Earlier this year, we hit the 40th anniversary of Lester Bang’s death. He was born in 1948, died in early 1982, and was for a time a deeply influential rock critic. His career started in the late 1960s, when he started contributing to Rolling Stone, and it went on until he died: his last piece ran a few days before his accidental overdose. He’s best remembered now as the carmegonly rock critic in Almost Famous: played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, this version of Bangs gives sagely advice to the protagonist, a young rock critic, and seems both gruff and wise, like someone who’s been around for a long time. In truth, when Bangs died he was barely 33.
Although his career as a writer lasted between 1969 and 1982, he’s best remembered for a six-year run when he was editor of Creem Magazine, when according to Greil Marcus, he wrote over 170 reviews, 70 feature stories, photo captions, replies to letters and all sorts of other mundane details. Writes Marcus in his introduction to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung:
“He discovered, invented, nurtured and promoted an esthetic of joyful disdain, a love for apparent trash and contempt for all pretension… Lester became a figure in the world of rock n roll:within its confines, he became a celebrity. Doping and drinking, wisecracking and insulting, cruel and performing… he became rock’s essential wild man…”
It was, one supposes, a more naive time: living to excess was glamourized by the rock media, who breathlessly followed groups like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones on tour, which often left havoc and destroyed lives in their wake. This period came to a crashing end when Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungeon, but I digress.
Led by his brash, abrasive and occasionally condescending style, alongside Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, Creem was one of the leading rock mags of the 1970s; after he left, it stuck around for a little while before folding in 1989. It relaunched a few weeks ago, as both a glossy quarterly magazine and a website. Between a dismissive review of Imagine Dragons latest and a dive into the new Soccer Mommy, it invites you to read the “library of infamy” - practically an invitation to read the Bangs archive.
Acerbic? Oh yeah. Opinionated? You betcha. There are two collections of Bangs writing in print (Carburetor Dung, edited by Marcus and Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, edited by John Morthland) and even though both represent a small sampling of the many, many words Bangs wrote, taken as a whole, the two books pretty much cover all the bases. There are lots of words about Lou Reed, a handful of demolitions masquerading as reviews, and some long features that capture the New Journalism era fairly well. The volume edited by Marcus includes lengthy excerpts from Bangs notebooks; the one edited by Morthland includes material from two books Bangs wrote but never published. Both show him as a talented writer, but both gloss over some of the negative aspects from Bangs life.
To wit: he was not someone who shied away from calling someone a faggot in print, nor in using the N-slur. He looked down his nose at women (only Patti Smith really seems to get any praise). But you’d be hard pressed to find any of those in either of the books, which gloss over these periods and instead focus on Bangs more comedic rantings, or his apologia, the 1979 piece “The White Noise Supremacists” where he owns up to being an asshole, but insists he wasn’t really a racist when he’d call people slurs in print - even as he chastised others for doing the same. Interesting, that.
Marcus, almost as an aside, includes another side of Bangs: the 1975 piece “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves” where, for almost no real reason at all, Bangs wrote nasty things about Rachel Humphreys, a trans woman and then-girlfriend of Lou Reed:
“It was grotesque, it was abject, like something that might have grovelingly scampered in when Lou opened the door to get milk or papers in the morning, and just stayed around.” (pg 174)
For someone like Bangs, who seemed like he at least had some sensitivity, to repeatedly call Rachel an it, as “this creature,” or as a “large, strange, frightened being,” well, that’s pretty nasty. Maybe someone who was less of a boor wouldn't have frightened her. Or pissed off Reed as much, who allegedly never forgave Bangs.
In some ways, the world has changed a lot since Bangs wrote that piece almost 50 years ago: Lou, Rancel and Lester are all dead now and it’s not uncommon to find trans women in the music industry. At the same time, earlier today, the New York Times ran an opinion piece complaining that nobody can say the word “women” anymore because trans women have ruined everything for everybody, or something like that. While a rock mag might not call a trans woman an it anymore, similar language is used in the right-wing media to describe trans women. So maybe not much has changed, or if it has, it’s changing back.
But what of Bangs? For a lot of rock music writers, both of those collections are well-thumbed. His style of writing would’ve been tailor-made for 2022, when hot takes dominate the scene and people say outlandish stuff to stand out about the SEO crowd. I used to know a guy who specialized in stuff like this, saying wild things to get engagement on Twitter and leading people to his articles.
And me? I have both books, and when I was younger I enjoyed the hell out of them: Bangs style of not taking any shit appealed to a younger Roz, back when I was just starting out and was tired of the way everything in Rolling Stone seemed to get three stars unless it was an artist they wanted to push (then they’d get five) or low-hanging fruit for them to pick on (these records would get one star). It was a throwback to a different time, when it was easier to get access to artists and you could get a label to fly you to England, Jamaica or points beyond for a long travelogue piece. The way Bangs verbally sparred with Lou Reed wasn’t just fun to read on the page, it was the kind of access any writer would dream of.
And yet, and yet. I’m trans, I don’t pass and I like a lot of the same music that Bangs did (Miles, Mingus, Lou Reed, etc). When I read him, he can be thrilling… but he can also make me wonder: what would he think of me? Would he have rejected my articles and used the same language to describe me? What of artists working today like Laura Jane Grace or Black Dresses? Would he have written the same about them? Is this someone I want to be associated with? It’s hard to say and pointless to try.
In a lot of ways, it’s fruitless to judge Bangs by the standards of an era he never lived long enough to see. And, to be fair, he did attempt another mea culpa of a sort in “The White Noise Supremacists.” But it’s also missing the point to look at someone and reduce them to one kind of static image: just as it’s one sided to judge Bangs solely on what he said about Rachel, it’s one-sided to look at him in Almost Famous too.
A few months ago, a story came out that Random House was not moving ahead on a collection of Norman Mailer essays because one of them, 1957’s “The White Negro”, offended someone. The usual hand-wringing about cancel-culture and political correctness ensued before the truth came out: Random House said the book was never under contract; it looks now like this collection, A Mysterious Country, will be published next January by Skyhorse Publishing. Mailer, like Bangs, was also brash and rude and, if you’d believe the reactionaries, would never be published today. But the truth about Mailer is that he was a multifaceted guy, someone who was both talented and problematic: a heck of a writer and someone who stabbed his wife at a party.
And indeed, maybe that’s the best way to look at Bangs and his legacy. He was definitely of a time and a place, and his writing speaks to that from its vantage point of the 1970s. He was able to explain what made a Lou Reed record exciting just as he was capable of being offensive and a boor. To simply reduce him to a one-dimensional figure isn’t just unfair, it seems to go against what the thrust of his best criticism was about. He was a complicated man, and maybe he would’ve hated me and maybe it’s best to remember everything he was capable of.