The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Psychotic-Reactions-Carburetor-Dung-Literature/dp/0679720456/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197950914&sr=8-2

My mother would have never let me buy a copy of Creem magazine, say circa 1973 - 1979. Just look at some of those magazine covers. I'm sure my mom would have taken one look and told me to put it right back on the shelf. Heck, I was lucky to talk her into Mad, or Cracked, or when all else failed, the much inferior Crazy, at least as far as humor goes. So I would have never run into Lester Bangs in the heyday of his writing. In later years I was allowed to get Rolling Stone where my favorite thing to do was read the record reviews, but again, about 10 years too late for Lester Bangs' work. Reading those reviews is where I started searching out for new music that wasn't being played on the radio. Like punk music, for instance. But, between the reviews and music, you had to figure I'd eventually run across the name Lester Bangs. And I did.

Love him or hate him, Lester Bangs is considered the king of the music reviewers. He's also considered to be nothing more than a contentious boor. And it's probably true that he was both. But that's sort of the reason that Bangs is considered to be one of the best. His job wasn't to tell you about the music, he was there to to either piss you off or inspire you to check out the music. Bangs tended to lean towards the former, but if you were a fan of Lou Reed, or The Stooges, or Richard Hell, you probably agreed with him on more than one occasion. I don't know if I inspire or piss people off with my amateur reviews, but do know that when I stumbled across this book in probably one of the last independent bookstores in America while on vacation in Santa Fe, it seemed like a good idea to pick it up and try to learn from someone considered to be the master of the genre. I have to say I learned a few things, but I also learned that I was doing some of the same things he was doing too. Like for instance, playing devils advocate with highly contentious music, or telling stories that have little to do with the subject at hand, but still manage to segue way to a particular slant on the music that Bangs was trying to point out. Not that I manage to get anywhere close to the magnitude of Bangs.

The book itself is mostly Bang's work while with Creem, which is where a good portion of his better works appeared, but there is also a large chunk of other well written works from his New Music Express days too. And then there's also some of his unpublished works, a good number of which are no more than the drug induced stream of consciousness ramblings of a madman. Lester Bangs desperately wanted to be the William S. Burroughs of record reviewers and he obviously, overtly studied, wrote, and lived Burroughs and the Beat writers, right down to the lifestyle they immortalized. Which inevitably led to his death at the age of 34. Hey, I like Keroauc and Burroughs so it's no surprise that I like Lester Bangs writing too. But the drug induced, unpublishable stuff should have stayed unpublished. It's mostly awful. The book had plenty of material without needing to include it for 'padding', but I guess without that material Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung would be nothing more than a run of the mill anthology. Plus, it does sort of 'un-glorify' Bangs' lifestyle and make him seem more mortal ... I mean figuratively about his writing of course. He's obviously mortal. He's dead. Last I checked, that was sort of the definition.

There are two types of Lester Bangs works of prose, the longer pieces and the shorter pieces. The longer pieces, while interesting, are not what I want to read from Bangs. I prefer the shorter pieces where his arguments are more concise and focused. The longer pieces tend to drift all over the place, usually resulting in Lester telling you either sucked because you didn't have the soul like ? And The Mysterians or you were the greatest band because you understood where Lou Reed was coming from. Entertaining at times if you were a monthly reader of Creem or NME, but sometimes not so much when you're reading his works in anthology format.

This is really a book for those that like to see the product of the Beat generation, or if you're into record reviews, or if you like to hear about bands from the late 60's and the 70's. Luckily, I'm kind of into all three so it was an OK book for me, despite the fact that I had to slog my way through the unpublishable stuff.