WOMEN TALKING

To become mythological is a tragedy almost Shakespearean in scale—you may have your fame and your legacy, but you lose something else in the process: your identity. Like any historical figure portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in an Oscar-bait film, Lester Bangs has fallen victim to his own mythology. And when that happens, we forget the reality of who someone actually was.

On the one hand, he was undoubtedly one of a kind, the “king of dorks." He ushered in a new era of rock criticism on the literary foothills of Burroughs, Kerouac, and others. But let’s be frank—his writing doesn’t read well in this painfully virtuous present moment, what with its underlying racism, sexism, and homophobia. And that’s a valid bone to pick.

But it’s not the whole story. Say what you will of Lester—that he was slovenly, questionably fanatical about Metal Machine Music, at times a misogynist scumbag. These things may all be true, but they aren’t the entirety of the truth. The truth can be many things, unique to the eye of each beholder who dares to perceive us. This is why the women he worked with day in and day out can describe him as both a “good gal pal" and a “misogynist of the highest order.”

So let’s go straight to the source—Associate Publisher Connie Kramer, Editor Susan Whitall, and Senior Editor Jaan Uhelszki—to peel back the layers of the Lester mystique (or lack thereof). It won’t always be pretty, but at least it’ll be honest.

--MANDY BROWNHOLTZ, MANAGING EDITOR

(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

Jaan: Let’s start at the beginning. If you can each recall the first time you met Lester Bangs—what were your personal experiences with him, what were your first impressions?

Sue: I first met Lester at the office at 187 South Woodward and did not expect him to be this welcoming presence. I expected him to be scary because of everything I’d read and heard. But he had this almost puppy-dog exterior and very warm, laughing eyes. It helped to be a 22-year-old girl, I’m sure—he was just very sweet to me. I started hanging out more at the office, and he gave me assignments. But I think of him in his little cubby hole with his big bottle of no-brand root beer and the Romilar he would use to spike my coffee.

Connie: I don’t remember meeting Lester for the first time, but my first overall impression was that he seemed like a nice guy. He seemed a little flubby but not over-the-top, considering what else was wandering in and out of the writers’ room. I did not have any preconceived notions because I wasn’t hearing about him from the same sources that the writers were.

Sue: I think he was so different from his writing in person. He was a lot more outgoing and friendly, and let’s have some fun and let’s do this and that. It was just a lot of fun, laughing all the time.

There was a time when he put an offensive phrase in the table of contents of the issue right before we were to give it to [CREEM publisher Barry Kramer], Lester had us all sworn to secrecy about what he had done—he wanted to see if Barry would catch it. And there was an explosion from Barry’s office. [Laughs] He saw it.

Jaan: So when I met Lester, there wasn’t the big reputation to contend with. It was October 1970, and he had come out to do a story on Alice Cooper for the magazine. The first day in the CREEM office, he had dressed to impress, like he was applying for a job. Which I guess he was. He looked like a junior high school teacher in a Prince of Wales plaid suit jacket, with a white shirt and a sparkling white undershirt and shined brown shoes. Like he had worked out his ensemble from the pages of Saturday Evening Post. The disconnect was he looked so utterly normal. And what I mean by that is, he looked nothing like the way he wrote.

Sue: Lester was kind of part of the girl gang that we had. When I came along in 1975, they incorporated me into that girl gang a little bit. Lester loved women—something that I wouldn’t have expected when I first met him. Whenever we would tell him our love problems, and we did it all the time, he would always side with us against the guy. He’d say, “Get rid of him. You didn’t...you didn’t listen to me and now look at you.’’ He loved us telling him what was going on in our lives, and no matter what you told him— “I shot him with a gun”—he would say, “He deserved it. Why are you with that guy?” [Laughs] That always made me laugh about Lester. So whenever I see people accuse him of being sexist, I think of that. Because for him, the woman was always right and the man was always wrong. Jaan: We were all such a tight unit—a dysfunctional family, really. He was that big-brother figure, always protective and full of advice. He always was telling me to dump my boyfriend because he was such a ladies’ man. Which he was! When we finally did break up, Lester wrote this piece about me, because I was seeing somebody else—a couple of somebody elses, actually. Lester had “white knight syndrome”; he liked to save damsels in distress. He rose to the occasion when we were broken or sad because he could fix us. And once you were strong and empowered, or actually even followed his advice, he was out of a job. Maybe he was so good with women because he was raised by a single mom. But he was a good gal pal and an unredemptive romantic. Which made it so odd when we met his girlfriend.

He had this ballbuster girlfriend, Andie, who kept thinking he was wasting his time being a rock writer and just would constantly lecture him about it, planting seeds of doubt in his mind and pretty much undermining him. She kept saying, “Oh, you’re writing about other people and their lives. Why don’t you write about yours, the novel you’re always talking about? This is a dead-end street.”

Connie: I have a different take on his love of women, because as far as I’m concerned, Lester was a misogynist of the highest degree. And I observed it, I saw it in his writing, and it really, really struck a chord with me when I got a call from Bebe Buell when she was pregnant. I was pregnant at the same time, and so this was pretty sensitive with me. He had written that because he did not like Steven Tyler or Steven Tyler’s teeth that she should have an abortion or a miscarriage. Lester did much of the same in going after Joan Jett.

But when I say he was a misogynist, maybe that has to be tempered. Yes, he loved women. But Jaan, you just pointed it out: He loved when they were broken.

Jaan: Yeah, he did.

Connie: I was never a fan of Lester, which has a lot of layers. There was Lester the person, Lester the writer, and then there was Lester the ultimate asshole—all of these things combined in Lester. Dealing with Lester was almost like herding cats, trying to herd Lester constantly. [Laughs] It was draining. He was brilliant without question, there’s no taking away from that, but I felt as if he diminished his own genius a lot of the time. Maybe he felt like he had so much to get out, so much to say. I’m not sure the actual reason, but it was like he sabotaged his own writing, in my opinion.

I had my experiences with Lester and my point of view is going to be different because Sue and Jaan shared a certain creative lane with Lester. I was in that lane of business, trying to keep the monsters from killing each other.

Jaan: He hated anyone who tried to thwart his forward motion. You represented authority, and also he saw you and [your husband] Barry as one being— always something he was bumping his head against. Rereading the letter to Barry that he wrote that we’re publishing part of, it’s much nicer than his real relationship with Barry. It’s like, what happy pills was he on that day? Because it was, like, so not their relationship.

Connie: But the thing is, in Lester’s letter to Barry—I mean, you wouldn’t know it, but there was a deep affection for Lester on Barry’s part. I didn’t share that, but it was always there as part of their relationship.

Sue: I think he was in awe of his talent and everything, obviously.

Jaan: So true. Maybe it’s a good time to talk about the time Barry made you cry?

Sue: This was my first big trip to New York, and Barry was doling out my money for the trip in his office. He was telling me what I needed to do and not do at CREEM s corporate hotel room, so I said something like, “Hey, don’t you trust me?” We got into this argument where I provoked him and he was in a rage, yelling at me like, “What, are you calling me cheap?” I was not expecting this, so I started crying and ran to the bathroom. Lester heard it all. So here’s the white knight—this is his opportunity to come in and be mad at Barry for bullying this poor young girl. And I heard pounding. I think there were some slugs exchanged. Lester came and got me from the bathroom. Lester wrote me a note later that I still have: “Don’t you quit, Sapphire. We love your ass! Don’t you quit.” We had nicknames, and Sapphire was mine.

Jaan: One thing that I was in awe of was that he used to write so fast. Words just raced out of his fingers. [Former editor] Ben Edmonds and I used to talk about it years later, confessing we developed phobias because we couldn’t write as fast. But years later I came to the realization that maybe he was racing the clock. On some deep level he knew that he didn’t have a lot of time on the planet, and it galvanized his thinking and output. I don’t know. But it was superhuman.

Sue: Well, he loved the Beats—the Beat poets and all that. And the way they wrote was like that, just bang bang bang bang. And he also had some good writing advice for me one time when I was being dramatic, and he said, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Just start typing garbage, and eventually the garbage will fall away.” And that’s what he did.

Connie: But the problem was the change that happened. I think you really hit it on the head. It was really great, those first few years with Lester; it was inspiring to see the amount of product and how good that product was. Then, at least from where I saw it, the more adulation and fans that he accumulated—at the same time that I think that he was maybe taming his demons with more alcohol, more drugs—it diluted the quality that I saw in what he was writing.

Sue: He kind of knew that because he once told me, “You can drink and write at night, or get high and write and you think it’s great stuff, but you read it in the morning and it’s garbage.”

Jaan: But it didn’t stop any of us from taking drugs. In the beginning, we had such a small staff and we had so much to do every month. But that is an excuse for taking amphetamines or downing codeines, which was, like, pretty much our drug of choice because it was accessible, cheap, and you could buy it over the counter in Windsor, which was just over the border in Canada.

I think the watershed in Lester’s habits really was with his drinking. When Robert Duncan and Eric “Air-Wreck” Genheimer joined the staff, he had boys to drink with. It was different than having pink drinks with his girl gang. They went to a nearby Italian restaurant called Pasquale’s every night, and they would sit there really late drinking. I think that changed the tenor of his behavior and his excessiveness, because with the girls, he didn’t drink that much.

Sue: That’s true. I was there at Pasquale’s every night with the boys—they kind of adopted me and they would go for dinner. And that one waitress... I went in there not long before it closed, and she remembered and she was still mad at Lester. [Laughs]

Connie: Part of what I saw as a tragedy with Lester was because he started to self-destruct. And it takes a while sometimes. But I think he was somebody who aspired to be Hunter S. Thompson or on a level with William S. Burroughs. And I think that he saw himself failing at that and just pushing harder. But because of the booze, there was so much garbage infiltrating his output. I found it very difficult to appreciate those gems that were there.

Jaan: Do you think his brain really did disintegrate? What I noticed is after he left CREEM, he didn’t have indulgent editors or didn’t self-edit. So he was writing more carefully and much more academically. Some of his better pieces were post-CREEM, and that’s when his behavior—his drinking and drug behavior—became so excessive. Yet the copy is so, so much more, um, understandable.

But when he was at CREEM, he had a strong work ethic. He would sleep on that green couch because we had to get back to work to get the issue out. I’m not sure I can put a date on when his habits got more excessive and self-destructive. He always seemed to be able to pull himself together and do the work.

Sue: Well, my theory on that is when he was at CREEM, he had editor responsibilities. So I think that was a bit of discipline that he needed, even though he was still off the rails at night when he would be drinking and doing stuff and writing. He still had to come in and the issue had to go out. When he was in New York, he had no responsibility except for his own stories.

I came in ’75 and he was still okay. I don’t think he was blacking out, but there was that time when he passed out in his car right in front of the Birmingham Theater. His door was open and he was in the red Camaro. It was Paul Christy, I think, a guy from a radio station, who found him. Paul took him to his condo and dried him out. [Laughs]

One thing I’ve always resented is the way his New York “friends” and associates—people who were not really friends—encouraged his bad behavior. The parties never end and the bars never close, so he would go on and on. The bars closed in Detroit at 2 a.m., so you had to go home at some point.

Jaan: And still not go to bed. Lots of times you’d just go back to the office.

There was a lot of intellectual bullying in the early days, and Lester found himself with a foil: On one side there was Dave Marsh, who saw music as politics and in a bigger context than the rest of us did, and then there was Lester, who used it to point out the absurdities of human behavior. Looking back, I’m not sure they disagreed fundamentally, but the way they expressed it was completely at odds. There was genius in both of their approaches, and it took the magazine to places it might not have gotten to if they weren’t so polarized. Sometimes it was just pure contrarianism on both their parts. They both loved to argue.

But the one thing about Lester, which I actually love, is he’d change his mind about something he wrote, and then admit it. In print. Of course there was the MC5’s debut record that he reviewed for Rolling Stone, which all but derailed their career, and he spent years recanting it—and MC5 vocalist Rob Tyner became one of his best friends. He called Mick Jagger a washout, then changed his mind. He wasn’t ashamed to admit he was wrong, and he would rereview the album.

Sue: I wish he had changed his mind about Metal Machine Music. [Laughs] We had to make him wear those headphones just so we wouldn’t have to listen to it every day.

Connie: I think some of the best dialogues in the house were when David and Lester were arguing. This is when they were using their words. Right? [Laughs] Because you had super high intellect on both sides here. And you have one guy who’s being so precise and so focused and so minute—pedantic, if you will— getting his point across. And then you have Lester on the other side trying to outtalk David, which is not possible. And when they would come together, it was like, “How many angels are on the head of this pin?” And it would go on for hours. And it was fascinating.

Jaan: For all his posturing and bravado, I do think he was a bit insecure. I do remember sometimes we’d go backstage and he would be a little shy. Or even when he had agreed to get on stage with J. Geils—he was so nervous, I thought I was gonna have to push him up the stairs. It was charming that he would be nervous. He was even a little nervous before he would do one of the Lou Reed interviews. So it wasn’t all big talk, he really was a little bit insecure.

He lived by his own rules. It’s funny, the Lou Reed stuff—I don’t even know how to digest it now. They loved each other. They hated each other. They were so insulting. It was embarrassing to see. And then sometimes you look back and you read it and it feels scripted. I think they actually brought out the best in each other in a very public way, because it enhanced both their reputations.

Sue: Yeah.

Connie: That was one of the most brilliantly conceived series of interviews, and that “Wanted Dead or Alive” thing—the mug shots—that was probably one of our best-selling issues. And that’s when I appreciate Lester. Whether I liked what he wrote or not was irrelevant to me. It was the Best of Lester and the Worst of Lester. But it was great.

Jaan: I know. It was so chilling to watch because I was filled with embarrassment for both of them. And then I remember during the Sallg Can’t Dance tour stop that he dragged us to in Detroit, Lou dedicated a song to Lester and “all the little squirts of shit at CREEM.” And I’d never felt so proud. So there was a big payoff. I had moved to L.A., and I was working for a trade record world. Lou Reed came in and they told him that I had come from CREEM, and he shadowed me for an hour because he wanted to know about Lester. He insisted that we take a picture together so I could show Lester. It was an attachment. It was like some kind of contract they had with each other. But you’re right, it was a brilliant marketing scheme without being that conceived, but being somewhat conceived. Intuitive yet diabolical.

Connie, can you think of any moments of fun? Something that’s contrary to your overall view? Maybe one night out that was specifically fun or something?

Connie: No.