THE LESTER LETTER

Dear Barry:

I am writing this (editing and typing it up) about two weeks after I began it so some parts may seem dated or confusing now (especially since I just realized the time is stretching to a month after I started it...ah well, Finnegan’s Wake wasn’t born in day...and this is much easier to read; entertaining, instructive, even), but bear with me.

A lot of it refers to things that you have in the past month or so said to me, that I have heard you say to [CREEM managing editor Robert] Duncan, and that Duncan has told me you said, and so on.

There is no crisis or hostility involved, so relax. I would be delighted to have a personal meeting with you, at the earliest possible convenience and totally in terms of your schedule, should you feel there are any matters of mutual interest which we need to discuss. I really enjoy talking to you, because I find you a stimulating, provocative, ofttimes brilliantly aphoristic (we can have our cake and eat it, too!) conversationalist.

However, as you know I am extremely busy, so unless the need for actual talk is really pressing, I will have to excuse myself from conference. And even if you do want to talk to me, which my feelings will not be hurt if you don’t, I know that owing to your understandable human need to express yourself fully you will do at least 75% of the talking, so please excuse this impersonal form of reply but here is a bulletin on current developments in the worlds of Bangs/CREEM:

1. Concerning your midnight letter to me (somewhere around New Year’s and a bottle of VSOP), I want you to know that I was deeply, personally moved, and since I can’t find a way to work it into my next Lou Reed article and Screw said they weren’t interested in publishing it, I shall file it among my mementoes.

You will make some lucky tyke a wonderful father someday.

2. Speaking of tykes, reminds me to tell you that my own wedding plans, which are set for summer and no big to-do, will have absolutely no bearing upon my feelings re my position at CREEM, in other words if you were worried about me splitting after the nuptials, forget it.

I’m in this thing too deep. I would like to take a threeto four-week paid vacation for my honeymoon, which I am sure you will agree I deserve anyway, since I haven’t had a real (non-PR) vacation since December 1973, three years ago. I think Nancy and I may go out to California so I can introduce her to the folks and all that, plus pick up whatever stray cash they may wish to palm our way, of course. But, I reiterate, we will most certainly be back.

Since you got drunk and wrote your maudlin midnight missive to me, I will lay a little secret on you—there are times that I feel that I am so deeply involved in this thing (CREEM, rock ’n’ roll, and writing) that I fiercely love, that I wonder if it doesn’t depersonalize me in terms of other relationships, particularly with the woman I plan to marry.

Also, even though there are times that I despise you to the marrow, I remember a certain time in Memphis when a certain past (thank god) chick had me more fucked up than I’ve probably ever been before or since, and you came through as a true friend. Thank you.

3. I don’t know if this means anything to you, and I’ll cut your head off if you ever throw it up to me, but I have recently been turning down or welching out on freelance assignments because almost 100% of my energies are being channeled into CREEM. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I am not as affluent as I used to be.

You may have noticed, however, that we do have a better magazine. In fact, I think that with some very minor exceptions, the April issue may just be both the best issue aesthetically and the biggest single seller we have ever had. I’ve been telling everybody it’s a killer.

Meanwhile, I know you know I wrote a couple of reviews under pseudonyms for Rolling Stone. Big deal. I could dare you to pull out an issue and actually tell me which of those pieces came from my typewriter, but it’s really too petty for us to even talk about.

4. When the hell are the employees of this magazine going to get group medical insurance? Or, better yet, can someone other than [CREEM general manager] Richard Siegel be put in charge of procuring the same?

5. This is probably going to raise your hackles over something that you may think would be better left a dropped issue, but I just want you to know that, in regards to “accusations” not long ago that you and other employees of this magazine listened in on my personal phone conversations, well...look—the first time you listened in on me was early 1972, in Walled Lake. You were at the house on 14 Mile and I was at the office on Haggerty, and I was talking to [VP of Swan Song Records] Danny Goldberg, who was complaining that he bore some paranoia that the editorial policies and musical preferences of CREEM magazine swung entirely on the whims of [former editor in chief] Dave Marsh’s obsessive/compulsive praxis.

I told Goldberg that was nonsense: “We’re not so monolithic as that.” After I had finished talking to him, you called me up, told me that you had listened to the whole conversation, then you complimented me on the way I handled him and gave me a few pointers regarding such situations arising in future.

You are manipulative, but that is a fact of life I have learned to live with, just as, I presume, you have learned to live with the garbage which covers my entire corner of the editorial office, or the fact that the secretaries may arrive in the morning to find me passed out drunk on the floor with Metal Machine Music playing at a volume which, according to some, might conceivably get us evicted. My feeling on eviction is that if one of the staffers can drive everybody totally out of their minds playing the Tubes and Jethro Tull and the absolute worst of Todd Rundgren at such volumes that I can hear them all the way to the bathroom, then I can play anything I want, loud, even Metal Machine Music. This is, after all, a rock ’n’ roll magazine.

6. Periodically you make references to me or Duncan which generally center around the subject of “Should we continue to put out CREEM, or should we end it here and now?” You said it the last time we had words. I would like to very respectfully (because, oddly enough, on certain levels I do respect you) inform you that I will not, ever, discuss any such subject, and I certainly will not attend a meeting devoted to its consideration. I simply have too much work to do to fuck around with neurotic bullshit like that.

My own neurotic bullshit keeps me busy enough. I reject brinksmanship totally, and refuse to deal with it on any level, just like I know at this point it would be more ludicrous than insulting for you to do something like, oh, say holding my job over my head.

So don’t bother ever threatening to fire me again, either. Because you can’t. It’s as simple as that; we’re stuck with each other, and, having said all that, I gotta say again that on certain levels I sure do admire your style, pal.

7. This is a bit belated, but I heard about a month ago that when the secretaries came in at 9 AM they found you passed out in your chair from too much nocturnal cognac. Welcome to the club; this single incident will probably provide a bond in degeneracy which will help bring us closer together as friends and coworkers.

8. Again belated, and quite related, but thanks a lot, you son of a bitch, for going into my briefcase and stealing half a Percodan. That made me feel just dandy when I went after that same Percodan, needing one as badly as I ever had in my life, during the weekend we put the February issue out, when I stayed up all night Friday night, fell asleep in the chair at my desk about 3 AM on Sunday morning, and woke five or six hours later in dire pain and with plenty more work to do which would in fact keep me up all that night.

Thief. You may call it petty, but it sure didn’t feel petty in my head that morning. Also, and returning briefly to the subject of privacy and invasion thereof, I wonder how you would feel if some night I broke into your office and drank up all your booze or rifled your desk for pills. I imagine you would be screaming.

9. I think Jaan will do very well for herself in California. I think the move will be good for her. Duncan and I and Sue [Whitall, CREEM assistant editor] have already begun to have meetings about the kind of replacement we want.

I want an enthusiastic journalism-school former fanzine editor stone-fan type; they seem to be looking for something a bit more austerely professional.

I think it should be a woman, for reasons I can’t quite explain but make some sort of interior sense and have nothing to do with my pecker. Maybe a lesbian would brighten the place up a bit.

10. Picking this up again at home on my own Smith-Corona, recently purchased at Hudson’s. I know you said CREEM would buy me one, but I figured this is just my tax write-off instead of yours so, same difference.

If you are looking to invest in a typewriter, however, know that life in the editorial department would be immeasurably more comfortable (and efficient) if you would authorize and someone would carry out the immediate purchase of another IBM like the ones we have already.

Passing around those things is an incredible pain in the ass, plus not good for the machines themselves, and the complaints from both myself and the other people who work in there are almost constant. We need, imperatively need, a typewriter permanently planted on all four desks in there. We have been waiting for this for so long I get a sense of disorientating deja vu just writing these words, but I know that I myself have been asking for this for literal years with no action, and still we wait for something so absolutely necessary to putting this thing out that it should almost have been there before we (me and you) (we’re the originals, all the others chickened out, or will) were.

11. As you know and previously agreed upon by you, Duncan, and myself, I am going to Jamaica next week, on Island’s tab, to do a story on Bob Marley (ostensibly) and reggae and Jamaican mystique in general. I will be gone a week, leaving Tuesday the 17th and returning approximately Tuesday the 24th, which should give me about a week to catch up and keep on top of things before the issue ships. All the record review assignments are out, features are coming in, everything looks good but the sports thing, and even that can, I think, be fixed up to look socko and beautiful with a little effort and ingenuity.

If there’s anything you want me to pick up for you down there (as long as it isn’t herbaceous contraband or some exotic bacillus), let me know.

12. News note: I have lost all interest in the subject of Lou Reed, with the exception of certain Velvet Underground songs and Metal Machine Music. Patti Smith is god, I mean God, and reggae is the only real soul music around so I’d pick up on it (but not Marley) if you haven’t already. Let me know and I’ll get you started on a good collection. An acquired taste, but addictive once you get the message; also, the perfect antidote to disco poisoning.

13. Since [former editor] Wayne Robins left here, I have been busting my balls to make CREEM circa ’76 the most fantastick, incredible, far-out, intellectual, streetwise, and generally mind-fucking rock ’n’ roll magazine in the history of the world. I believe we may yet succeed, and I intend to drive myself harder and harder as we get better and better at reincarnating our own spirit.

Whatever unpleasant feelings might ever have existed between you and I become irrelevant, paltry in the face of the goal towards which we are working and fighting together. I mean, for one thing, this is business, and we’re both pros (or at least I think we’re beginning to get there), which means that we don’t have to love each other to work together smoothly and put out a superlative product.

So all I’m saying is two things:

One: I realize that reading parts of this letter has probably made you blow your stack, activated your paranoia, sent you prowling for Valium, etc.... But the very fact that I would take the time and trouble to be as honest with you as I have here proves that I am probably a better friend of yours than you think, so—shake. Point Two: Having busted my balls in the good fight as described above, and intending to push them and the rest of me further and further as the months go on, I believe I have earned a raise, and would like to politely and intently request that you up my earnings from the rag I was married to before I met Nancy by $25.00 a week, effective immediately. I know you will, because we both know that I deserve it. Thanks, pops.

Your most loyal nemesis,

Lester

[Ed. note: This letter does not reflect the opinions of CREEM or its current staff. It has been edited for clarity and also because it was very long and we all have to get back to our lives, right? These are the good parts, promise.]