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Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader - Softcover

Bangs, Lester

 
9780375713675: Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375713670 ISBN 13: 9780375713675
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Before his untimely death in 1982, Lester Bangs was inarguably the most influential critic of rock and roll. Writing in hyper-intelligent Benzedrine prose that calls to mind Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, he eschewed all conventional thinking as he discussed everything from Black Sabbath being the first truly Catholic band to Anne Murray’s smoldering sexuality. In Mainlines, Blood Feasts, Bad Taste fellow rock critic John Morthland has compiled a companion volume to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the first, now classic collection of Bangs’s work. Here are excerpts from an autobiographical piece Bangs wrote as a teenager, travel essays, and, of course, the music pieces, essays, and criticism covering everything from titans like Miles Davis, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones to esoteric musicians like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart. Singularly entertaining, this book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the history of rock.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lester Bangs wrote for Creem, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone.

John Morthland, co-executor of the Bangs literary estate, was a colleague of Bangs from 1969 until the author's death. He was editor of Creem in 1974-75. He is a writer at large for Texas Monthly.

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Before his untimely death in 1982, Lester Bangs was inarguably the most influential critic of rock and roll. Writing in hyper-intelligent Benzedrine prose that calls to mind Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, he eschewed all conventional thinking as he discussed everything from Black Sabbath being the first truly Catholic band to Anne Murray’s smoldering sexuality. In Mainlines, Blood Feasts, Bad Taste fellow rock critic John Morthland has compiled a companion volume to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the first, now classic collection of Bangs’s work. Here are excerpts from an autobiographical piece Bangs wrote as a teenager, travel essays, and, of course, the music pieces, essays, and criticism covering everything from titans like Miles Davis, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones to esoteric musicians like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart. Singularly entertaining, this book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the history of rock.

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DRUG PUNK: from Two Assassinations and a Speedy Retreat into Pastoral Nostalgias.

Today Andy Warhol was assassinated-well, I shouldn't say "assassinated," he was shot by some chick who wanted to murder him, and right now he's in critical condition, 50-50 chance or so they say. I was over at my girlfriend Andy's today listening to my new William Burroughs album for the first time (it just came in the mail) when suddenly they shouted for me from the bedroom. When I went in Andy's mother told me the news. Somehow I got the feeling they were expecting me to get distraught or something, so I faked this bunch of guffaws. Actually the news had no effect on me, at least no kind that could be measured positively or negatively, except that kind of vibration that sudden real-life surrealism sets off in you. It blew my mind is what I meant to say. When you say "Blow my mind," you don't mean anything to do with sadness or happiness, you mean WHAM!, the sudden impact of something outrageous, incredible, unthinkable, and I guess you could say that that's a positive feeling. Andy's mother went on to say blandly: "Some New York woman art critic shot him. Blew his whole head right off."

"What?! Is he dead then?"

Andy started to laugh. Her mother corrected her own surrealism (Burroughs had just been saying on the phonograph, "Trak news service. . . We don't report the news we write it"): "No, he's just in the hospital in critical condition." I went back into the living room and wrote on the paper slipcover from inside my Burroughs album: "June 3, 1968-Day Andy Warhol was assassinated." It looked better that way than if I'd wrote "Day Andy Warhol was shot."

Maybe I should be more concerned. Warhol used to be one of my heroes. Of course, I didn't know a damn thing about him, hadn't seen any of his movies or very many of his paintings, but I'd seen a TV show on him with the Velvet Underground playing that blew my mind, and I read what I could here and there in the magazines. Somewhere along in there I bought a giant poster with his face and sunglasses on it, and kept the thing up for months. It's not much to look at, or rather it wasn't, it's dead now. . . . I mean it wasn't one of these psychedelic-rococo things you can stare at for hours. As a matter of fact it was ugly, downright, and after a while the only reason I kept it up was that I wanted pictures on my wall and it was big. Back when I first got it I kept it right across from my bed and at night in the darkness I would stare at the face, trying to simulate perceptual drug experience, until it changed. But the changes never had much definition, not much showed in that face, it was just a famous face, incredibly blank and perhaps that was its claim to fame. Without the sunglasses he looked like a typical fey faggot, but with shades he achieved this rubbery cement look, a cement wall. Gradually over the months I began to find out that Warhol had little or nothing to do with the movies under his name. Roger met Warhol (or an imposter, as has been rumored since) and Paul Morrissey, who seems to be the real man responsible for the films, when they came to lecture at San Diego State. I wasn't there, but again Warhol came across as a catatonic if anything. When I moved to Broadway the poster went up in the living room there, and one night when they were all on acid and all equally bum-tripped, Jerry Luck fastened his paranoia on the Warhol poster: "I can't stand that guy, he's always looking at me! Ugh, that face!"

"The cat hassling you?" I sympathized.

"Man, I can't stand it! I'd like to rip that fucker into a million pieces! All the time I feel him staring at me, every motherfucking time I look around I see him staring at me like that, an' I hate the fucker, I hate 'im!"

I was in a very ironic/sarcastic mood that night, so I said: "Well, man, if he bothers you that much, rip the shit out of him! The poster belongs to me and I don't mind. Go ahead . . . fuck 'im up!"

"Really? I can?"

"Shore, go right ahead, have a ball!"

Everybody else made noises of disgust or told Luck to cool it. For a brief moment there was an odd suspenseful lull, and then he sprang at the poster and ripped it off the wall with a gurgling cry. Flopping about on the floor like a beached octopus, he tore it into a scattered litter of small pieces, snarling. Then he sat up, scratching his head, and looked around the room dazedly. I looked at him curiously. The others had made even more disgusted noises. Someone told him to clean up the mess, and he grumbled just like he did the night that he and Dan and Roger stole a chicken from some neighbor and he cleaned and plucked it on our kitchen floor, taking a bite from its bloody crotch to prove his Class.

But to get back to the assassination; when I got home that night my mother met me at the door with the news. She said he had been shot by his "girlfriend." Later Roger came over, and was predictably shocked when I dropped the bomb, gasping wide-eyed and staggering around the room a moment with his hand to his head. I don't think this was so much an indication that Warhol held some dear place deep in his heart, as an example of his typical response when his mind is blown.

Yesterday Andy Warhol was shot in his New York office, today Robert Kennedy in an L.A. hotel lounge just as he was finishing his victory speech after winning the California primary. And just two months ago, almost to the day, Martin Luther King, a far better man than either of the other two, was murdered in Memphis by a hired assassin who still eludes the FBI. Who next? What next? Andy and I were sitting in the den about half past midnight browsing a state college catalog when her mother shouted from the bedroom, "Andy! Come quickly! Bobby Kennedy's been shot!" We ran down the hall to sit dazedly watching the strange milling mélange on the screen, nervous confused newscasters their voices breaking as they interviewed witnesses most of whom had differing stories, cameras blurring in and out of focus again and again, pandemonium, a harried cop shouting for everyone to clear the room but breaking off in mid-sentence as he saw a CBS man two feet away holding his microphone out to a witness, muddy charcoal semidarkness on the screen as they doused the lights in the lounge in an unsuccessful attempt to clear it, hearing an account later of the tense moments right after the shooting when photographers and reporters and bystanders crowded in so close over Kennedy and the two other wounded individuals that the senator (prone on the floor with blood all over his face, hands, and hips) finally had to cry out for some air, his mob was suffocating him . . . saw the would-be assassin dragged out surrounded by a tough contingent of a couple dozen cops pushing through the crowd, their captive barely glimpsed between trunks of cops as he hung half-limp yet his muscles tightened trying to roll himself almost into a fetal ball with arms defensively over the crown of his head . . . another supposed assassin got away . . . Andy was sobbing. Her mother clucked about "This country, I don't know . . ." and said to Paul: "Paul, let's move to Australia." Andy declared fiercely through her tears: "I'll bet it was one of those McCarthyites!" She is, predictably, a fanatical Kennedy supporter. I'm for McCarthy. Earlier in the evening, she had been crying, "nearly distraught" as she herself put it at the prospect, which seemed quite likely then according to network projections, of Kennedy's defeat. I watched the TV coverage of the immediate aftermath of his shooting with my jaw hanging, stupefied and shocked in the same way I'd been those interminable leagues of moments that I...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375713670
ISBN 13 
9780375713675
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Herausgeber
Morthland John
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

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