Dead Flowers

Well when you're sittin back, in your rose pink Cadillac Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day, I'll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon. And another girl to take my pain away -Jagger/Richards

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Lester Bangs: Man who turned rock journalism into an art form, and the man who coined the term "Punk Rock"




"Rock is basically an adolescent music, reflecting the rhythms, concerns and aspirations of a very specialized age group. It can't grow up, but when it does, it turns into something else which may be just as valid but is still very different from the original. Personally I believe that real rock n roll maybe on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out."
- Lester Bangs(1971) reviewing The Stooges' Funhouse and signaling the demise of rock n roll

Freakin' hell. What words!!

Does Lester Bangs ring a bell? If you have seen Almost Famous, it surely will. Remember the scene when a man is on an early morning radio show, and he asks for The Stooges' Raw Power to be played. And the poor RJ says,"Stooges! Not this early Mr.Bangs."

Lester Bangs (1948 - 1982) is the most revered and influential rock journalist ever. He was associated with such institutions as Rolling Stone (the late 60s indie period), Creem and NME (most prolific during his Creem days). The man had this amazing ability to pick out bands. And the fun part was that he hailed them when the world was busy trashing them (he was probably the only critic who loved the Velvets during their lifetime). Again going back to that radio show part in Almost Famous: Bangs takes out The Morrison Hotel LP, trashes it, and says, "Gimme WhiteLight/WhiteHeat." Remember the year was 1973. And he knew rock n roll had been knocked dead by Punk. He was very skeptical about the Woodstock hangover spilling over into the 70s. That's why he said that he just loved Robert Plant when he sang," I've got the flower, I've got the power."

Talking about picking out raw bands, he simply loved bands like Iggy & the Stooges, The Velvets, Black Sabbath and Captain Beefheart. He writes in one of his essays on the Stooges: "The Stooges are back, and I'm happy, and I'm sad. Happy because they're such a great band, a distillation of beautiful fury that could tear your head off. Sad, because I'm sitting in a scumpit called the Michigan Palace waiting through three dogshit bands for them to come on. It's not just that the environment's ugly, but that I've been sitting in essentially this same place for five years now, counting a couple years layoff, waiting for them to break over the edge they always seem to be pushing toward and make it really big."

The Stooges were probably the first band to acknowledge the influence of Velvet Underground on their music. Sadly for Bangs, both these bands never quite made it big (not in their lifetime) in terms of the so called set parameters of popular music.

P.S: Read Lester Bangs' various reviews and essays on the Creem archives. And when you read them you will realise that he was a writer, not just a journalist.

1 Comments:

At 6:22 PM, Blogger whitelight said...

Black Dog:
Could not agree more. Back then Rolling Stone was a very different magazine. And they could shape the fate of a band, hell yes, they could. Read about Bangs, and there is this story that Bangs' negative write-ups in Creem about MC5 was the most important reason for their demise.

I think music critiquing died sometime in the 80s(when Creem folded & RS became 'hip'). The irony is that today the length of reviews are decreasing and the number of reviewers expanding.

Thing about writers like Bangs was that they had a very strong sense of opinion. And they were not driven by fads, like today's so called music critics are.

Read his essay on Black Sabbath in Creem. Damn, that man was a genius.

 

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