Punk is an attitude. That is the old refrain. Despite what outsiders might think, punk isn’t a clothing style or any definite way of playing music. It isn’t an ideology or a set of beliefs. Punk is loud, aggressive, raucous, in your face, and, most importantly, sincere. The attitude isn’t limited to music, appearance, or the counter cultural underground music scene. It can extend into any aspect of life. Even writing. And possibly no other writer embodied the punk attitude in the written word the way Lester Bangs did during the short 33 years of his life. Live fast, die young. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is an anthology of his writings assembled to preserve his energetic raging-bull prose for future generations who probably need a wake up kick in the shins these days since it appears counter culture, and American culture along with it, is sleepwalking into oblivion.
Lester Bangs is most famous for his rock journalism, criticism, and record and concert reviews most notably written for Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice back in the 1970s. He may have been the man who coined the term “punk” since he presciently saw a connecting thread between the garage bands of the 1960s, the Velvet Underground, glam rock, the proto-punk scene in Detroit, and the expanding punk scene in New York City from the mid-1970s and beyond. He championed The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and The Dictators when most people were unwilling to tolerate them. He was one of the first critics to point out that rock and roll is all about feeling and raw emotion more than technical perfection. He was also one of the first critics to call out rock stars for being what they mostly are: spoiled, petulant little children whose monster sized egos are nothing but a smokescreen to hide their human shortcomings from public view. “All rock stars are assholes,” said rock promoter Danny Fields. Lester Bangs took that simple idea and ran with it.
The opening articles start in the late 1960s, covering garage bands like The Count Five and Question Mark and The Mysterians, the meaning and significance of the first two Stooges albums, and why Ray Dennis Stekler’s trashy cult classic psychedelic zombie musical film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, is a great work of art. But early on, it is easy to see that Bangs’ writing is about so much more than the stated subject matters. He rarely ever stays on topic, going off on long tangents about sex and drugs while violating standard rules of punctuation and sentence length. He often writes like Arthur Rimbaud after popping a handful of uppers. If psychosis and French Symbolist poetry ever found an appropriate place to liaise with rock journalism it is in the prose of Lester Bangs. Reading this stuff is like being hit in the face with a firehose while riding a bull in a rodeo, not that I would actually know what that feels like. (I did ride a mechanical bull once in a place where there was an Asian woman wearing a fringed leather bikini and shiny knee-high boots wielding a horse whip in her hand. Needless to say, I didn’t last long on the mechanical bull. And now I think I understand what the song “Rawhide” is really about.) But somehow the fast paced insanity of the writing works even if it can be a little exhausting to keep up with at times.
This collection moves on into various articles written for Rolling Stone and Creem in the early 70s. The acts covered range widely from the likes of James Taylor and Barry White to Jethro Tull, Slade, The J. Geils Band, David Bowie, and Kraftwerk. Some of these are favorable and some aren’t. Lester Bangs takes interest in whoever he writes about even when he has no interest in them. His reviews of James Taylor are obviously sarcastic, character assassination pieces while he expresses fascination for Jethro Tull even though he hates their music. The chapter on David Bowie is a little more complex as he considers himself a Bowie fan but can’t stand the man as a performer. The Slade and J. Geils articles are interesting since Slade starts a food fight in Trader Vic’s (yes, that’s the original tiki bar that eventually turned into the Trader Joe’s grocery store chain) and then harasses a dinner party for Freemasons. The J. Geils Band invite Bangs onstage to type an article during a concert for reasons you will have to read on your own. Lester Bangs really captures the atmosphere of free for all fun that was a part of rock concerts back in those days, something that sadly no longer exists in our dismal music industry now.
There are a couple important things to notice in these writings. One is that Bangs frequently refers to a certain class of rock stars as punks. This was a few years before “punk” became an officially designated genre of music. But Bangs wasn’t describing the music. He was describing the obnoxious behavior of people like the MC5 and Iggy Pop. It looks almost obvious that he was instrumental in that words being used to describe the genre. There is some debate over whether it was Bruce Springsteen or Legs McNeil who started using “punk” as a name for the musical style and scene that grew with it.
The other important thing to notice is that these articles are thoroughly unpredictable. You can never tell where they will end up. In example, a review of a John Coltrane album turns into a story about Lester Bangs using screeching, atonal blasts from a saxophone to terrorize his landlady after she complains about him making too much noise. Other than the presence of the saxophone, what does this have to do with the Coltrane album? Who Knows? Who cares? It’s great writing.
The genius of Lester Bangs really shines through in the section on Lou Reed. The two men had a curious relationship. Bangs became famous in New York City for the interviews he did with Reed for the Village Voice. As we see here, they weren’t actual interviews, but more like drunken arguments over nothing important other than one-upmanship in a gladiatorial battle of nastiness. Both Bangs and Reed would later say that these argument/interviews were the best punk journalism ever written. Both of them were in firm agreement on one other thing too: they both thought that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded. In one interview, Reed goes on about how it is a multi-layered symphonic work of avant-garde classical composition. Lester Bangs retorts by saying that Reed only thinks so because he was on amphetamines when he recorded it. In any case, Bangs also waxes poetic about how beautiful its four sides of vinyl containing nothing but droning guitar feedback played through high-end studio equipment are. It is a masterpiece because most people find it impossible to listen to. One thing about Lester Bangs is that he appreciated the noisier, abrasive side of rock and roll more than the finer examples of musicianship that the mainstream goes for. He liked his music a lot more if he knew it would irritate people to the point of anger. I bet he would have loved the Butthole Surfers. I bet he would have hated grunge too.
After the Lou Reed section, we get a variety of articles with an even wider range of topics than came previously. They mostly start as album or concert reviews, but there is also one long-form work of journalism about The Clash. We get insights into all kinds of things like the direction the music industry is heading in the late 1970s, the crass and offensive attitudes of rock’s biggest stars, social observations, critiques of the American lifestyle, and Lester Bangs’ inner torments in dealing with disillusionment, anxiety, depression, insecurity, inadequacy, and drug addiction. This fits harmoniously with an article about Iggy Pop and the underlying negativity of the punk scene in general. In a previous article written about Iggy Pop, he examines how The Stooges embody authenticity in rock music, more so than most other bands. Here he poses the question as to why Iggy Pop is so self-abusive when performing on stage. He drunkenly rolls around in broken glass, cuts his body with razors, and starts a fight with a bar-full of bikers, taunting them with insults and throwing beer bottles at them until he gets beaten close to death. Bangs observes that in the beginning The Stooges reckless abandonment and Iggy Pop’s indulgence in nihilistic self-destruction was ecstatic and liberating, but over time it became more obvious that this freedom from restraint is motivated by a deep sense of self-hatred on Iggy Pop’s part. Bangs also sees this self-hatred as being an underlying attitude of the New York and British punk scenes. If this were so, you might wonder why Iggy Pop never just outright committed suicide (he’s still alive and well today). But there must be something to what Bangs has said considering Pop’s antics. It may not be entirely about self-hatred, but it certainly isn’t self-love either. A singer who brings himself to the edge of death in every performance is not a role model of healthy self-respect. The guy obviously has problems, but the mind of Iggy Pop remains a mystery.
In the latter articles of this collection, you can see Lester Bangs maturing both in writing style and psychologically. He becomes more socially responsible. In what is possible his most famous work of journalism, “The White Noise Supremacists”, he admits to feeling guilty for having used racist language in the past and examines racism in the punk scene despite the presence of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and everything else. When interviewing people at CBGB’s about the subject, one punk dismisses the problem because racism is just as much a part of their scene as anywhere else. Bangs’ comeback is that punks are supposed to be different from everybody else. He ends the article with a plea for punks to stop being racist. He is met with a lukewarm response and his disillusionment with America continues to grow.
And then it goes onwards to the U.K. where he tours with The Clash. He finds them to be likable and unpretentious, thinking he finally found a bunch of rock stars who weren’t assholes, but as events on the tour unfold, he becomes disillusioned with them too. There is a progressively creeping sense of despair as Lester Bangs wrote into the early 1980s before he died of a drug overdose while he had the flu.
What is great about these writings is that Lester Bangs transcends his genre. That may be an odd statement considering that the genre is rock journalism, one that doesn’t lend itself easily to the concept of transcendence to begin with. But this is an author who put so much of himself into what he wrote. He wasn’t just writing to make a living or even just for attention. He was writing to make art and in that he succeeded. Of course, this book is only a sample of what is probably his best work. Not everything about it is great though. There is a fair amount of casually racist language that would have been common in his time, but dates the writing significantly. To be fair, he doesn’t express any ideas about other races that are meant to be insulting or hateful; it’s just that he uses words that are now considered racially offensive in place of terms like “African-American” or “Asian”. By the end of the book, his writing becomes a little tiring too. His long sentences and tortured syntax combines with his moodiness and indulgence in pessimism begin to drag his writing down to the point where you get fatigued from reading it. Otherwise, I’d be interested in the articles that weren’t included here. Lester Bangs was one of the first, if not THE first, to recognize the genius of Lemmy Kilmister and the greatest of punk-metal crossover bands Motorhead. I would love to see what he wrote about them.
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is so much more than a collection of articles or a nostalgia trip for aging counter-culturalists. It is a collection of writings marked by energy, passion, authenticity and enough volume (the amp is tuned up to 11) to speak across multiple generations. On the surface, these passages are rough while being true to the punk attitude in their inner core. The old punk clothing style could include leather, spikes, razors, chains, dog collars, combat boots, safety pins through the nose, and self-inflicted wounds while your typical punk, beneath it all, was good natured, humorous, ironic, articulate, intelligent, complex, affectionate, righteously angry, socially aware, and even a bit sensitive. Those later traits are all inherent parts of Lester Bangs’ writing while the former ornamentation is the sharp edges of his language that breaks all rules of good writing and works better than what most teachers would consider to be acceptable by educational standards. Regardless of what you think of Lester Bangs’ ever changing world view, these writing should serve as a boost of rocket fuel for the increasingly dull and shallow society we have in America today. The upcoming generations need writing like this to inspire them with the fires of rebellion. Stop acting like a bunch of old ladies. Smash your mind-rotting cell phones and make some noise. It’s time again for some cage rattling and earth shaking. Let’s make life exciting once again.
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