“Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.
So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds well for many other people, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver’s seat while AM walloped you on, alone under the headphones with vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac postmidnights, or just sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America, slapping on sides and feeling good.”
— Lester Bangs
You may have noticed that my blog is defined as: “writings, reviews, and ramblings from a failed rock critic turned working writer.”
Ok, what’s the story behind the failed rock critic?
Was there an internship with Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, or American Songwriter that failed to turn into a job?
Were there countless hours doing album reviews, concert coverage, and artist interviews for very low pay?
Was there a book that never got published that could have been considered a classic in rock music history?
Nope.
My story as a working writer goes back to 1987, when I attempted to have an article published about who I thought was a true legend in rock music writing — Lester Bangs.
Lester Bangs and a few other peers — especially Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Nick Kent, and his former boss, Dave Marsh — were going down a similar channel. They were passionate writing about music that had become the life blood of pop culture and social change.
Pop music critics Robert Hilburn and Richard Cromelin at the LA Times also had influence on me. I might have read Hilburn’s piece on this strange new band, Devo, launching their first album. Then I would see them playing on Saturday Night Live in their radioactivity-protected jump suits and goggles — and I was at a record store the next morning buying the record. Cromelin might have gotten a bit more esoteric and written about artists like Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, The Damned, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno.
Bangs, much like Hunter S. Thompson, would become a character in the story. You might learn about all about the oddities of traveling on the Lou Reed concert tour in 1975; or taking an aggressive stance by starting out an interview with unconventional questions; or making fun of pop culture fluff, admitting that he and his girlfriend might be watching “The Donnie & Marie Show” on their date night.
While Bangs may not make a search list in the “literary nonfiction” realm with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Annie Dillard, H.L. Mencken, P.J. O’Rourke, Susan Sontag, and Hunter S. Thompson, he did inspire me to become a writer. I was nearly as obsessed with rock music as we was.
That period — 1975 to 1980 — was my favorite in rock music history, as I came of age and could listen to radio, buy 45s and LPs, read magazines like Creem, go to concerts, and watch the early days of video from artists like Peter Gabriel and David Bowie. Then there were older collections released for the first time like Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes and Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions (hearing “That’s All Right, Mama,” being one of those moments I’ll never forget). You could also sample different styles like reggae from Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Live!, to The Harder They Come soundtrack album.
I engaged in passionate debate with buddies — why I wasn’t as into Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and Aerosmith anymore as I was into The Clash, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Graham Parker & the Rumour, Pretenders, X, Blondie, and Talking Heads.
It also didn’t go well that I liked sneaking into see John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and there was some disco I liked; and I was into where soul and R&B were going with Earth Wind & Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Michael Jackson, and Prince making some great recordings.
I was becoming a left-leaning anti-establishment cynic who may have glorified the ‘60s a bit before learning more about its dark side. But the music was amazing, and I could find restored versions of classics from the early days at one of several record stores I perused regularly.
Lester Bangs and his peers were brilliant writing about the uneasy social change in the atmosphere, and the fun and chaos coming from sex and drugs and rock & roll. They LOVED rock music, with some of them crossing over to writing and playing some of their own. Lester Bangs took a stab at it with friends, recording “Let it Blurt” and other songs that were not very listenable, in my opinion.
But boy could he write. I became immersed in Bangs’ writing with the release of Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, edited with a forward by another one of my rock critic heroes, Greil Marcus. Bangs was enthralled with where the music was heading, and also frustrated and depressed by sports stadium mega-concerts with pricey tickets, and bands like Kansas, Styx, and Toto getting heavy radio play while rockers he considered to be true artists struggled to be heard.
He was quite the critic, dismissing rockstars I still enjoy listening to that were just not up to his high standards for music disrupting mainstream pop — and that you’d just want to blast off your stereo 150 times.
His writing style was also in the spirit of his music heroes, some from bebop jazz, others from garage protopunk bands; some that fuzed the styles, like Van Morrison’s brilliant jazz-based Astral Weeks album.
He’d died at a very early age, 33, in 1982, though the cause of death wasn’t quite clear. He had been drinking a bottle of Romilar cough syrup every day and was considered an alcoholic.
Bangs’ style reminded me of “new journalism” writers like Hunter S. Thompson being part of the story, unlike Tom Wolfe’s best-selling books where he wrote in the third person like a newspaper reporter. Thompson’s first book, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, went in another direction. The book starts with him laying near dead along a highway where he'd been beaten up and stomped on by the biker gang after spending nearly a year riding with them; and drinking with them and nearly becoming one of them.
When I spoke with Greil Marcus, I was shocked by where the interview was going. I had read his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock & Roll Music. He’d written a series of essays tying in great music of the day from Bob Dylan, The Band, Sly & the Family Stone, and Randy Newman, and connecting it to the history of American music going back to its roots, such as blues legend Robert Johnson.
During our phone interview, Marcus dismissed Mystery Train as being insignificant and from his past. He’d changed direction, he said, working on another one called Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. That book was quite different, correlating 20th century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism with the Sex Pistols and other late-1970s British punk bands.
Bangs had a similar practice of winding down an intellectual, distant path that separated him from the common rock music fan. Bangs loved Count Five, Velvet Underground, the Stooges, MC5, and Public Image, Ltd. In a radio interview, he dismissed Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders as being unoriginal and like many rock banks of the day — pretty much boring and pointless, and not radical, innovative, and avant garde enough.
I’ve tended to go more toward the center — loving the Pretenders, and a few other artists that Bangs dismissed.
My fascination with him comes down more to his contribution to the DIY (do it yourself) movement. A rough, provocative, and sometimes hilarious, character like Lester Bangs could become a leading rock critic. Then there was Charles Bukowski, the rough and drunk postal worker who occasionally wrote great poems. And punk rock, that broke down into songs with two-to-three chords played by rockers who’d probably never taken a music class. Beatniks from the 1950s like Jack Kerouac would fit into the DIY category as well.
No one wants to end up like Bangs. He didn’t last very long, and missed out on a lot more years of great writing, love, friendship, travel, and colorful stories. I’d rather lean toward the center, and do the real-life stuff to stick around longer and enjoy more years of writing and living.
I had pitched my article on the Lester Bangs book to a few publications and it never got published. But it was the first step in becoming a writer — that got me to back to school for journalism, take an editorial job at a business magazine publishing company, and launch a long series of writing projects that have been tough to do and richly satisfying to type and type and type.
That’s one thing I’ve had in common with Lester Bangs — can’t stop typing.
Bangs did cultivate a following. Philip Seymour Hoffman played him in Almost Famous.
“How to Be a Rock Critic,” a one-man play, ran earlier this year at the Public Theatre in New York City, exploring Bangs’s life, work, and death. Wearing a “Detroit Sucks” t-shirt, Bangs preaches to the choir around a stage littered with empty Chinese takeout cartons, pill bottles, crushed Schlitz cans, magazines, and endless crates of records.
“Nobody touch my fucking records,” he warns early on.
I doubt I’ll be making any more efforts to become a rock critic. I’ll always be keeping my voice as a writer alive and putting it out there, just like Lester Bangs.
So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds well for many other people, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver’s seat while AM walloped you on, alone under the headphones with vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac postmidnights, or just sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America, slapping on sides and feeling good.”
— Lester Bangs
You may have noticed that my blog is defined as: “writings, reviews, and ramblings from a failed rock critic turned working writer.”
Ok, what’s the story behind the failed rock critic?
Was there an internship with Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, or American Songwriter that failed to turn into a job?
Were there countless hours doing album reviews, concert coverage, and artist interviews for very low pay?
Was there a book that never got published that could have been considered a classic in rock music history?
Nope.
My story as a working writer goes back to 1987, when I attempted to have an article published about who I thought was a true legend in rock music writing — Lester Bangs.
Lester Bangs and a few other peers — especially Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Nick Kent, and his former boss, Dave Marsh — were going down a similar channel. They were passionate writing about music that had become the life blood of pop culture and social change.Pop music critics Robert Hilburn and Richard Cromelin at the LA Times also had influence on me. I might have read Hilburn’s piece on this strange new band, Devo, launching their first album. Then I would see them playing on Saturday Night Live in their radioactivity-protected jump suits and goggles — and I was at a record store the next morning buying the record. Cromelin might have gotten a bit more esoteric and written about artists like Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, The Damned, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno.
Bangs, much like Hunter S. Thompson, would become a character in the story. You might learn about all about the oddities of traveling on the Lou Reed concert tour in 1975; or taking an aggressive stance by starting out an interview with unconventional questions; or making fun of pop culture fluff, admitting that he and his girlfriend might be watching “The Donnie & Marie Show” on their date night.
While Bangs may not make a search list in the “literary nonfiction” realm with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Annie Dillard, H.L. Mencken, P.J. O’Rourke, Susan Sontag, and Hunter S. Thompson, he did inspire me to become a writer. I was nearly as obsessed with rock music as we was.
That period — 1975 to 1980 — was my favorite in rock music history, as I came of age and could listen to radio, buy 45s and LPs, read magazines like Creem, go to concerts, and watch the early days of video from artists like Peter Gabriel and David Bowie. Then there were older collections released for the first time like Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes and Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions (hearing “That’s All Right, Mama,” being one of those moments I’ll never forget). You could also sample different styles like reggae from Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Live!, to The Harder They Come soundtrack album.
I engaged in passionate debate with buddies — why I wasn’t as into Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and Aerosmith anymore as I was into The Clash, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Graham Parker & the Rumour, Pretenders, X, Blondie, and Talking Heads.
It also didn’t go well that I liked sneaking into see John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and there was some disco I liked; and I was into where soul and R&B were going with Earth Wind & Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Michael Jackson, and Prince making some great recordings.
I was becoming a left-leaning anti-establishment cynic who may have glorified the ‘60s a bit before learning more about its dark side. But the music was amazing, and I could find restored versions of classics from the early days at one of several record stores I perused regularly.
Lester Bangs and his peers were brilliant writing about the uneasy social change in the atmosphere, and the fun and chaos coming from sex and drugs and rock & roll. They LOVED rock music, with some of them crossing over to writing and playing some of their own. Lester Bangs took a stab at it with friends, recording “Let it Blurt” and other songs that were not very listenable, in my opinion.
But boy could he write. I became immersed in Bangs’ writing with the release of Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, edited with a forward by another one of my rock critic heroes, Greil Marcus. Bangs was enthralled with where the music was heading, and also frustrated and depressed by sports stadium mega-concerts with pricey tickets, and bands like Kansas, Styx, and Toto getting heavy radio play while rockers he considered to be true artists struggled to be heard.
He was quite the critic, dismissing rockstars I still enjoy listening to that were just not up to his high standards for music disrupting mainstream pop — and that you’d just want to blast off your stereo 150 times.
His writing style was also in the spirit of his music heroes, some from bebop jazz, others from garage protopunk bands; some that fuzed the styles, like Van Morrison’s brilliant jazz-based Astral Weeks album.
He’d died at a very early age, 33, in 1982, though the cause of death wasn’t quite clear. He had been drinking a bottle of Romilar cough syrup every day and was considered an alcoholic.
Bangs’ style reminded me of “new journalism” writers like Hunter S. Thompson being part of the story, unlike Tom Wolfe’s best-selling books where he wrote in the third person like a newspaper reporter. Thompson’s first book, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, went in another direction. The book starts with him laying near dead along a highway where he'd been beaten up and stomped on by the biker gang after spending nearly a year riding with them; and drinking with them and nearly becoming one of them.
When I spoke with Greil Marcus, I was shocked by where the interview was going. I had read his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock & Roll Music. He’d written a series of essays tying in great music of the day from Bob Dylan, The Band, Sly & the Family Stone, and Randy Newman, and connecting it to the history of American music going back to its roots, such as blues legend Robert Johnson.
During our phone interview, Marcus dismissed Mystery Train as being insignificant and from his past. He’d changed direction, he said, working on another one called Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. That book was quite different, correlating 20th century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism with the Sex Pistols and other late-1970s British punk bands.
Bangs had a similar practice of winding down an intellectual, distant path that separated him from the common rock music fan. Bangs loved Count Five, Velvet Underground, the Stooges, MC5, and Public Image, Ltd. In a radio interview, he dismissed Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders as being unoriginal and like many rock banks of the day — pretty much boring and pointless, and not radical, innovative, and avant garde enough.
I’ve tended to go more toward the center — loving the Pretenders, and a few other artists that Bangs dismissed.
My fascination with him comes down more to his contribution to the DIY (do it yourself) movement. A rough, provocative, and sometimes hilarious, character like Lester Bangs could become a leading rock critic. Then there was Charles Bukowski, the rough and drunk postal worker who occasionally wrote great poems. And punk rock, that broke down into songs with two-to-three chords played by rockers who’d probably never taken a music class. Beatniks from the 1950s like Jack Kerouac would fit into the DIY category as well.
No one wants to end up like Bangs. He didn’t last very long, and missed out on a lot more years of great writing, love, friendship, travel, and colorful stories. I’d rather lean toward the center, and do the real-life stuff to stick around longer and enjoy more years of writing and living.
I had pitched my article on the Lester Bangs book to a few publications and it never got published. But it was the first step in becoming a writer — that got me to back to school for journalism, take an editorial job at a business magazine publishing company, and launch a long series of writing projects that have been tough to do and richly satisfying to type and type and type.
That’s one thing I’ve had in common with Lester Bangs — can’t stop typing.
Bangs did cultivate a following. Philip Seymour Hoffman played him in Almost Famous.
“How to Be a Rock Critic,” a one-man play, ran earlier this year at the Public Theatre in New York City, exploring Bangs’s life, work, and death. Wearing a “Detroit Sucks” t-shirt, Bangs preaches to the choir around a stage littered with empty Chinese takeout cartons, pill bottles, crushed Schlitz cans, magazines, and endless crates of records.
“Nobody touch my fucking records,” he warns early on.
I doubt I’ll be making any more efforts to become a rock critic. I’ll always be keeping my voice as a writer alive and putting it out there, just like Lester Bangs.
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