Lester Bangs

Essays examine rock performers and bands including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Chicago, the Clash, James Taylor, and Iggy Pop

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

Steven Ovadia

Bangs is the only rock critic that matters. As far as I'm concerned, rock criticism was born with him and died with him. No one did it better.

Daryl Houston

There's a lot to like in this book, though there's plenty to skim too. I especially liked the pieces he wrote about touring with The Clash.

Until his death aged thirty-three in 1982, Lester Bangs wrote wired, rock 'n' roll pieces on Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, Kraftwerk, Lou Reed. As a rock critic, he had an eagle-eye for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing; written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating take-downs reveal an iconoclast unafraid to tell it like it is. To his journalism he brought the talent of a great a renegade Beat poet, and his essays, reviews and scattered notes convey the electric thrill of a music junky indulging the habit of a lifetime. As Greil Marcus writes in his introduction, 'What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.'

Kyle Barron-Cohen

Ever year or so I return to this collection, primarily to re-read the Joycean Strand-walk of a rock record review that is Bangs' exegesis of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. It reminds me that criticism can be worthwhile, and that music is supposed to mean something. Bangs believed Astral Weeks to be a metaphysical Testament. At one point he writes:

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics—although many are bodily as well—which are there for a reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breathe out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You"; in "Cyprus Abenue" twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George," where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves." 

The record—and Bangs' own examination of his reaction to that record—provide a startling moment of collusion with the young man's ecstatic release in the short story Araby from Dubliners:

I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times.

Here then, are the passions of all my passions combined. First, Bangs on Morrison:

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along.

And finally, the last words from Molly Bloom in Ulysses:
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

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