The low spark of a rock hack

In 1968, when he was just 20, Lester Bangs completed his autobiography. “Drug Punk,” as he titled the never-published manuscript, chronicled a life that traded a youth marked by repression and cultural vacuity for a not-quite-adulthood full of musical and narcotic-al abandon. Bangs wrote about the politics of the day with mordant wit, about his unbroken stream of drug intake with fascination and about his personal limitations -- from his paralysis at witnessing a Hells Angels gang rape to his concerns about his skills as a writer -- with uncommon candor.

At times, he felt useless in front of the typewriter. “I’ll probably never produce a masterpiece,” Bangs wrote. “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 shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.” The supernova had begun.

In his introduction to the first Lester Bangs anthology, 1987’s “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” editor Greil Marcus asserted, “[W]hat this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.” And Bangs had a voice that could suspend said disbelief. He wrote about music the same way most ardent fans think about it: passionately, fitfully and with a foot-on-the-gas-pedal sense of subtlety. Bangs could be jaded, for sure, but even his hit jobs on artists or albums took on the tone of a scolding by a loved one.

Following “Psychotic Reactions,” “Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste” is the second anthology of Bangs’ work, and editor John Morthland -- a close confidant of Bangs’ during the critic’s life and co-executor of his literary estate -- is confronted with a long shadow to work around. Marcus cherry-picked many of the very best Bangs pieces for his set -- “The White Noise Supremacists,” an analysis of racism in the punk scene; a suite of articles that track Bangs’ admiration for, revulsion to and jousting with Lou Reed; an epic personal account of a road trip with the “insufficient” Clash -- but still left vast gaps in his version of history, ignoring altogether Bangs’ early work for Rolling Stone, as well as his first, unpublished personal writings.

Morthland’s selection of pieces aims for broader context, opening with logorrheic excerpts from “Drug Punk” (from which the selection above is drawn), then sweeping through Bangs’ reviews -- from Rolling Stone, Creem and several other titles -- and closing with a series of travel fantasias (with “travel” defined extremely broadly). “Mainlines” is, by design, something of a schizoid experience, and reading Bangs en masse can be numbing. In a sense, the proper nouns -- the actual objects of critique -- don’t matter, so long as they provide a kernel of an excuse for Bangs to riff.

In general, good criticism demands an impassioned response. However, driving without a seatbelt has its limitations, and Bangs was almost always on, even when it was clear the subject matter at hand didn’t merit his mania. In “Blood Feast of Reddy Kilowatt!” a 1974 skewering of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bangs shines when describing the group’s stage show as a “martial array of percussion” and calling their percussionist a “beamy sod.” Yet, when face to face with them for an interview, he can’t even muster the energy to wittily parry the group’s lame responses to his questions.

Let’s face it, then: Bangs was a hack. A hack of unusual skill and vision but still a pen-for-hire. And like all working schlubs, sometimes he ran out of gas. Bangs wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style -- or, more accurately, a stream-of-semiconsciousness style -- that served him poorly as often as not. He was known for changing his mind, usually a complete about-face, and did so on albums ranging from the MC5’s garage-punk primer “Kick Out the Jams” to Miles Davis’ fusion experiment “On the Corner.” In a series of articles about the Rolling Stones, he veers from exultant admiration to sneering dismissal, lauding them for putting on the best concert of his life and shaming them for their complicity, however inadvertent, in the Altamont tragedy. “Why don’t you guys go fertilize a forest,” Bangs concludes.

Bangs could also be deliciously counterintuitive. “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber,” a 1972 Creem article, responds to the Moral Majority criticisms of Ozzy Osbourne’s first mass-media assault with a revelation: Not only was Black Sabbath baffled by their association with the dark side, they were actually “moralists” at heart, “like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs.” The band’s “phantasmagorias of malediction and punishment,” are in the service of “making an attempt to provide direction for a generation busy immolating itself as quickly as possible.”

Bangs was far more worried about the generation of late ‘70s punk rockers: rabid nihilists with attitude that far outstripped their experience of the world, however dismal. Although he was a fixture at New York’s punk mecca CBGB during the late ‘70s, he was always among punk’s most prominent skeptics, as seen here in the bitter bromide “Everybody’s Search for Roots”: “Punk is saying ... [forget] punk rock .... Punk is passe.”

Perhaps because he was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Bangs shied away from any dogma that suggested the end of life was some sort of transformative event. Bangs’ approach to writing was ultimately humanist. He saw music as a unifying force and also as a path toward more profound understanding of the self. Of Miles Davis, Bangs proclaimed “his music was that powerful: it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity, to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain.” Unlike punk, this was hurt Bangs could appreciate.

The best example of Bangs’ intersection of passion and poesy, and also the most powerful piece in “Mainlines” -- alongside a stunning exposition on Captain Beefheart -- is “Innocents in Babylon,” a sprawling travelogue detailing a weeklong junket to Jamaica that Bangs took in 1976, as the island nation was “still undergoing what might be termed a colonial hangover.” Between interviews with artists such as King Tubby and Bob Marley (the latter always surrounded by “grand cumulous cannabinol ellipses”) and checking out performances and nightclubs, Bangs and his fellow white journos grapple with their fear of the other. His Rolling Stone compadre, whom he refers to derisively as “Gonzo,” hopes to write his piece without straying too far from the hotel. Though he, himself, writes of being shaken at the idea of going into one of the local watering holes after dark, Bangs is uniquely in tune with the paradox of the trip and, by extension, the entire relationship between white consumers and black producers. When meeting King Tubby, he holds out a record of his he’d just bought, asking how much money he was paid to make it. The response? As Bangs expected,”[n]othing yet.” Bangs died in 1982 of a Darvon overdose -- likely an unintentional one, according to his biography. It was perhaps the right time to go. Creem and Rolling Stone had been in decline for years, and the professionalization of music criticism was well underway. The dynamic commentary Bangs specialized in is barely available in the music press today, a casualty of the genre’s increasing corporatization and the slow strangling of writers’ copy. With his influence cut short so prematurely, Bangs didn’t leave as permanent a template for later writers to follow -- though a committed minority did try and still do -- leaving the field ultimately to those with fewer jokes but better punch lines. What’s worse, new scenes -- hip-hop, alt-country, the world of raves and underground dance culture -- cry out for Bangs-like inquiries but have no such tradition to refer to. Instead, their chronicling -- as well as that of the punk, metal and reggae that followed his death -- has become the one thing Bangs never was: ossified.