Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste (2003)

This Lester Bangs collection, edited by John Morthland, was intended as a nonredundant companion to the collection edited by Greil Marcus and published in 1987, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Altogether that’s about 800 pages of the original gonzo rock critic. As a general rule the Marcus collection contains most of the hits—including the famous faceoff with Lou Reed and the previously unpublished piece in which Bangs disinters Elvis Presley’s body and reaches into his guts for undigested pharmaceuticals—whereas this later collection more documents the workaday product of the rock critic: scads of record reviews, including one of Bob Dylan’s Desire in which he takes Dylan to task for making shit up. It’s kind of refreshing to see (see also Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech), but we should remember Bangs regularly made shit up himself, albeit with qualitative differences from what Dylan does. There is a sympathetic meditation on Sid Vicious and his ugly end. We find out much more about Bangs’s status as a jazzbo. There is a great feature piece and interview with Captain Beefheart. In many ways, somewhat surprisingly, Bangs is a stern moralist, although it is sadly somewhat undercut by his life as an alcoholic and drug addict, his death in 1982 at the age of 33 the result of a Darvon overdose. It’s been long enough now that another factor has come into play. I wonder a lot about what he would make of subsequent developments, even about the artists he knew like Lou Reed and Miles Davis, and certainly all kinds of things since then. His literary tastes strike me now as wrong, elevating Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs above all others. He even slags Allen Ginsberg (but not Jack Kerouac). This is all wrong according to me. Some of Bangs’s experimental writing is found here, but not as much as in Carburetor Dung. Full disclosure, that’s a good thing by my lights. That stuff has generally not aged well. But Lester Bangs remains in spirit an important model for anyone considering the commitment to being a rock critic. He’s cheerful enough often enough about being out of touch or at odds with the mainstream, acknowledging his own “bad taste.” You could do worse on primers about how to rock critic.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.