The Big Bangs (new collection of Lester Bangs writings on rock music)

AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN ^ | Tuesday, August 12, 2003 | By Joe Gross

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The big Bangs

An Austin friend delivers an expansive anthology of work by the legendary rock critic

To hear John Morthland tell it, Lester Bangs was a passionate, honest man. One of the best rock critics who ever lived, he could dismiss Dylan, praise Anne Murray and show his allegiance to Lou Reed, Black Sabbath and Stevie Nicks all at once. And do so in a smart, gonzo-prose style that hypnotized a generation or two of rock scribes.

He was, however, known for changing his mind now and again.

"He changed his mind about bands a lot," says Morthland, a longtime Austin writer and editor for publications such as Texas Monthly. "But his writing is always really honest to what he felt at the moment, and people always respond to really honest writers."

We're sitting in the cool of Ruta Maya Coffeehouse on South Congress, discussing "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader," (Anchor Books, $15) a Morthland-edited collection of Bangs' writings that hits stores today. Morthland, who was Bangs' pal and the co-executor of his literary estate, is, implicitly, explaining the challenge of making such a book hold together. "You could give Lester any subject and he had a response that was totally fresh and totally full of conviction," Morthland says. "And then he might write the opposite the next month and mean it just as much."

Morthland became friends with Bangs when both were working at Creem magazine in the '70s. Morthland was an editor at the mag, which pioneered a freewheeling prose style that was best embodied by Bangs, Creem's marquee writer. Bangs' writing was manic and insightful, but what made him truly stick out was his bald conviction that, as Morthland puts it, "this stuff matters and there's something at stake."

The bond between the two men ran deep; as Jim De Rogatis put it in his 2000 biography of Bangs, "Let It Blurt" (the only full-scale biography ever done of a rock critic), Bangs "was one of a select few known to make Morthland laugh."

"We were best friends," Morthland says, simply. Bangs died on April 30, 1982, at the age of 33 from a Darvon overdose. According to DeRogatis, Morthland was one of the first people called when Bangs' body was found, and faced the grim task of making phone calls in the aftermath.

"Mainlines" is the product of about two years' hard work and nearly 16 years' contemplation on Morthland's part. The first collection of Bangs' writing, 1987's "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," edited by rock critic Greil Marcus, was a book that some believe presented a skewed picture of Bangs' work. There are, for example, no pieces on heavy metal, which Bangs wrote about often.

"People try to get me to say bad things about `Carburetor Dung,' " Morthland says. "But I think it's a terrific book. There are plenty of pieces in there I would have loved to use."

After years of mulling things over, right around the time Philip Seymour Hoffman portrayed Bangs in the rock-crit fantasia "Almost Famous," and roughly around the time the DeRogatis book was published, Morthland began sifting through the thousands and thousands of pieces Marcus hadn't used. The results were sometimes discouraging.

"Lester just turned out a huge volume of stuff in his day and a lot of it just doesn't hold up," Morthland says. "I wanted to get the stuff that was really quintessential Lester and really well written. (Fans) want everything he ever wrote, but I don't think that would serve him to have a lot of his bad stuff out there." And anyway, there's a lot of good stuff: "Mainlines" weighs in at more than 400 pages.

Of particular interest to local readers might be "Notes on Austin," part of an unpublished screed Bangs wrote while living here from the middle of 1980 to early 1981. The piece opens: "Austin, laid-back and somewhat indulgent as it is, might be a terrible place for a New Yorker or anyone who wants to move and shake culture or corporations but it's an undeniably great place to start a band. . . . It's almost too easy to make music in this town."

Housing prices may go up, and Liberty Lunch might fall down, but some things stay exactly the same. Bangs goes on to describe playing a frat party on Halloween "for the sons and daughter of the ruling class" and marveling over the indestructibility of "Louie, Louie." It doesn't feel like an argument, more like a rant, but Morthland says that's where Bangs' head was during his time here.

"He really came here to make an album (the semi-legendary `Jook Savages on the Brazos') and find musicians to play with," Morthland says.

And how did Lester find our fair city? "He loved it when he first got here and he hated it when he left," says Morthland, who arrived here in September 1985. "I think he came here to get away from a lot of stuff and when he first got here he felt good about being away from it, but that wasn't enough to sustain him."

But there's plenty of sustenance in Bangs' writing. Morthland says that working on this book he fell in love with Bangs' power all over again. "It has so much of this careening kind of energy," Morthland says. "He wrote very fast most of the time, and you can see that in the writing; it's just barreling though the typewriter. Its infectiousness just catches people and holds them."