Jim DeRogatis - Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Americas Greatest Rock Critic

I have always believed that
rock n roll comes down to myth.
There are no facts.

L ESTER B ANGS.
in Rod Stewart

Sometimes Lester was full of shit. Of course there are facts in rock n roll, and they are valuable tools for deflating the myths, thereby making heroic deeds seem possible for us lowly humans. This was a pursuit that Lester loved almost as much as constructing the myths in the first place.

Lester was the great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock writingits Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one. Out of tune with the peace n love ethos of the sixties and the Me Generation navel-gazing of the seventies, he agitated for sounds that were harsher, louder, more electric, and more alive, charting if not defining the aesthetics of heavy metal and punk. Where others idealized the rock n roll lifestyle or presented a distant academic version of it, he lived it, reveling in its excesses, drawing energy from its din, and matching its passion in prose that erupted from the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice. In the process he became a peer of the artists he celebrated, brash visionaries and dedicated individualists such as Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and most of all Lou Reed, with whom he had a relationship that was equal parts Johnson/Boswell, Vidal/Mailer, and Mozart/Salieri (and it was often difficult to tell who was who).

I set out to meet the Lester of legend on the afternoon of April 14, 1982. A senior at Hudson Catholic Regional High School for Boys in Jersey City, New Jersey, I had been assigned by my journalism teacher to interview a hero. The PATH train deposited me on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and I shouted Lesters name at the fifth-floor window as instructed. His building didnt have doorbells, and at that point he lacked a phone; it distracted him from writing, he said. After a minute he threw down the keys, and I made the long climb up to his apartment. Dominated by thousands of albums and piles of trash, it was an exaggerated version of every teenaged rock fans lair, though its occupant at the time was thirty-three years old.

Over the next few hours I caught a glimpse of another Lester: the kind, magnetic, righteous, outrageously funny, and occasionally frustrating man behind the persona. His gangly frame carried a penetrating intellect housed in a brain so big it seemed to be pushing through the alien lump on his forehead. Addicted to contrarianism, he was a brilliantly successful failure, a doofus savant, and a self-described compassionate humanist perfectly capable of destroying someone with a casual blast of callous insensitivity He was a romantic in the gravest, saddest, best, and most ridiculous sense of that worn-out word, his friend Nick Tosches wrote. He couldnt merely go to bed with a woman, he had to fall in love with her. He couldnt merely dislike something, he had to rail and rage against it. None of it was real, but in the end, the phantoms of all that crazy love and anger, since they werent his to command, conquered him.

Early in his grade-school years the dictates of his mothers religion marked Lester as an outsider, and long after he split from the Jehovahs Witnesses he never really fit in anywhere. Raised in a San Diego suburb, he rebelled against both his vanilla surroundings and the hippie alternative by transforming himself into a self-proclaimed beatnik drug punk. When he went to work at Creem, he embraced the angry energy of working-class rockers desperate to avoid the assembly line, but it wasnt long before he found Detroit as stifling intellectually and emotionally as El Cajon had been. Finally he settled in Manhattan. At first he thought hed found the creative community hed long advocated in the punk explosion centered at CBGB, but he was ultimately disillusioned when the reality fell short of his ideal. In the end he was preparing to write about life as an alienated castaway on one of the worlds most populated islands.