A heavy-set man with a mustache lay face-up on his couch in a crummy Manhattan apartment above the Gumjoy Chinese restaurant on the evening of April 30, 1982. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. Across the room, a record spun endlessly, the needle bumping the runout groove in the idiot rhythm of a machine with nothing left to play.
The record was Dare by the English synth-pop group The Human League, a glossily made confection he had bought that very afternoon. He was 33 years old. He had the flu.
And after 15 years of cough syrup, rock gut, and amphetamine, he had more or less stopped drinking.
In two weeks, he was supposed to fly to Mexico, borrow a rock star’s hunting lodge, and write the novel that would let him quit being a rock critic forever. The funny thing is that he had spent his adult life documenting exactly this kind of death, mourning it, raging at it, and warning a generation against it in prose that ran hot as a blown amplifier. And now here it was in his own front room, as silent as a switched-off television.
His name was Leslie Conway Bangs, though nobody on earth ever called him Leslie. And how a boy raised in a Jehovah’s Witness kingdom hall in the tract-house sprawl of El Cajon came to be lying dead beneath a needle stuck in the last groove of a record he half despised is a story with far more feedback in it than melody.
Bangs was born in Escanido, California on December 14, 1948, the only child of two transplanted Texans who had drifted west into the citrus and the smog. His mother, Norma Bell, was a coffee shop waitress and a devout Jehovah’s Witness, a meek and hardworking woman who kept the faith like it was a secret treasure. His father, Conway, was an ex-convict and a heavy drinker, a truck driver who walked out on the family around 1957 and died not long afterward in a house fire when Lester was still a boy.
So he had a mother married to the end of the world and a father who burned alive. These facts settled at the bottom of everything Lester Bangs ever wrote, like sediment in a bottle.
He and Norma moved to El Cajon in San Diego’s dusty east county, and there they made an odd couple indeed: the pious, exhausted waitress and the tall, gawky, uncoordinated kid who looked, one boyhood friend remembered, like Abraham Lincoln without the beard. What the boy wanted was noise. He hid his records behind his bed so his mother would not find them, and he dreamed, he later said, of one day owning a mansion built over catacombs that held every recording ever pressed.
He came up on jazz first, the difficult stuff: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus. Then on the Beats: Kerouac for the rhythm, Burroughs for the derangement. He learned early that a page could be made to swing, too.
At El Cajon Valley High School, his rebellions had a certain flair. He recited Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in its entirety in speech class. Assigned a ten-page paper for each day of gym he had skipped, he turned in a 50-page epic titled Hector the Homosexual Monkey and was promptly suspended.
A rant against the hypocrisies of the faith delivered at a church meeting got him banned from the Kingdom Hall for the rest of his life. To reach the altered states his mother’s religion forbade, he ate nutmeg, guzzled cough syrup, and swallowed whatever legal and illegal chemistry he could lay hands on, forever chasing the next kick and the next new sound.
He had a miserable childhood, was poorly armed by his environment for anything, and so was obliged to invent himself from scratch. He drifted through Grossmont Junior College and out the other side, finding his way into print through underground papers, reviewing records for the San Diego Door, where he met a bright-eyed teenager named Cameron Crowe who was writing about music too. In 1967, Rolling Stone put out an open call for record reviewers, and Lester answered it the way a drowning man answers a rope from the heavens.
He mailed in reviews by the fistful, ten or twelve some weeks, and watched them come back rejected.
Then in the spring of 1969, he sent a savage takedown of the MC5’s debut album, Kick Out the Jams, wrapped around a letter that has since become scripture among a certain kind of writer. “Look,” it read, “I’m as good as any writer you’ve got in there.” They printed him.
Over the next four years, he would publish more than 150 reviews in the magazine, working when he could sit still long enough at a clip of 16 crackling pages an hour. Rolling Stone was San Francisco, and San Francisco, to Lester’s ear, had gone soft and self-important. His true country was Detroit, and his true home was Creem, the scruffy, broke, gloriously juvenile magazine that treated rock and roll as neither an art object nor a lifestyle accessory, but as a beautiful, disreputable joke worth dying for.
He began freelancing for Creem in 1970, wrote a feature on Alice Cooper in 1971, and then packed up and moved to Michigan, where he was named the magazine’s editor that same year. He fell hard for the city, calling it “rock’s only hope,” and stayed five years. Creem in those years was less a magazine than a commune with a printing deadline, run on a shoestring by publisher Barry Kramer out of a farmhouse north of the city where the staff lived and argued and drank and got high in one another’s pockets.
It suited Lester perfectly. He had found not merely a job but a family and a brawl, a place that shared his conviction that rock and roll mattered enormously and that taking it too seriously was the one unforgivable sin.
Detroit, the wounded motor city with the MC5 and the Stooges in its bloodstream, felt to him like the last honest town in American music, and he defended it against the coasts with the fervor of a convert who has finally located his church or his war. His mother might have approved in theory, if not exactly in practice. At Creem, his prose finally detonated.
Using an album as a mere launching pad, his reviews spun off into confession, stand-up routine, insult comedy, and metaphysics, all of it aimed squarely at the swelling pretensions of the rock aristocracy. He and his fellow desperadoes Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches were christened the Noise Boys, and they brought to the page a manic, overcaffeinated glee that nobody had thought music writing could hold.
He was by every account a spectacle in the flesh: a big, shambling, sweating man who could talk faster than most people could think. In 1974, he climbed on stage with the J. Geils Band in front of 13,000 people, sat down at a typewriter, and hammered at it as a species of performance art.
He typed pure gibberish, and this was in its way the meaning of the man. The work paid almost nothing, $12 a review, and the survival economics were rather baroque, to say the least. In the 70s, the record companies still believed good reviews sold gold records, and they lavished penniless critics with liquor, dinners, and free flights to see bands in far-off cities.
Lester laid the whole grubby arrangement bare in an essay called How to Be a Rock Critic, a comic and self-lacerating anatomy of his trade. He promised the aspirant every glittering reward the racket could offer: “You’ll be an international celebrity,” he wrote, “and die at 33.” He was 33 years old when he wrote his own ending as the punchline to this joke.
It was at Creem, too, that Lester and a few colleagues took an old scrap of slang and raised it as a kind of flag. They began using the phrase “punk rock” to describe the raw, fucked-up garage bands of the previous decade and the snarling new acts like the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges that carried the same voltage. Their writing handed the coming explosion in New York and London much of its vocabulary and half its attitude before the first safety pin had been unclasped.
His enthusiasms were fierce and very unfashionable. He wrote up the Stooges as a program for mass liberation, dismissed Black Sabbath’s early records as plodding Cream cliches even while he half admired the bludgeon of them, and championed Lou Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Captain Beefheart, Brian Eno, and the New York Dolls years ahead of the respectable press, which mostly regarded these people as noise or filth or both. He trusted his own ears further than he trusted any consensus.
He had, he wrote, long since given up on extending to the other fellow’s taste the benefit of the doubt.
And then there was Lou Reed, who was less a subject for Lester Bangs than a lifelong love affair conducted entirely in the key of abuse. Reed was his hero, Lester wrote, precisely because he stood for “the most fucked-up things a person could possibly conceive of.” Lester chased him across a run of interviews between 1973 and 1975 that read like two drunks trying to bludgeon each other to death with cigarette lighters.
In the most notorious of them, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” published in Creem in March 1975, he called Reed a “completely depraved pervert” and “pathetic death dwarf,” a liar and a whore selling pounds of his own flesh, and then in the same breath credited him with lending poetry and dignity to smack, speed, sadomasochism, and every other thing polite society wished would quietly disappear.
He called Reed’s bleak album Berlin a “slab of maggoty rancor,” possibly the most depressed record ever made, and adored it anyway. He worshiped the noise Reed made and defended the indefensible Metal Machine Music, an hour of shrieking feedback that Reed’s own label came to regard as a contractual insult. Lester hailed it as “more or less the greatest thing ever committed to vinyl.”
Reed understood the game and gave back exactly what he got. “He’s fat and he’s got a mustache,” Reed said of his tormentor. “I wouldn’t fuck in Lester’s nose.”
It was in its own deranged way one of the great romances of the age.
His genius for the insult eventually cost him his best-paying pulpit. In 1973, Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, fired Lester outright for what he called “disrespect toward musicians.” The last straw was a review so brutal that the magazine’s founder decided its author was no longer welcome in his pages.
Lester wore the banishment like a battle ribbon. He had no use for the solemn church of rock that Rolling Stone was busy building with its high priests and its careful stewardship of access to the stars, and the magazine would not run his byline again until 1978.
By 1976, Detroit had given him all it had, and Lester Bangs moved to New York, to a rent-controlled walk-up near 14th Street, into the very scene his Creem prophecies had helped conjure. He wrote for The Village Voice, for Penthouse and Playboy, and the British weekly New Musical Express, and he prowled CBGB, the Bowery toilet that had somehow become the cathedral of American punk. Here, his ambivalence about the whole self-destructive romance of rock came due.
In 1977, his friend Peter Laughner, a brilliantly doomed guitarist from Cleveland who had helped invent the bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu, died at 24, worn out by drugs and by the labor of trying to become his idols.
Lester wrote him an obituary that doubled as a warning shot fired at himself. Laughner had his own private pains, he allowed, but “at least in part, he died because he wanted to be Lou Reed.” The new wave, Lester wrote, had just produced its first casualty.
He would not be the last, and some cold part of him surely knew it. For Lester never merely wrote about rock and roll. He tried always and hopelessly to live inside it.
He was a musician, too, or badly wanted to be. In June 1977, he took the stage at CBGB fronting a trio with the great guitarist Robert Quine. That same year, he cut a single, “Let It Blurt,” mixed by The Velvet Underground’s own John Cale and released in 1979.
The song, all raw nerve and open wound, was about a former girlfriend’s abortion. He formed a band called Birdland with Mickey Leigh, the younger brother of Joey Ramone, and gigged around the city until his bandmates threw him out on the grounds, in their telling of it, that he was too fat to be a frontman, could not really sing, and had become a tyrant impossible to work with. In his telling, they were sellouts.
Both accounts were probably accurate. He revered Iggy Pop as the last honest man in show business, a performer who hurled his own body at the audience, and he wrote of him as someone “so imprisoned in his own skin that all feeling is perceived as pain,” which was about as close to a self-portrait as Lester ever came.
Underneath all the demolition work sat a coherent and surprisingly generous creed. Rock and roll for Lester Bangs was never a musical form, but an attitude, a way of doing things. By that logic, a book or a movie or a life could be rock and roll if it was lived with enough nerve.
It belonged to everyone. It ought to be so implicitly anti-elitist, he insisted, that the question of whether a given person was qualified to perform it should never even arise. And in a scene tilting ever further into studied nihilism, into the fashionable pose of “I suck, you suck, the world sucks and who cares,” Lester began near the end to argue the opposite case.
Nihilism and the anti-hero had had their run, he wrote, from Brando and James Dean through the Stones and the Velvets and Iggy, and it might be time, against every signal from the world outside, to start thinking again in terms of heroes, of love instead of hate, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction. It was an astonishing thing for the great scourge of rock piety to say, and he clearly meant every word of it. For all his corrosive wit, the secret engine of the man was an almost unbearable romanticism, a stubborn faith that a great band might model a better way of being alive.
He could not explain, he admitted, why he kept looking to rock and roll groups for a blueprint of a better society. He had simply “glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once and mistaken it perhaps for prophecy,” and had been hunting its fulfillment ever since. In 1977, he chased that flashbulb across the Atlantic.
Sickened by the disco on the radio and by his old gods gone glam, he flew to England to spend a few days on the road with The Clash, half expecting the snarling anarchist menace the British press was selling. What he found instead rewired him. He watched a band that appeared to mean it, that let broke teenage fans crash on their hotel room floors, and he came home converted, having decided that The Clash were authentic not because they were noble savages, but because their music carried, as he put it, “brutal conviction.”
Rock and roll, he wrote, echoing his friend Richard Hell, was finally “an arena in which a person recreates himself,” and all the earnest chatter about authenticity was so much crap. It may have been the most hopeful thing he ever set down on paper. That same faith lent his elegy for Elvis Presley, published in The Village Voice in August 1977, its terrible tenderness.
Elvis meant little to Lester as a musician. What the King’s death meant was the extinction of the last thing a splintering culture could still agree to love. Americans would go on fragmenting, he predicted, growing ever more contemptuous of one another’s idols, and they would never again agree about anything the way they had once agreed about Elvis.
And so he wrote he would not bother saying goodbye to the corpse. “I will say goodbye to you.” It reads now like a note he left for himself.
He was beneath the mayhem a ferocious moralist, and never more so than when his target was his own tribe. In December 1979, The Village Voice ran “The White Noise Supremacists,” a piece in which Lester turned his scalpel on the racism festering in the punk scene, the Nazi chic and the casual slurs that everyone insisted were paraded purely for shock. He indicted himself alongside everyone else, recalling the night in Detroit when he had put soul records on at a party only to hear his punk friends sneer, and confessing the sick shame of glimpsing in himself everything he claimed to despise.
Bigotry, he wrote, was the most poisonous thing on earth, and liberal guilt the most pathetic, and he refused to let himself off the hook for either one.
He praised the kids of Rock Against Racism for attempting nothing more or less than simple decency, and he understood better than most how easily a liberation can curdle into a fresh kind of cage. The private man behind the byline was, according to nearly everyone who loved him, a wreck of pure feeling, generous and exasperating, and desperately lonely. His apartment was a squalid museum of the job: records and books and unopened promotional mail drifting into dunes, the domestic wreckage of a man who consumed culture faster than he could ever house it.
Nick Tosches, who knew him as well as anyone did, called him “a romantic in the gravest, saddest, best, and most ridiculous sense of that worn-out word.”
A man who could not go to bed with a woman without falling in love with her, who could not dislike a thing without raging against it, and who was conquered in the end by the phantoms of all that love and anger, since none of it had ever quite been his to command. Women, said Tex-Mex bandleader Joe King Carrasco, could make no sense of him nor he of them. Lester called himself a rock and roll innocent, and he was speaking of his heart.
In 1980, he knocked out a quick paperback about Blondie, a job he took partly for the money and regarded with a cash-register cynicism that embarrassed him. And yet even there he could not help throwing sparks, laying down one of his flintiest commandments: “Style is originality,” he wrote, “while fashion is fascism. The two forever and unalterably opposed.”
But the love he wanted never quite matched the love he got, and the drink and the pills kept filling the gap the way they always do, which is to say badly. In the autumn of 1980, burned out on New York and on the small-mindedness he felt curdling the CBGB scene, Lester decamped to Austin, Texas for what was meant to be a lost weekend and stretched to four months. He fell in with a fanzine crowd, crashed on a couch he stank up so thoroughly that his hosts had to fumigate it, and assembled a scratch band called The Delinquents to play the venerated Armadillo World Headquarters, inviting more or less anyone he met to jam whether or not they could hold an instrument.
He got himself arrested, though not for the barroom brawl of legend. He simply drank too much, fell down in the street, and was helped straight into a cell from which he emerged the next morning bellowing that Texas was a fascist police state.
He was tinkering on and off with a lurid book alongside the photo archivist Michael Ochs called Rock Gomorrah, a would-be Hollywood Babylon for the record business. And at a New York party thrown by the editor of his Blondie book, two young men from Athens, Georgia named Peter Buck and Michael Stipe met their critic hero, an encounter they would immortalize a few years later by name-checking Lester in “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” The decade turned dark on him.
When John Lennon was shot dead in December 1980, Lester did not reach for the harp. He wrote two days after the murder that he could not decide which was the more pathetic: the people of his own generation who refused to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who would snatch at any scrap of a dream a stranger had declared finished a decade before.
It was a hard thing to say about a grief the whole world was busy sharing, and it was pure Lester, who trusted the truth further than he ever trusted comfort, and who was in his own life just then trying to work out what exactly a man was supposed to live for once the music stopped saving him. Because the astonishing thing about the final year of Lester Bangs is that he was, against every odd and every precedent, actually getting better. Somewhere in 1981, he started attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and he mostly quit the booze, though he was still swallowing Valium by the handful, still self-medicating a nervous system he had spent 15 years demolishing.
What he wanted now was out. He had always burned to write the great American novel, and he had grown certain he could never manage it while remaining Lester Bangs, rock critic, prisoner of the $12 review.
Some doors he could not pry open. He and his peers who tried to break into other kinds of writing kept receiving the same curt rejection, the one that told them to stick to rock. But another door swung wide.
Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top offered Lester the run of his hunting lodge in Mexico for as long as he needed it, and William Burroughs’ own secretary and agent, James Grauerholz, was standing by to carry the finished manuscript to publishers. Lester had a plane ticket in hand. He meant to stop being a cartoon and become at last a writer.
On April 14, 1982, a 17-year-old high school journalist named Jim DeRogatis, who two decades on would produce the definitive biography, spent a long afternoon interviewing his hero in the 14th Street apartment.
The Lester who talked to the young man that day was a man taking careful stock. He had seen where the wild life led and where it deposited its casualties. Charles Bukowski, he observed, had reached the point of writing poems about no longer being able to write, and Hunter Thompson paid more attention to his image than his work.
Bangs did not intend to go out that way. The novel was the thing. “Now I’ve got to do something that has nothing to do with music,” he said.
He had no deal, no guarantee that a single soul would want the book. That, he told the kid, was precisely what made it the most important thing of all. He never boarded the plane.
Two weeks later, on April 30, 1982, the flu came for him, and Lester did what he had always done, which was to reach for the chemistry set. He bought Darvon, a synthetic painkiller, from one of the pill peddlers working his own block of 14th Street, and he took it along with the Valium and a slug of NyQuil, and he lay down on the couch. He had bought Dare that afternoon, and he put it on.
He owned no telephone, having gone without one since 1980, and made his calls from the pay phone on the street. That day, he had rung around, and the downstairs neighbor had thought he looked gray. Sometime that evening, his heart and his breath simply stopped.
A friend found him the next day, face up on the couch, eyes open, and the needle riding the runout groove of a synth-pop record partly made by machines, going round and around with nothing left to say. He was 33 years old, precisely the death age he had once handed as a gag to every would-be rock critic in America. The autopsy, such as it was, could not even grant him the courtesy of certainty.
The medical examiner allowed that Lester had probably died of an overdose of Darvon and probably Valium as well, but complained that without proper measurement, he could not truly say, and that if pressed on the point in a courtroom, he would have to confess he did not know. It was an accidental, undramatic, terribly ordinary death, exactly the kind he had spent a whole career refusing to let anyone romanticize, and it took him alone in a room two weeks short of Mexico with his novel unwritten and a record he hated spinning out its final groove.
The words outlived the man, as he must have half hoped they would. In 1987, the critic Greil Marcus gathered the best of them into Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a fat and indispensable collection that introduced Lester Bangs to readers who had never held a copy of Creem. In 2000, Jim DeRogatis published Let It Blurt, still the only full biography anyone has bothered to write of a rock critic.
That same year, Cameron Crowe, the bright-eyed teenager from the San Diego Door, put his old friend up on movie screens around the world, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous as a kind of patron saint for everyone too honest and too uncool to belong. The Ramones name-checked him. A whole congregation of rock writers who came after learned their trade from his fearless, funny, bleeding pages.
What he left them was not a style to imitate, though God knows they tried, but a stance. Do not believe the hype. Do not suck up to the people you cover.
Do not mistake being close enough to touch for love. He told Crowe once that the trouble with getting close to rock stars was that they made you feel cool, and that the only way to keep your soul as a writer was to accept that you never would be. “We’re uncool,” he said, and somehow made it sound like a state of grace.
Lester Bangs believed, against the whole weight of the evidence he himself so gleefully cataloged, that rock and roll might yet redeem us, that somewhere down in the noise lay a rumor of a better world. He chased that rumor clear to the end of the groove. He never did write the novel.
In the end, he did not have to. He had already made criticism itself into something that could break your heart.
