"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.
bright eyes underneath her fringe I see , a pupil of Lester Bangs looking at me
Posted by: mcmarsh | 04/23/2010 at 08:53 PM