"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?
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."
thanks for reading!
Posted by: richie | 04/21/2011 at 07:26 PM