RiffRaf

Great Rock Photographers: The Mick Rock Interview (Pt. II)

                                  

In your photographs of Syd Barrett, you can see an accursed poet. He had a reputation of being difficult. Was he?

No, quite the opposite. Syd and me were very comfortable together. I think that was why I got the pictures I got. I took acid with him once, just one time. And whenever I say it to people they think oh, my God, that must have been weird. But it wasn't.

It was actually quite relaxed and very playful. We had a lot of fun and we played records and looked at Robert Crumb comics and played like a kind of Chinese checkers game. I still remember certain things about it and it was entirely playful. I did have some pretty bizarre experiences with certain people under the influence of acid but not with Syd.

It was more with Syd about the pressures. I did actually the last interview with him, and that's where that phrase, "a very irregular head," comes from and "I'm full of dust and guitars." That was from the very last public interview he ever did, not long after I finished at Cambridge in 1971. 

That's when I did the very last pictures of him in the garden of his mother's house and down in the basement where he had a pad.

So I got on with Syd. I often have to remind myself and remind people when I'm talking about those early years, how young we all were. Everyone was in their early 20s. My daughter's 21 now, and I look back and think of all the craziness I was up to at 21, including taking photos of Syd. 

And I think it was a very accelerated kind of time, not just for me, but for the people I hung around with. It was a time when there was still something called the 'underground' where all this creativity happened...not in the political sense because I had little interest in it and still don't. I've never voted in my life. I despise all politicians.

Maybe Winston Churchill you can take your hat off to, but even he had a checkered early career. It was only his facing down of Hitler that transformed him into this very substantial person. He's a fascinating man. But in general, politicians are undoubtedly a lower form of human life. They're in the business of lying and manipulation. 

And, if you get someone who comes along who's not so bad, like Obama, even he's forced into all kinds of compromises by the circumstances. I'm sure he's got a fairly pure heart, but he's stuck with the fact that he's black and with racism that's still rife in this country, and the powers that be that really control what happens...but that's a whole other tale. 

At the time of the Madcap Laughs, do you think Syd was relieved from the pressures of Pink Floyd?

I think he was relieved from having to play the same songs every night. In the same way. He was really more like a jazz musician in many ways. He thought like a painter. Like an abstract painter. That's really what he was for the rest of his life. And what he had been originally since a young age. 

A book of his art came out last year. There aren’t many of his actual physical paintings left - but the interesting thing was that he would photograph his paintings and then destroy them. 

In recent years I reconnected with a girlfriend of Syd's, Jenny Spires. And she has some of his original paintings, as well as a collection of Syd's love letters to her. She's referred to as 'Jennifer Gentle' in the early Floyd track 'Lucifer Sam'

I want to ask you one more question about Syd.

Syd never goes away. It's amazing. My first conversations with David Bowie were about Syd Barrett. 

             

What did you guys talk about?

We talked about Syd, and he had recently met Lou and Iggy. You've got to remember Lou and Iggy were not that well known at that moment in time. They both had a certain underground following, but that was before Transformer and Raw Power, and in either case had they been able to sell any records or get radio airplay.

I remember talking about Syd and Iggy and Lou Reed in first my conversations with David Bowie. I think that's why we got on. We had certain tastes in common and you have to remember again, in 1972, those tastes were maybe slightly more esoteric than they are today. 

I know Bowie used to go to the Floyd shows, the underground shows at the UFO Club.

It was to see Syd. It was Syd that really obsessed him, not particularly Pink Floyd. And the other thing about Syd was he sang like an Englishman. David sort of almost invented singing like an Englishman, but the precursor was Syd Barrett. Even in the case of The Beatles you could hear Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and occasionally Little Richard or something. And the Stones were totally American influenced of course.

"Arnold Layne was a strange fellow." That's a totally British thing. David also sang with this English intonation which certainly influenced just about all significant succeeding British rock and rollers. 

And along comes Bryan Ferry as well. He was another of the British school. And a great singer/songwriter called Steve Harley who had a band called Cockney Rebel who, certainly in Europe in the 70s, was very significant. 

I suppose that Syd probably was influenced by Ray Davies with some of the English-isms.

Maybe. But I don't recall Syd being particularly interested in The Kinks. Ray [Davies] didn't early on sound that English. Think of "You Really Got Me." But by the time he got to "Lola," yes. 

Besides the obvious like Dylan and the Stones and The Beatles, which we all loved, Syd was interested in jazz. That's what he often played. Coltrane and Mingus. In a way he thought more like a jazz musician. It was always about improvisation and I think that was the thing with Floyd. He didn't want to go out and play the same music every night. He wanted to just do whatever he felt like. 

He was about the blues as well, but he mixed up all these influences and it became Pink Floyd which didn't sound like anything you'd ever heard before and it was certainly the result of his LSD experiments. Although, at that time, I don't think the rest of the band had taken acid, not at the beginning. 

Syd was certainly the visionary as Dave and Roger constantly give him credit. They've been very good about showing their respect for his innovations. 

You can't get away from Syd. In Tom Stoppard's play Rock n Roll, the Syd character looms large although he's not a character in the play itself.

Tom Stoppard, the renowned playwright, wrote the foreword to my book Exposed, and he talks about Syd and how that formed the connection between him and me.

And, of course, the afterword's by a gentleman called Andrew Loog Oldham who I got to know in New York in the late 70s. He was the original manager and producer and publicist of the Rolling Stones. A genius, no doubt.

For that book I wanted to get a kind of slightly different flavor rather than going to somebody obvious and getting them to write a foreword because I've done collaborations with Queen and with Debbie [Harry] and with David and Iggy and even with Rocky Horror. 

I have a great Rocky Horror book out in Germany for which Richard O'Brien, who wrote the musical and plays RiffRaff in the film, wrote the foreword for. It's in both German and English although it is of course primarily a photobook.

And now I finally got around to doing a book with Lou Reed. 

                            

I'm glad Lou agreed to do that with you. 

Well, I think it's about timing. It's 40 years since Transformer. I've been often approached about doing it, but it was never going to happen without Lou's full participation. I always involve the subjects of my books. And I have a deep and abiding respect for Lou both as a person and an artist, and I want him to be totally happy about the end result. I'm just scanning pictures and sending them over to him and he's picking out what he likes. We'll both write a foreword for the book and we'll co-sign. It'll be a beautiful signed and numbered and slipcased limited edition tome, to be published by Genesis Publications, with whom I did my collaborations with Bowie and Queen. And Syd, who co-signed 320 copies of our book Psychedelic Renegades, his only public gesture in the last 35 years of his life. The co-signed copies are now selling for several thousand dollars, if you can find them....

Of course, Lou has an interesting, somewhat combative public reputation in his maturity, but he shows one side to journalists, and that's only a little bit of Lou Reed. The full man is much more interesting and complex. And has been very kind to a number of people I know.

I understand that you have a good friendship with David and had one with Syd, but were you ever in awe of a subject?

I think I was a little in awe of all of them: Syd, David, Lou Reed. Lou, especially back in those days, was such a groundbreaker. We were all a bit in awe of Lou Reed, certainly David was too.

And Freddie, of course, an awesome talent. And Iggy Pop. Absolutely. He was a primal force, the like of which has never been equalled in rock n roll. When punk rock came along in full force a few years later, it was kind of amateur time compared to Iggy. It was like...this is punk? 

I still think of Iggy in 1972, when I shot the Raw Power photos. Now, that was punk. And he's still the one true punk out there. All the rest have drifted away. A great artist. 

Great Rock Photographers: The Mick Rock Interview (Pt. I)

                                  

Mick Rock's early photographs (1972-1979) of David Bowie, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Queen, Johnny Rotten and Debbie Harry are so iconic that they have become deeply ingrained in our social consciousness.

Mr. Rock is known as "The Man Who Shot the Seventies," but he didn't stop working when David Bowie took off his Ziggy Stardust costume. In fact, the photographer is so busy these days that he can "hardly keep up with his own brain."

In our "Great Rock Photographer" series, the inaugural photographer, the legendary Mick Rock, chats about David Bowie, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett, whacked-out poets, LSD, his health scare, yoga, New York, cats and oh yeah, photography.

Riffraf caught up with Mr. Rock for a two-part interview. Below is part one. Check back tomorrow for part two.

Why do you think you're drawn to musicians?

I think some cute answer I gave a few years ago to Spin Magazine was for my sins in a former life, I've been forced to spend an inordinate amount of time with musicians in this life. Of course, I love them.

I don't think there's anything logical. I think it was more about timing, inclination, my name, the way I look. I think all these things combined, plus certainly in my youth - I studied languages and literature at Cambridge, so I tended to see a lot of the early characters that I worked with as kind of modern equivalents of Baudelaire and Coleridge and all these crazy drug-sodden poets.

And that was really the way I saw them, and I related to them and that somehow or another, while I was still a student, some local band gave me 5 quid to take some pictures of them. And I'd only been using a camera for about three or four months, but I think that synchronized in my brain, well you mean you can actually get paid for doing something like this? And back then, 5 quid was worth something. 

I don't know if you've seen my latest book, Exposed. I say right at the beginning of my introduction that 'photography happened to me. It idly drifted into my life, set up shop and took over.' It wasn't particularly what I had in mind. I think maybe I would have liked to have been a lyric writer or something of that nature, something a bit more of a literary persuasion. 

And, in fact, in the early days, I used to do interviews and provide photographs myself because you could get a double whammy that way. You get paid for the text and for the photos. And the other thing, of course, was that I got to know Syd Barrett and that was probably an inspiration; besides his unbelievable talent, he looked like a poet of another era.

Like Rimbaud.

Exactly, yes. So I think all these things conspired. Of course, I went out my way to do certain things that interested me, but somehow it was like an energy all of its own. And obviously I had an interest in the music. I played rock music all the time from an early age and, of course, I took LSD and that probably helped too. It's over 40 years since I've touched that, but I think that it somehow taught me how to 'see.'

It did have a profound influence on a number of people I've known and read about. Steve Jobs would talk about how it influenced his vision. I think it also ruined the lives of a lot of other people. In my case, it opened up my third eye. It definitely influenced the direction of my life.

You've also shot actors and models.

Not really many actors, but certainly I've shot quite a few models in my time, that's for sure. But I somehow will always be a rock and roll photographer. Even though I do a lot of photo art. In fact, I'm in the middle of preparing for my first exhibition here in New York at the CATM Gallery in Chelsea towards the end of March. They want to call it: The Legends Collection and there will be Bob Marley and Bowie and Iggy and Mick Jagger and Freddie, Queen. Certainly Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Iggy, Debbie Harry, Kate Moss because she's about as rock and roll as anybody out there. And also the master of modern art, Andy Warhol. All based on my own photos. Anyway, I'm excited about that.  

And I've also just completed the first music video that I've done in a long time for a very hot young guitar player called Andrew Watt. And then I'm working on my Lou Reed book with Lou for a company called Genesis for whom I've done books for Bowie and Queen and one on Syd Barrett that he cosigned a number of copies of. And there's an Iggy limited edition book in the works that will cover more than just my Raw Power stuff.

I think it's all this kundalini yoga and chanting that I do every day. There's so much going on at the moment, I can hardly keep up with my own brain. Somehow I'm busier than ever. 

And then there's a documentary about me kicking into gear. It's directed by a guy called Barney Clay who's a music video director (you can check him out) of some esteem and who's just married my friend Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 

And then I'm going to do an art show in London, and then I'll probably have to do a couple of glam shows. It looks like I'm doing one in London and New York and maybe in Stockholm and Sydney. And I don't do drugs. Haven't done for 15 years...How about that? I'm too old. It's all done on yoga and caffeine these days. 

                  

You had a triple bypass?

It was a quadruple, but it wasn't only that. I was detoxing from 20 years of cocaine and speed and it wasn't what I was eating - I've been a vegetarian for a long time. It was about the fact that I wasn't eating very much or not sleeping and the whole irregularity of my life.

I was always fascinated by the likes of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and company and how to whack your senses out in such a way that you can see things differently. 'Le Dereglement Des Sens' that Rimbaud wrote about. In fact, the documentary director, Barney, sent me an email over the weekend requesting that I send him over a list of the writings that had influenced me because he knew that I studied languages and literature at Cambridge. I realized from the list how pumped my imagination was by all of these crazy poets and writers.

As much as I was interested in the literature itself, I was also interested in the lives they led and, of course, later on, in the '70s when my photography was in full flight I got much more interested in visual artists and, certainly, Paris in the '20s and '30s. And Man Ray became a big obsession of mine.

I suppose we're all like tactile machines, we creatives: we absorb all these different stimuli and process it through us and then spit it out in a new form. I think I imagined myself as being like a crazed poet, except in my case I was a deranged photographer, if you like.

Not only are you interested in musicians, but you're also interested in cats.

Oh, yes. I've even got people talking to me about a cats book. In fact I've just acquired a new kitten...a delightful female Maine Coon, a breed I've been obsessed with for the past 25 years. I've had a succession of them. I need her as a pal for Razor, because we had two die this year unfortunately. Her name is Bellini...

I wonder what it is about cats that some artists find so appealing. I was at Hemingway's House in Key West and there are hundreds of cats on his property. He was a cat lover. 

Cats are very meditative kind of animals because they actually sleep quite a lot and they're very zened down and they're pretty self-sufficient. As long as you feed them and have a litter box and pet them, they're pretty happy. I like other people's dogs, but I never want a dog because they do require a huge amount of work. They can be a little bit demanding, and they want to go out walking. A cat is very soothing. 

I can just sit and watch these cats at times and get off just watching them play or even sleep. I've always liked cats. As long as I can remember, there have been cats in my life. Baudelaire was a big cat lover. I think there's even a famous painting or drawing of him with a cat. Yes, I think a lot of artists do.  

You've been living in New York City since 1977. 

Not really full time until '82. I was running between the two cities for about five years. 

How do you feel about some of the changes in New York?

Well, it has been cleaned up a lot. Alphabet City is a concept now; it's not reality. It's so fashionable these days. I don't spend too much time thinking about these things. I'm too obsessed by what I'm doing in the present, and I tend to accept that change is inevitable. 

I do a lot of kundalini yoga and one of the chief tenets of any form of yoga, is that the world is in a constant state of flux. That's why the concept of political 'conservatism' doesn't really work because you can't hold back change. Change will happen whether you want it to or not. 

At this stage of my life I've learned to be discriminating, but the idea that you can hold back time and change - and, of course, there are lots of pockets in the world where people think they can hold back - but you can't even if you want to. Inevitably, change sooner or later will come. That's just the organic state of the universe.

So I accept those changes. I try to keep a certain continuity nowadays in my own life unlike in my first 40 years of my life. You get to a certain point where you need to achieve a certain stability in your relationships and in your work mode. You need to make clear commitments.

But I know that change is going to keep happening and you've got to be flexible and that's the advantage of being an artist. You learn flexibility. You learn to roll with it. So I'm quite comfortable with all the dramatic changes that have gone on in the modern world, because my life has been changing the whole time anyway. As crazy and as upended as it all is, that's the way my life has always been. So I feel a certain exhilaration.... 

I do know that 2012, according to the Mayans, is the end of it all, but people have been forecasting the end of time for thousands of years. There seems to be a certain resilience about the earth in spite of everything. 

I like to do my work. I like to spend time with people I like and do a lot of yoga, get a lot of massages, do some chanting and meditation and power breathing. These are the things that keep me all balanced. And I've learned to stay away from negative, destructive people. But it takes time in life to learn about that, the powers of discrimination. 

In my youth I embraced everything and everybody, and got myself into all kinds of mischief, the good, the bad and the ugly. Nowadays I am more circumspect, but I try to keep an open mind. I like working with a lot of young musicians and young people in general, that's for sure. I keep learning.

Do musicians come in with ideas?  Is it a collaboration?

It's more about an exchange of energies. I'm always open to what anybody wants to bring to the table. I have something of a reputation, having, if you like, a certain 'pedigree', especially based on a lot of characters and images from the 70s that people are still obsessed by. People tend to come in with a certain amount of respect for that, but I let them know that if they’ve got ideas, I'm game and if not, I'm going to take the bull by the horns and keep running and twisting and turning 'til we squeeze out the magic! 

So it's always collaborative in a sense even if the subject is just sitting there because you are, after all, photographing them. Just their presence is a collaboration. If you review my work, in terms of setups, it's mostly not that complicated. Occasionally they are more elaborate, but not so often. I tend to go for the jugular! I focus down heavily on the people themselves and just play around with lighting and angles and mood. For me those are the most important factors. 

Like a musician, a good photographer must have good timing. 

Photography is about timing, very much about timing. There's definitely a synchronicity between music and photography. There certainly is in my case. Did you get that moment? Click, click, click. The seizing of the moment, the plucking of the frame. 

And quite often, I shoot rhythmically. I'll hit a pattern. If you watch some of the videos of me at work (they're on the internet) you get a certain sense of it. Maybe it's slightly vampiric. I taste a little blood and then I'm off to the races, and I hit my rhythm and then these great things start to happen. 

People often come in and they kind of give me a vague sense of what they want and let me run with it because it's out of the rhythm of the way I work that the images pop. 

Well, like the "Guitar Fellatio" photograph. You caught it just right.  

Well that was the right time, right place, right relationship, yes. I didn't know it was going to happen, but there I was for the encore, on the side of the stage and, as David [Bowie] told me many years later, he wasn't really trying to go down on Mick [Ronson's] guitar he was just trying to gnaw on it, but Mick kept on swinging the guitar around and in fact if you check the shot out, his feet are just splayed apart, he's not actually on his knees. But it was so effective publicity-wise that he recreated it many times from then on.

And in my book Moonage Daydream, my collaboration with David, you'll see the previous shot where he's standing and biting Mick's guitar.

                 

I Want My MTV

                                    

MTV helped catapult the careers of Madonna and Michael Jackson. But it also ended those of many established artists who were unable to groove with the alternating rhythm of the times.

In their recent book, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, journalists Craig Marks an Rob Tannenbaum have compiled an oral history that reflects the power MTV had in making or breaking artists in the early 80's.

For those artists/bands who embraced the music industry's new medium - Madonna, Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, ZZ Top, and Def Leppard for instance - MTV enabled them to reach an audience they would never have reached with vinyl records alone, turning them into international stars. According to J. Freedom duLac at The Washington Post, "Record sales doubled during the first decade of MTV’s existence, although the advent of the CD had something to do with it."

Some artists/groups simply refused to make videos, and then there were those established musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Rick James and Billy Squier who tried and failed. To their credit, they at least recognized how quickly music videos had become a vital part of the business. Image had become a crucial component of the rock and roll equation. Unfortunately, their music didn't quite translate as well on television.

In Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," the singer asks a girl in the audience (Courtney Cox) to join him on stage. They dance like two dorks at a middle school dance, while the band plays on. In Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl," Billy, dressed as a car mechanic, dances around a garage, while holding a crescent wrench. Rick James' "Superfreak" is downright cheesy; and then there is Billy Squier's "Rock Me Tonite." A video that takes Rick James' cheese to unreachable heights. It's most likely the worst video ever made. Whereas Springsteen, Joel and James were able to rebound, poor Billy Squier's career went down in a ball of flames.

Billy Squier was a hard-rock superstar before he released the "Rock Me Tonite" video in 1984. The video is riddled with cliches that succeed in tarnishing the hard rocker's image: Squier skips around his bedroom, grinds on the floor, rips off his pink t-shirt, then falls back onto his bed. The singer blames the video, which was directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega, for his career's demise.

Marks and Tannenbaum dedicate an entire chapter to the Billy Squier debacle. The authors interviewed over 400 people - artists, managers, filmmakers, record company executives and MTV employees - and none could agree on the best video, but all agreed that "Rock Me Tonite" was the worst. Squier has said:

       The video misrepresents who I am as an artist. I was a good-looking, sexy guy. That certainly didn't hurt in         selling records. But in this video I'm sort of pretty boy. And I'm preening around a room. People said "He's         gay." Or "He's on drugs." It was traumatizing to me. I mean, I had nothing against gays. I have a lot of gay         friends. But like it or not, it was more of a sticky point then.

Take a look for yourself and you decide if it's the worst music video ever made.

                  

Those Tricky Lead Singers

The following excerpt is from Jonathan Lethem’s “Fly in the Ointment (Director’s Cut),” published in Rolling Stone (November 27, 2008).

“Singers are tricksters. Sometimes we’ll wonder if they’re more like movie actors than musicians per se – we’ll decide that the “real” R.E.M. is embodied by Buck, Berry and Mills, not that kooky frontman Stipe, or the “real” Rolling Stones is Richards-Wood-Watts-Wyman, rather than that irritating capitalist Jagger. But beware – go down this route and soon you’ll find yourself wondering how The Doors sound sans 'Mr. Mojo Risin,' or imagining someone can better put across Dylan’s gnarled syllables than Dylan himself….

In truth, so often what makes a band like the Stones or R.E.M. (or the band Dylan transformed from The Hawks into The Band) so truly unique and powerful is in how the instrumentalists rise to the challenge of creating a home for the vocalists’ less-than-purely-musical approach to a song: the braggadocio or mumbling, the spoken asides or too-many-syllables crowded into a line that destroys traditional rhythm or measure, those movie-star flourishes that compel us to adore and resent the singer at once.”

Here are some other “kooky” lead singers with a “less-than-purely-musical approach": Johnny Rotten, Roger Daltrey, Joe Strummer, James Brown, Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, Eric Burdon, Bono, Karen O, Syd Barrett, Debbie Harry, Liam Gallagher, Robert Smith, Elvis Costello, Michael Hutchence, PJ Harvey, Ian Curtis, Jeff Tweedy, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and yours truly (not that I'm in their league, but I've fronted several bands).

What do we all have in common? We have all been fortunate enough to have had a band behind us, affording us the freedom to explore the melody and nuance of a song.

Sometimes we go off-key; sometimes we are never in-key to begin with; sometimes we may be sick with the flu and unable to locate any key whatsoever; sometimes we simply can't compete with our guitarist's blaring amplifier and therefore, finding any key is futile.

That's what makes lead singers tricksters, tricking their way through every tune.

It's only rock and roll, but I like it!

Eating Slugs Off The Sidewalk: Or Let Us Now Praise Lester Bangs (Part II)

"Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is"--Lester Bangs

In the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, Lester Bangs berates his hero and Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed, throughout the infamous interview: "He's a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh, a panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn't have the energy to commit suicide."

Where is the praise? The adulation? The idolization? The veneration? The hero-worship? You're not going to get any hollow fawning from Lester. That's for sure.

Lester's ambivalence about Lou Reed -- someone he claimed to have admired -- is something that he freely admitted: "Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch."

Tell us how you really feel, Lester. Why would Lou agree to an interview with a hostile journalist? Maybe because he liked to dish it out as much as he liked to receive it.

The two legends debate a variety of topics: smack, speed, drag queens, decadence, Johnny Walker Black, Yoko Ono and Burt Reynolds. Below is a brief excerpt from the interview.

"Me, I was drunk. I slugged about a half-quart of Johnnie Walker Black while waiting for Lou to get ready to argue, and what the hell, last time Lou was in town he was drinking double Johnny Walkers while I sat there nursing my Bloody Mary, trying to think of questions while he rambled on woozily saying things like "Will Yoko leave Paul?" and "I admire Burt Reynolds a lot."

Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I'd pondered over for months.

LESTER: Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their own lives for them, vicariously, in your music or your life?

He didn't seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about [....] Like, I listen to your records, shootin' smack, shootin' speed, committing suicide--

LOU: That's three percent out of a hundred songs.

LESTER: Like with all this decadence and glitter shit--none of it would have happened if not for you, and yet I wonder if--

LOU: I didn't have anything to do with it.

LESTER: Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.

LOU : What's decadent about that?

LESTER: Okay, let's define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence?

LOU: You because you used to be able to write and now you're just fulla shit. You don't keep track of music; you're not on top of what's happening, you don't know the players or who's doin' what. It's all jive. You're getting very egocentric.

That's why Lou Reed was necessary. And what may be even more important is that he had the good sense (or maybe just the brain rot, hard to tell) to realize that the whole concept of sleaze, "decadence," "degeneracy, was a joke, and turned himself into a clown, the Pit into a puddle. Any numbskull can be a degenerate, but not everybody realizes that even now, like Jim Morrison, Lou realized the implicit absurdity of rock n' roll [....] Though that may be giving him too much credit.

Eating Slugs Off The Sidewalk: Or Let Us Now Praise Lester Bangs (Part I)

"A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own" - Lester Bangs 

A few weeks ago I asked my friends, "If you could have dinner with one musician, living or dead, who would it be?" Three luminaries -- Elvis, John Lennon, and Frank Sinatra -- topped the list. For legendary rock music critic Lester Bangs, he would have chosen former Velvet Underground frontman, Lou Reed. 

Throughout his brief career, Lester Bangs -- the Hunter S. Thompson of the rock music world -- interviewed Lou Reed several times, and though their relationship was often volatile, deep down they had a mutual respect for each other. Bangs urged Reed to explore and experiment and not become a parody of himself, whereas Reed held Bangs to a high standard as critic and writer. 

Bangs once had this to say this about his idol: "I'm flattered by the fact that one of my heroes has become one of my fans [...] The fact is that Lou, like all heroes, is there for the beating up. They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again..."

Bangs' ambivalence about his "hero" is made apparent in the infamous Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves: Or How I Slugged it Out With Lou Reed and Stayed Awake. In the 1975 interview for Creem magazine, the writer and musician go head-to-head, building each other up only to tear each other down. In the end, they were like oil and water. Fire and gasoline. That Hatfields and McCoys. Ray and Dave Davies. The Gallagher Brothers.

Below is an excerpt from the classic interview (I have retained only the dialogue) which has been taken from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Collected Writings of Lester Bangs edited by Greil Marcus.

LESTER: I saw Bowie the other night.

LOU: Lucky you. I think it's very sad.

LESTER: He ripped off all your riffs, obviously.

LOU: Everybody steals riffs. You steal yours. David wrote some really great songs.

LESTER: Aw, c'mon...anybody can write great songs! Sam the Sham wrote great songs! Did David ever write anything better than "Wooly Bully"?

LOU: You ever listen to the Bewlay Brothers, shithead?

LESTER: Yeah, fucker, I listened to those fuckin' lyrics, motherfucker!

LOU: Name one lyric from that song.

LESTER: I didn't listen--I've heard it...but what I and millions of fans all over wanna know about Bowie is: first you, then Jagger, then Iggy. What in the hell's he got?

LOU: Jagger and Iggy?

LESTER: Yeah, you know he fucks everybody in the rock and roll circuit. He's a bigger groupie than Jann Wenner!

LOU: He's the one who's getting fucked.

LESTER: Didja fuck 'im?

LOU: He's fucking himself. He doesn't know it, though.

                   
 

Pure Gonzo Journalism; Bangs is honest though subjective, and is very much the central focus of the interview. Could you imagine reading an interview like this in today's Spin or Rolling Stone? 

In quintessential Bangs fashion, he self-deprecatingly declared: "Lou Reed is my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination." Even though he was quite critical of his hero, he also managed to take a parting shot at himself. 

Though Bangs died at 33, he leaves behind a legacy as the preeminent rock music critic of our time. Since his death in 1982, he has become a mythical figure, one that looms largely in our consciousness, one that was depicted in Almost Famous by Philip Seymour Hoffman. 

This is something that he would have surely despised: "I don't wanna be anyone's fuckin' hero."