One can argue for other writers: Nick Tosches is a better all rounder and made the transition to heavyweight novelist, a Houdini act Lester longed to emulate but never carried off. Greil Marcus (who edited the first posthumous Bangs collection, the peerless ‘Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung,’ published in 1987) has more intellectual clout, Richard Melzer is more rabid, Paul Morley more future-proof, Nick Kent got better insider dirt, Nik Cohn could capsulate his ideas better and Charles Shaar Murray got a sharper bead on his subject through cool critical distance. But Bangs represented all that was excellent and some of what was execrable about rock ‘n’ roll journalism. Since his death in 1982, he has taken his place on the pantheon of great American loudmouths, spoofers and self-proclaimed geniuses, from Lenny Bruce to John Belushi, from Andy Kaufman to Bill Hicks. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of the writer in Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous favoured Bangs’ benign, avuncular side, and many argued it bleached out the ugly bits, sanitising a man who could be loud and obnoxious when whacked out on cough mixture and booze. But cult of personality aside, his influence on the latest generation of New Journalism progeny (evident more on the Internet than in print media) is eclipsed only by Hunter S. Thompson.

“Lester Bangs gave me my mantra,” says REM guitarist Peter Buck. “I grew up reading his writing and just thinking he was god. Michael (Stipe) and I went to New York and lived in a van for a week, didn’t bathe, just put on make-up and grease in our hair and went to a party and there was Lester Bangs. It was near the end of his life, and he was as drunk as any person I’ve ever seen in my life. He was standing in the hallway, you had to go by him to get to the bathroom, and he would insult every person that walked by, (but) with an interesting, original insult. He wouldn’t (just) say you were an asshole; he called me a ‘rotten cocksucker’. I read that he died maybe a year after that, and I said, ‘Let’s remember that Lester Bangs called me a rotten cocksucker and it’s totally okay with me.’ Funnily enough, Michael, even years later, had this dream about that party where there was no food and we were starving and all they had was jellybeans and birthday cake, and Lester Bangs was there, Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce. And he realised for some reason there were three celebrities with LB in their names, and he wrote that verse of ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ about that party.”

Following the publication of Jim DeRogatis’ Bangs biography ‘Let It Blurt’ in 2000, Lester’s legacy came up for review: his advocates remained staunch, but there were now a growing number of unbelievers, or at least a number who had hitherto remained tight-lipped. Foremost among these was ‘Rolling Stone’ jobsworth Anthony DeCurtis, a competent but rather gutless writer who dismissed Bangs entire output as warmed over Beat bleatings. Bangs, a merciless iconoclast himself, might’ve appreciated being taken down a peg or two, although one could only compare his firebrand dispatches with DeCurtis’s tepid verbiage and think of Blake’s line about the eagle never losing so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

The second posthumous Bangs anthology ‘Mainlines, Blood Feats and Bad Taste,’ edited by veteran writer John Morthland, a Rolling Stone alumnus and Lester’s colleague in the crazed Creem kibbutz of 1970s Detroit. Mainlines . . . is made up of writings Marcus excluded from ‘Carburetor Dung’ for reasons of space and personal preference, plus several pieces that were hitherto missing in action, but this is no rag-bag of leftovers. In fact it contains several seminal pieces: Lester’s pan of ‘Kick Out The Jams’ (later retracted); a brilliant reappraisal of Miles Davis electric 70s era in which the writer seems to talk himself in and out of love with the music; an austere and poetical essay on Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’ and a brutal refuting of Bob Dylan’s beatification of mobster Joey Gallo on ‘Desire.’ Even when critiquing easy meat like ELP, Bangs was doing it in a way so thoughtful it flattered the subject; it’s almost touching to see the weight he bestows upon Black Sabbath, especially in the wake of Ozzy’s rebirth as everyone’s favourite dozy dad.

Furthermore, for those hamstrung by the kind of thinking that says you can’t write with any substance about Sugababes or Xtina, check out the wit he invests in reviews of records by Anne Murray, Kim Carnes and Stevie Nicks, the latter containing the best summation of the Big Mac’s ‘Dreams’ ever published: “The song was so honest and accurate that it became heartbreak instead of just being about it. It was cleansing for everyone who heard it, which was everyone period.”

Of course, sometimes he missed the dartboard altogether. Bangs’ speed prose and word horde facility can’t save the ‘Drug Punk’ extract from the level of from sub-Burroughs juvenilia. A piece on Alabama band Wet Willie is passive-aggressive homophobic old-school rockist trash. He was also capable of being perfectly boring, as is evident in a few of his travel pieces.

Despite all this though, Bangs was always irresistibly irreverent, hyperbolic and honest, the everyman with a pen, and his prodigious output meant that there’s probably the makings of a third volume further down the line. Ask Peter Buck for his favourite Bangs dispatch and he says this:

“I don’t know if it’s ever been compiled, but I remember one where he was assigned to interview Jefferson Starship, and he was (like), ‘I could care less about these bozos, they made one good record in 1967, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna make up the interview.’ And all I really remember is that the interview with Jack Cassady said that he’d gotten so into plumbing lately that he’d taken all the pipes outside of his house so he could work on it. You know, this was a better interview than they would have ever done. I read an interview with Grace Slick and she said, ‘I wish they’d all be like that. It was funnier and better and I didn’t have to do the interview!’

“You know the one on the death of Peter Laughner, the ‘I choose life’ one? That was really moving. You wish he’d kept those words in his mind as time went on. I guarantee you though, he would’ve hated REM. Just fuckin’ hated us. The last review of his I ever read when he was alive, he reviewed The Replacements’ first record and said, ‘This is what rock ‘n’ roll is all about.’ And then he died a couple of months later. Amazing man, I wish he could’ve been happy. The world needs him.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.