Jim DeRogatis's Let It Blurt

...Friends would put food in his pockets so he would remember to eat when he got home...

...For better or worse, we will never know...

...it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's...

...Besides his friends and fans, Bangs left behind several million words of notes, reviews, essays, and proposals...

...His screeds against those he viewed as pretenders or vulgarians could be as vicious as they were hilarious, and his obsessions with his heroes often led to hyperbole...

...But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis...

...Despite its imperfections, Let It Blurt is a welcome addition to the Bangs canon and makes one impatient for more of Bangs's writing to see the light of day • ALEX HALBERSTADT contributes to Salon.com and the New York Times...

...So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse...

...Strangely, DeRogatis, a pop music critic at the Chicago Sun Times who owes much of his own pugnacious style to Bangs, has surprisingly little to say about his mentor's work...

...Like his legion of imitators, one is tempted to embrace his candor and outrageousness while neglecting his encyclopedic knowledge of music history, his voraciousness and generosity, and a sense of humor that could win over even his detractors, who, by the end of his career, were admittedly many...

...LET IT BLURT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LESTER BANGS, AMERICA' S GREATEST ROCK CRITIC by Jim DeRogatis Broadway Books (a division of Random House), 2000 332 pp $15.95 ‘ F LOVE IS truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence," wrote Lester Bangs in 1977, eulogizing Elvis Presley in the Village Voice...

...It wasn't BOO KS until he started contributing to Creem that Bangs found the most sympathetic forum for his writing, and in 1971 he moved to Detroit to write and edit for the tabloid that published his most freewheeling and original work...

...The aftermath—shattered relationships, squandered opportunities, evictions— is often described in a series of numbing clichés about the price of excess...

...The danger of celebrating Bangs's self-invention as a Rabelaisian figure is that it often conceals the qualities that make his story worth telling in the first place...

...Instead, in the frequently brilliant essays and reviews that appeared in Rolling Stone, Creem, the Village Voice, and other publications, he championed music that offered an ecstatic, violent release from the constraints of AM radio and the conventions of polite society...

...In high school, Lester's attempts to fit in were equally unconventional—in speech class he proudly recited Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" in its entirety, and when a teacher assigned him a ten-page paper for each of the five days of gym class he had missed, Lester responded with a fifty-page story entitled "Hector the Homosexual Monkey," for which he was promptly suspended...

...One of DeRogatis's stated goals, and probably his finest achievement in Let It Blurt, is DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 121 BOOKS charting a history of rock criticism...

...A climate of editorial conservatism set in as music publications began to re-align themselves more closely with record company interests, and a with increasing frequency, Bangs often found himself rewriting articles and having them rejected by editors...

...A record was spinning on the turntable, the stylus caught in the leadout groove...

...We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present...

...To his mother's dismay, the adolescent Lester developed an interest in jazz, the Beats, and the narcotic properties of nutmeg, and soon a rant about the hypocrisy of religion delivered at a church meeting resulted in his lifelong ban from the Witnesses' Kingdom Hall...

...a decade later, they became nearly as unpublishable...

...Those looking for a "Rock-Grit Babylon" will not be disappointed: here is Village Voice writer and editor Robert Christgau editing Bangs in the nude and flinging his dinner at former girlfriend Ellen Willis, who authored a rock column for the New Yorker...

...Not surprisingly, Bangs's favorite topic during his last years was the desultory state of the record industry...

...Greil Marcus puffing on a professorial pipe at Altamont...

...As years of drug use and neglect added up, Bangs found himself waking up on sidewalks...

...Bangs told a friend that because of his upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness he was always trying to make converts, and in his most impassioned declarations of devotion, like his painfully earnest thirty-six-page manifesto about the Clash, he presented popular music as a series of moral choices...

...In retrospect, these words can be read as an apt farewell to Bangs himself, who died in 1982, and to the kind of demanding and fearless criticism exemplified by his work, which seemed to vanish from the pages of music magazines shortly thereafter...

...But then, only in Lester's moral universe could four musicians in a van hold the key to a Utopian future...

...Soon Greil Marcus, the Rolling Stone record-reviews editor, was receiving as many as a dozen reviews per week from the shoe salesman from El Cajon...

...Bangs strove for the "free-flowing, imagistic quality" of fiction, and his best sentences mutate, digress, and reconfigure themselves with an associative dexterity worthy of Henry Miller...

...Unfortunately, Let It Blurt is often content to celebrate the mythological Lester...

...It stands as one of the most nuanced, romantic, and utterly original essays written about rock 'n' roll, and reading it is perhaps the best shortcut to understanding both Bangs and the expressive possibilities of the genre...

...And his comparisons of Bangs to Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski perpetuate a stereotype that is both tiresome and misleading...

...Bangs frequently complained that "professionalism" was becoming rampant among young writers, and in today's transaction-oriented "thumbs-up" climate, it is doubtful that the author of "James Taylor Marked for Death" would have found a sympathetic editor...

...Bangs wrote about his heroes in a style laced with irreverence, sarI20 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 casm, self-referential posturing, and often hilarious invective...

...Like the sections about Bangs, that history is short on analysis and rich in salacious detail, but nonetheless provides a fascinating look at the personalities whose work laid the foundation for most subsequent attempts to write cogently about popular music...

...Despite his gifts, Bangs could be lazy, gratuitously belligerent, and unfair...

...In 1969, while employed at Streicher's Shoe Store in the Mission Valley Shopping Center, Bangs stumbled across his vocation when he answered a Rolling Stone ad soliciting "record reviews, movie reviews, and book reviews from interested writers...

...By the early eighties, Bangs regularly contributed to the Village Voice, but for the first time was having difficulty finding a suitable home for his writing...

...The action takes place against the backdrop of a bygone era of high promotion, when record companies flew writers to lavishly catered events in hopes of securing a sympathetic review...

...It was this activist yet remarkably fluent approach to popular music that made Bangs its first great critic, placing him in the company of Randall Jarrell and Pauline Kael rather than the lifestyle icons he is compared to in Let It Blurt...

...Of his countless book proposals, only two throwaway fan biographies of Rod Stewart and the band Blondie became a reality, and Bangs resorted to writing for musicians' magazines such as Guitar Player and Gig...

...122 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...For music journalists, a group of small magazines and tabloids devoted to rock 'n'roll—Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Fusion—as well as a changing of the guard at the more traditional outlets ushered in the newfound freedom, which turned out to be exceedingly short-lived...

...Although Bangs's editors quickly took notice of their star reviewer's creativity and brutally honest perspective, his gleeful pans infuriated the record companies that advertised in the fledgling San Francisco magazine, and his articles became increasingly unwelcome at Rolling Stone...

...and Bangs's romantic misadventures with several female colleagues...

...He once wrote that singer Mitch Ryder's real name was "Bill Bradshinkel," and in another piece vowed to personally disembowel James Taylor...

...More problematic is the book's tendency to blithely memorialize Bangs's life as if the nature of his achievement was a foregone conclusion...

...In his highly enjoyable biography, Jim DeRogatis traces the development of Bangs's famously contrarian persona back to the tracthouse suburb of El Cajon, California, where Bangs began his life in 1948 and was raised as a Jehovah's Witness...

...Most important, Bangs knew that the vestments and posturing of rock were as essential as the music and lyrics, and in decidedly lowbrow cadences demanded that rock, on its own terms, meet the criteria of art...

...At Creem, Bangs devoted tens of thousands of words to his love-hate relationship with Lou Reed, and was only partially ironic when he declared Reed's Metal Machine Music—an hour of shrieking feedback that, according to Reed, contained audio frequencies lethal to the human ear—the "greatest album ever made...

...Unlike the best biographies, it fails to connect the life with the art, and as a result it sometimes reads like a litany of all-night binges, insults, and food fights, fueled by whisky, amphetamines, and Romilar cough syrup...

...ALL OF THIS would be of purely anecdotal value, except that the span covered in Let It Blurt—roughly the decade between 1968 and 1978—marked a period of unprecedented creative freedom in rock criticism The generational shift and the accompanying temporary suspension of censorship affected print and broadcast media, the record industry, and even Hollywood, where filmmakers such as Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson, and Martin Scorsese made films that were as frank, iconoclastic, and strange as Bangs's writing...

...The fusillades written by Bangs and his compatriots would not have found a place in print a decade earlier...

...It was an approach he shared with fellow rock critics Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer, a corollary to the New Journalism of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe as well as the 1950s fiction of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, authors whom Bangs idolized as a teenager...

...He first glimpsed it in the avant-garde jazz of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and later embraced the chaotic proto-punk sounds of the Stooges, the Godz, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed...

...The music business was always cynical," Bangs wrote in 1981, "but the cynicism of the music business as it stands today is awesome, surreal...

...He also ambivalently but effectively cultivated a persona of a rock 'n' roll wild man, a feat that drew groupies and sycophants into Bangs's circle, but that belied, and nearly subsumed, his stature as a great American critic...

...I will say goodbye to you...

...As evidence, one only has to read his essay on Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," an ambitious piece of literary criticism that transposes Morrison's lyrics with those of Federico Garcia Lorca...

...Those words could have been written today with even more veracity, and one wonders what heights of indignation Bangs might have scaled at a time when the vast majority of MTV and radio programming is paid for with record company dollars, corporate homunculi such as Britney Spears and 'N Sync rule the charts, and once adventurous magazines such as Rolling Stone and Spin have become as synonymous with the trade as Billboard and Cashbox...

...Today, the sole surviving Bangs artifact is Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a slim and desperately incomplete posthumous volume compiled by Greil Marcus, and one might have hoped that DeRogatis would have adopted a more lapidary approach toward Bangs's writing...

...When Bangs's friend Nancy Stillman walked into his Sixth Avenue apartment on the evening of April 30, 1982, she found him slumped on the couch, dead of an accidental overdose of the prescription painkiller Darvon...

...Despite his moving epitaph to Presley, Bangs had little interest in the vernacular...

...BANGS WAS endlessly amused by the irony of attempting to discover meaning in a market-driven music he once referred to as "basically a bunch of garbage," and loved to puncture show-business megalomania and pretense...