And because you are what you eat, Lester becomes Elvis, going off on a stream-of-consciousness ramble that’s part Lester/part Elvis, focusing on the thoughts that must have been going through Presley’s mind on that fateful night. It’s both horrifying and hilarious, and nowhere has the Elvis psyche been more ingeniously portrayed or examined. You almost feel you now understand something that isn’t understandable.

I remember reading a CREEM review Lester wrote of Helen Reddy’s follow-up LP to “I Am Woman” (Bangs on feminism) to my fellow students in a college English class. Everyone had to pick a magazine to report on, and I’d chosen CREEM. At least half this class probably knew very little nor cared much about music and popular culture, and yet every single person in that room (professor included) was in stitches. I’m talking tears running down your face and

pounding your desk in hysterical laughter here. Lester had a power to do that kind of thing. The fact that he is dead is not just one of the great tragedies of rock ’n’ roll, but of American literature in general.

The following is a previously unpublished letter CREEM received from a young woman named Sharon Huggett a month and a half after Lester’s death:

“This morning I discovered that Lester Bangs had died this past April. I am surprised with my returning thoughts of the rock critic turned rocker. I have hated Lester Bangs for the past eight years, ever since his March 74 slagging of mega-techno rockers Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Eight years ago, I was 14 years old. That my parents allowed me to read CREEM is phenomenal. My being so moved to hatred by the Bangs ELP article is awesome. At 14,1 knew very little—all I knew was that I loved ELP and that Lester Bangs had cut them to the ground.

“Yet Bangs intrigued me. I continued to read his articles. I found them to be entertaining and strange. Still, I hated him. Now he is dead, and I am strangely saddened. Once more, Bangs has stunned me. One year of college with a cultural mirror for an English teacher has taught me many things which contribute to my current melancholy.

“Lester Bangs wrote with brutal honesty. If a band needed a slap in the face or a kick in the ass, Bangs never hesitated to administer it. If they didn’t like it—tough. If they learned something from it—excellent. Bangs was witty, innovative and versatile with a spark of genius. With Bangs, if you understood him, you either loved or hated him. I chose to hate him, but I admit he was right. ELP’s 1977 orchestrated orgasm destroyed them.

“Lester Bangs was the critic as artist. The death of Lester Bangs is a loss to all of us— those who loved him and those who hated him.”

Buy this book. Make it possible for Volumes II, III and so forth to be published. most imitated. None of this, however, guarantees that Chuck Berry is capable of turning out a whole dadgum book, right?

BROWN-EYED HANDSOME MAN

CHUCK BERRY THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Harmony Books)

by Jon Young

Sure, he’s the source of such seminal rock ’n’ roll tunes as “Maybellene,” “Memphis,” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Sure, he had a profound influence on the Beatles and Stones, among a zillion others. Sure, he’s arguably the greatest rock guitarist of all time and certainly the

Good news, pardners. The Autobiography is a fascinating, quirky self-portrait that never fails to entertain, even though it raises as many questions as it answers. “Entirely written, phrase by phrase” by the man himself, this offbeat tome delivers a mass of information in nearly 300 pages of text, ranging from his family’s roots in pre-Civil War slavery days right through the present. In addition to the expected inside dope on those great songs, it recounts Berry’s behind-the-scenes encounters with the ugliness of racism and the perfidy of crooked businessmen, not to mention functioning as a catalogue of his numerous—and I mean numerous—sexual exploits.

Though driven by an obsession with music, which he relates in a curiously matterof-fact tone, ol’ Chuck seems to have been compelled even more by the urge to grab for all the carnal gusto he could get. Around the age of three, insists Berry, he found his passionate yearning first stirred by the family nurse. “My mother’s nurse had a profound effect on the state of my fantasies and settled into the nature of my libido,” he recalls. As a teenager, he couldn’t wait to earn his stud merit badge. As an adult pop star, Berry cheerfully entered into encounters

with all manner of willing females, reported here in sometimes embarrassing detail.

Well, cheap thrills are a given in rock ’n’ roll, of course. But Berry also says he’s been a happily married man for more than three decades. So what’s the deal? Apart from noting that some of his early infidelities upset his wife, he makes no attempt to reconcile the roles of tomcat and husband. Guess it’s just the old male ego in full regalia.

Happily, the same playful feel for language that elevates his greatest works keeps Berry’s lusty tales from growing too stale or distasteful. “I was overwhelmed by her interest and would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can,” he volunteers at one point. Elsewhere, remembering a botched encounter with a white woman in Mississippi, he says, “I wanted to go for the southern up-to-date experience but the forecast was too cloudy and the white man was still holding the reins.” (Berry’s discretion tended to fade quickly, however, eventually leading to his imprisonment on Mann Act charges.) But just when you’re getting heartily sick of his macho escapades, Chuck manages to restate the obvious in charming, courtly fashion—for example, he concedes, “I have always been subject to the sight of the female anatomy reaching my retina and taxing my tolerance.”

The shadow of white America hangs over The Autobiography the way clouds intrude on a sunny day. Barely hinting at what must be a consuming rage, he recalls arriving to play a date and being turned away when the redneck promoters discovered this whitesounding artist was black. As a child, he concocted a disturbing rhyme that went in part, “If you’re white, you’re all right.. .If you’re brown, don’t come ’round, and if you’re black just stay back.” Make no mistake, there’s a deep reservoir of pent-up feeling in this complex man.

Writes Berry, “I feel safe in saying that NO white person can conceive the feeling of obtaining Caucasian respect in the wake of a world of dark denial.” For, while he expresses pride in his family’s heritage, and champions racial equality, he’s also spent much of his life seeking acceptance on white terms. Most of his “girlfriends” have been white, as he takes pains to note, and he admits calculating many songs to appeal to a white audience first. Nowhere, though, does Berry confront his ambivalence headon, preferring to walk the line between two worlds, just the way Jimi Hendrix did later.

Oh yeah, there’s plenty of music talk to go with all this sexual and sociological stuff, though probably not enough to satisfy us hardcore Berryphiles. Citing early favorites like Lonnie Johnson, Gene Autry(l), T-Bone Walker, and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, he recalls learning guitar licks from an admirer of the great Benny Goodman, axeman Charlie Christian. Berry credits Muddy Waters with being the prime inspiration in launching his career, describing the thrill of his first encounter with the godfather of the blues as comparable to meeting the president or the pope.

Stone Chuckaholics will get the biggest charge from the stories behind the creation of the songs themselves. Betcha didn’t know, for example, that Muddy was the inspiration for “Johnny B. Goode.” Or that “No Particular Place To Go” and “Promised Land,” two of his best, were composed while languishing in the slammer. But everything he reveals ends up being more tantalizing than fulfilling. He says next to nothing about the recording sessions themselves, or about his ’50s contemporaries. There’s no allusion to the notorious onstage rumble with Jerry Lee Lewis chronicled in Nick Tosches’ outlandish book on country music. And what does he think of the Stones, who owe him next to everything? Chuck gives ’em only a passing, albeit benign, mention. Maybe in another volume.

A curious fellow, this teetotalling libertine. He can speak unflinchingly of his three jail terms, then coyly express amazement that he gets paid for doing what he’s thrilled to do anyway. Absorbing yet maddening, The Autobiography has the same idiosyncratic bent that enabled him to direct the course of rock ’n’ roll, while Elvis played the pitchman. So when Chuck comments, in his odd way, “I’m truly writing this book, I hope you’re enjoying it,” we can only answer, “Very, very, Mr. Berry.”

Now somebody let this genius make another record, OK?

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