#80's L.A. punk

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

AMERICAN HARDCORE PUNK IN A NUTSHELL -- THE STAGEDIVE WAS BORN.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on skateboarder/punk rocker Chuck Burke stage-diving during a D.O.A., ADOLESCENTS, & STIFF LITTLE FINGERS gig at Perkins Palace, Pasadena, CA, on July 4th 1981. 📸: Ed Colver.

"We weren't beating the shit out of each other, but we were definitely trying to outdo who could backflip off the stage and land on someone. There was a style to it -- it was like Kung Fu but without the Fu."

-- JIMMY GESTAPO of NYHC band MURPHY'S LAW, excerpt from the book "American Hardcore: A Tribal History" (2010) Second Edition, written by Steven Blush

Source: www.mprnews.org/story/2006/10/19/hardcore.

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

The Sound of Hollywood Girls 1983 Hard Rock / Punk Rock / New Wave / Heavy Metal

Oh my god, FUCK YES, dude! 😤 This is such an incredible album here! A crop of all-female and female-fronted underground rock acts of different stripes just delivering some pure rawness in early 80s Los Angeles, right before all the cock-rocking, dopey hair bands *really* came to take hold of the Sunset Strip and went on to define for most what 80s LA rock music was. Lots of odd, goofy, and quirkily satisfying fare to be found within this thing, and a lot of it done by *very* ephemeral acts that you've probably never heard of in your life.

Like, take De De Troit, for example: a woman who fronted a band called U.X.A. that put out a sole studio album in the 80s and who herself only put out one solo 7-inch in her career as well. She contributes a plainly wild exclusive cover here of the controversial, Phil Spector-produced and Carole King-and-Gerry Goffin-penned 1962 tune, "He Hit Me," by The Crystals, by laying down a strange combination of heavy, fuzz-muddy guitar chords and whimsical, saccharine pop strings, and then shifting the tempo upwards to churn out some brief bouts of killer punk rock on the choruses. Just totally irresistible nuttery in that one 😜🤘.

Then the B-side kicks off with a pair of less weird, but still fantastic tracks that would later go on to comprise both sides of a split 7-inch that same year, provided by, who are, by far, this album's two most popular bands: Hellion and Bitch. Hellion, fronted by the scratchiness of Ann Boleyn, deliver "Nightmares," a terrific hard rockin' metal groove that comes with one wicked guitar solo, and then Bitch light up and dazzle with some head-spinning, galloping thrashiness on "I'm in Love" 😍.

Truth be told, the A-side, which has more of the enjoyable quirk on it, is the more consistent half of this release, but those two Hellion and Bitch tunes that lead off the B-side are the most technically impressive ones of this whole bunch.

Tremendous record from the Hollywood-based Mystic Records here that presents an eclectic blend of rock tunes, from hard rock, to heavy metal, to punk and new wave, all while shining a spotlight on some great and mostly fleeting early 80s LA female talent. Lots of fun and chock-full of exclusives too.

Highlights:

LA Girls - "Sure" Soloman Kane - "Twilight Zone" The Skirts - "S&M Blvd. Boy" Butch - "Tractor Trailor Tragedy" De De Troit - "He Hit Me" Hellion - "Nightmares" Bitch - "I'm in Love"

[queercounterculture]

Another 10 queer punks

1. Gina Schock(on the right, Joan Jett is on the left): lesbian

Gina Schock is the drummer for the Go-Gos and prior to that she was the drummer for “Edie and the eggs” (which was fronted by Edith Massey who was most know for being in John Waters movies).

2. Kristian Hoffman(In the middle between David johansen and Jonathan Richman): gay

Kristian Hoffman was the keyboardist and song-writer for “The Mumps” and also played with “The Contortions” and Lydia Lunch. He was in the 1971 documentary tv series “An American Family” because he was Lance Loud’s (who was the singer of “The Mumps”) best friend.

3. Snuky Tate: gay

Snuky Tate was involved in the San Francisco punk scene and was in a band called “The Alterboys”. Though he recorded a single called “who cares?” that was not with “the Alterboys”. He died in 1998.

4. Cherry vanilla: unknown

Cherry Vanilla is a singer-songwriter and actress. She worked with and dated David Bowie. Too my knowledge she has never specifically stated her sexuality though her keyboardist Zecca Esquibel said “Well, Cherry's act was always a very sexual act. She's gorgeous woman, and known for her sexploits, so it was very easy for her to put into her show an occasional song about her attraction to women. Basically she's heterosexual, but she's had many…ah, I won't say many, I won't put words in her mouth. Cherry had had lesbian experiences with other women and was attracted to women, and occasionally she would sing about it, and ended up with one song on each album. "Foxy Bitch," which was, is about Linda Ronstadt, and "Amanda," on the second album. I can't claim that it's a reference to Amanda Lear, but I think it is, who is the famous sex change that appeared in a lot of Bowie's work.” So I’m not sure exactly how she identifies but it seems as though she’s not 100% straight.

5. Eric Emerson: Bisexual

Eric Emerson was a Warhol actor originally and then was in early glam punk band “The Magic Tramps”. Emerson was openly bisexual. At some point (probably in the 60’s) his father accused him of being “a little sweet” and Eric Emerson’s response to the statement was "What he don't understand is that my generation can swing both ways". He died in 1975 a month before his 30th birthday. The official cause of death was a hit and run though it is more likely he died from a heroin overdose in a different location and then placed on the side of the road.

6. Marie France: trans woman

Marie France is a French singer and actress who was somewhat involved with punk in the 70s, putting out a punk style single “Daisy / Déréglée” in 1977. She was involved with FHAR, Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire which in English is Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action. She was involved in a group called “The Gazolines” and was on the cover of a single by punk band “Gazoline” which was named after the group she was in.

7. Alice Bag: Bisexual

Alice Bag was the singer for the L.A punk band “The Bags”. She has said that David Bowie was was a big influence on her and how she found out that bisexuality was an option “When you’re in your early teens you’re starting to explore sexual feelings. At that point, I thought you either had to be straight or be gay. I didn’t know that you could be bisexual. But when David Bowie talked about it, all of a sudden I thought, That’s how I feel and that’s OK. He’s David Bowie and he’s giving me permission. It was very powerful.”

8. Vaginal Davis(the one in the front) : genderqueer and intersex

Vaginal Davis’s name is a homage to Angela Davis, considering Angela Davis to be one of her biggest inspirations. Vaginal Davis was in multiple bands such as “The Afro Sisters” and “¡Cholita! The Female Menudo” which Alice bag was also a member of. She also helped form the Queercore punk movement of the 80’s and made the zine “Fertile LaToyah Jackson” which was published from 1982 to 1991.

9. Phranc: lesbian

Phranc was in the L.A punk band “Nervous Gender” she was also in the bands “Catholic Discipline” and “Castration Squad”. Around the 80’s she moved away from punk and into folk music, calling herself the “All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger".

10. Tom Robinson: bisexual

Tom Robinson was in “The Tom Robinson Band” which was a political band that had many LGBT related songs. For a long time he identified as gay though in 1982 he met Sue Brearley and he would eventually marry her, though he would still identify as gay. In the 90’s he stated "I have much more sympathy with bisexuals now, but I am absolutely not one." Though he now does consider himself bisexual.

[tenaciouspostfun]

--wang chung in concert

 Last night at the Morristown Performing Arts Center, we were treated to three great 80's New Wave bands: Naked Eyes, The Motels and Wang Chung. Each band (with the exception of Wang Chung) played for about 45 minutes. It would mostly be Wang Chungs night, however. The English band who in my opinion had one of the best albums ever with "Points on A Curve" opened with "Wait". This lyric and melodic song has been playing on the airwaves from the early 80's and it is one of Wang Chungs signature songs.

 Over the band's somewhat short career, it is most recognized with its writing for the movie "To Live and Die In L.A. The band last night played an instrumental orchestration of "To Live" before playing the actual song.

 While billed as a new wave band, the versatile band has a hard rock side to it, and at times, a punk side to its repertoire. The band can be poppish as well as incorporating dance rock.

 Out of North London, its original founders, Nick Feldman, Jack Hues and Darren Costin formed a group that had a different sound. Feldman on bass is almost like a rhythm bass guitarist; far different than most bass players. This gives the band more depth in its dance numbers. It also provides a very up beat form to the bands talents. From "Dance Hall Days" to "Rent Free", the band was never pinned down to one sound that signifies most bands. When you listen to a song like "Let's Go", you're almost reminded of a Jimmy Buffet tune; in "Everybody Wang Chung" you have a very commercial, playful song that is the band's most recognized song. In playing a Clash song, you are made aware that this band can get as hardcore as any of the 80's new wave bands that were around during that era.

 With three bands on the billing, Wang Chung kept the evening short, but very tight. Playing a lot of commercial songs, but not all, they smattered the evening with less known songs as well.

      The Motels were the second band of the evening with seven songs. This new wave band from Berkeley, California has a very talented lead singer in Martha Davis. Starting in 1975, the band has had many musicians come and go, but the lead singer is widely recognized as a true vocialist. At times she has that folksy, wide ranging voice of Natalie Merchant, at other times, reminiscent of Chrissy Hines. Cool and resonant, Davis owns the stage when she sings. She is also a good guitarist of note.  The Motels were upbeat (anathema to Naked Eyes), their songs, while sometimes sad and pensive, have deep meaning. "Take the L" is just that kind of song. The Motels are not without tongue and cheek songs, however, "So L.A." is a tribute to the "totally" expression that was so commonly used in L.A. in the 80's, right along with the big hair.

 The Motels range is amazing, from their commercial songs: "Only The Lonely" and "Suddenly Last Summer" are feeders into deft songs like "Danger" the very staccato, "Total Control".

   Naked Eyes opened a bit flat. The first song "In The Name of Love" had no feel to it. In the second number, the band picked up to a macabre sounding "Voices in My Head". "Piccadilly" is a tribute to the section in London where they're from. This is a folksie, new wave song that is catchy as well as fun. The band would end with "Promises, Promises", and "Always There To Remind Me".

 All three bands had a different sound but all were very good last evening.

 



[musicarenagh]

The Hybris Unleashes 'On The Day We Met The King' Dive headfirst into a kaleidoscope where the shards of sound and color collide dazzlingly—this is the portal through which THE HYBRIS invites us with their latest single, "On The Day We Met The King." Here lies a frenetic fusion of 80s-style punk rock glamour combined with pop sensibilities that spark like fireworks in an endless night sky. Ringo Rabbit orchestrates storms on drums; Beanie Bison stitches destiny with each resonant pluck of his bass; and Malcolm Mandrill delivers vocals akin to throwing open windows in rooms too long closed, letting rebel yells sweep through. https://open.spotify.com/track/1VkvqwmVrY5O6LB5aD3Oqq Lyrically they dawn superhero capes, venturing beyond mere musical notes to pen tales of cosmic confrontations and societal standoffs. In "On The Day We Met The King," one detects echoes of characters clashing against tyrants; indeed, it speaks not just through sounds but paints vibrant rallies on cobblestone streets. Each strum pulses like neon around the silhouettes of freedom fighters engaged in dance-offs against dystopia—politics set to punk-rock operatics where each note swings for revolution. This track is an enigmatic blend harvested from fields once sown by Greek dramatists’ ink-dipped quills—an upheaval woven deeply within cords both bison-taught and rabid-crafty. [caption id="attachment_55699" align="alignnone" width="1080"] The Hybris Unleashes 'On The Day We Met The King'[/caption] And so we find ourselves caught up—where? Midway between mosh pit frenzy and philosophical ruminations tipped off by chords that cascade over each other wildly as festival streamers caught at gale force wind... This international ensemble fragments geographical confines binding Nice's breezes to L.A.'s sunsets swung around Cologne’s historic grit. THE HYBRIS isn’t merely releasing music; they are flinging great sonic galaxies spiraling into ears eager for tales taller than skyscrapers yet intimate as whispered revolt. With “On The Day We Met The King,” these musical vigilantes sharpen their lyrical swords not only to entertain but awaken—a battle hymnal at once vintage tinted and piercingly present. Follow The Hybris on Website, Twitter, and Instagram.

[clickyourradio]

📣 NEW RELEASE! 🎉 NEW RELEASE 🔔 NEW RELEASE!

🇺🇸 A Doll's House - 🎶 Over Easy

New music can come from anywhere…even four middle-aged guys. Meet A Doll’s House. A band that is old but new.

A Doll’s House was born in Los Angeles during the late 80's. For a few years, the band played all the L.A. clubs (Whiskey, Roxy, Troubadour, Anti Club, Raji's and even the Natural Fudge Cafe). Unfortunately, life took over and the party ended. They were barely 22 years old. Thirty years later, those same three guys with established careers as a lawyer, a veterinarian and a TV producer embraced the well-worn adage “better late than never.” They teamed up with an L.A. vocalist, David Santos, and the four clicked virtually overnight. The band had the great fortune of having Brian Wheat (perhaps best known as the bass player and co-founder of Tesla) engineer and produce the album. The result is A Doll’s House's first album: Annum. A ten-track album, literally thirty years in the making with the single 'Over Easy" now added to our #Rock & #Blues stream.

[vinylfromthevault]

“Punk 45: Chaos in the City of Angels and Devils” 2016. Soul Jazz Records. Two-LP comp of L.A. area punk bands from ‘77-’81. It’s a fairly comprehensive overview of the scene with some classic tracks and bands I’m quite familiar with and have in the collection like The Germs “Forming,” X “We’re Desperate,” Circle Jerks “What’s Your Problem” and Adolescents “Amoeba.” I am particularly excited about having The Bags’ “Survive” on vinyl now - that single was the only thing they released and finding any Bags is kinda next to impossible and it absolutely rips. There’s also a few less well-known but still familiar (at least to me/stuff I didn’t really listen to back in the day) songs like The Flesh Eaters “Disintegration Nation,” The Weirdos “A Life of Crime,” The Dils “Class War” and T.S.O.L. “World War III.” One curious inclusion is very familiar but a head-scratcher: Iggy and the Stooges “I Got a Right.” While Iggy and the band did spend time in L.A., they are most associated with Detroit and wrote this track back in ‘72 (though it wasn’t widely available until much later). Then there’s stuff that I’ve never heard of before, or have only read about like The Urinals (“Ack Ack Ack Ack” and “I’m White and Middle Class”), Simpletones’ “I Like Drugs,” Eyes’ “TAQN” and The Hollywood Squares’ “Hollywood Square.” 

[the-picked-last-club]

THE GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME: LOS LOBOS “HOW WILL THE WOLF SURVIVE?” (1984)

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Here is that song the band never completed. Maybe someday we will until then? This is all you get. Benedict Arnold & The traitors forever!

[cannedpoo]

"The story of the Atomic Cafe (1946-1989) is also the story of Little Tokyo, forced to move twice due to Civic Center expansion and redevelopment. The building, now occupied by Señor Fish, will be demolished this year to make way for the Metro Regional Connector station. Nancy Sekizawa, daughter of owners Minoru and Ito Matoba, took over the business and became known as Atomic Nancy. Nancy Sekizawa, daughter of owners Minoru and Ito Matoba, took over the business and became known as Atomic Nancy. Little Tokyo folks are working hard to commemorate the story of both the Atomic Café and its successor, the Troy Café, which enlivened the building for some 20 years with down-home Japanese American food, a hangout for punk rockers, and an incubator for the then-burgeoning Chicano/Latino arts movement. The Atomic Café was established by Minoru and Ito Matoba and moved to Third and Alameda in 1961. In the mid-1970s, Mr. Matoba suffered a stroke and his daughter, Nancy Sekizawa, started running the café, bringing her own taste in music and fashion. In the early 1980s, musicians from across the nation and even overseas could be found hanging out at the Atomic Café after hours. Blondie, The Go-Go’s, X, David Byrne, Linda Ronstadt and David Bowie were just a few of the café’s patrons. Sid Vicious once started a food fight there. After Sekizawa’s departure in the mid-1980s, her parents retired and closed the business. The Troy Café — another locally owned small business exuding artistic energy — opened in the same building. Attracting many young Chicano artists from neighboring East L.A., including Las Tres and Yeska, the Troy showcased local music, spoken word, and visual arts. Grammy-winning artists such as Beck and Quetzal performed there. The Little Tokyo Community Council’s Transit Committee, Planning Committee and Cultural Preservation Committee have been in discussion with Metro about a public art piece to commemorate the two cafés once the building — which dates back to 1913 — is demolished and the Regional Connector station is built. Award-winning filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura (“Life on Four Strings,” “A Song for Ourselves,” “Pilgrimage,” “Yellow Brotherhood”) is working with the Little Tokyo Service Center and fellow filmmaker Akira Boch on a short documentary about the two cafes and their legendary impact on L.A.’s music scene. “The interview for the project have been fun so far,” Nakamura said on his blog (www.tadashinakamura.com). “Listening to stories about L.A.’s punk scene in the ’80s and the Chicano arts scene of the ’90s have expanded my appreciation for Little Tokyo as a cultural hub for the arts.” https://rafu.com/2014/02/atomic-nancy-to-appear-at-former-atomic-cafe-site/

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

"HARDCORE MUSIC WAS A NEW FORM -- SHORT, DISSONANT BLASTS, ANGRY SOCIOPOLITCAL LYRICS..."

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on a movie poster for "American Hardcore" (2006), the film documents the early '80s rise of hardcore -- a musical and cultural revolution born of suburban ennui that ignited a national movement. Also included are first & second editions of "American Hardcore: A Tribal History" (2001) written by Steven Blush, on which the documentary was based.

"Hardcore music was a new form -- short, dissonant blasts, angry sociopolitical lyrics delivered as a primal scream -- with little regard for previous rock tradition; low-budget recordings with emphasis on intensity and attitude.

Hardcore was more than just music. It was also a national network created for kids and by kids -- with no major record companies, managers, or agents involved. It was the dawn of the DIY spirit, and much of the independent rock vibe we still see today arose from that initial ethos.

"American Hardcore" pays tribute to the pioneers of the movement. It's a testament to the strength of unity and dedication to a common belief, the undeniable power of youth, and the need to reveal against a fucked-up world. "American Hardcore" is a sobering social commentary on America in the early 1980s, and by implication, an indictment of what's up with our nation today."

-- STEVEN BLUSH (writer/producer) & PAUL RACHMAN (director/producer)

Sources: www.posterazzi.com/american-hardcore-movie-poster-print-27-x-40-item-movei0217, Microcosm Publishing, & www.njuskalo.hr/literatura-knjige.

[randomvarious]

Today’s compilation:

Tantrum Compilation 1990 Punk Rock / Alternative Rock / Pop-Punk / Hardcore Punk

Got another one of these punky early 90s LPs that manages to totally rip shit up 🤘😤. Presenting Tantrum Compilation, a 1990 release from a small L.A. label called Cocktail Records, who put out this album, and then a split 7-inch the following year, and then completely bounced out of existence. Ephemeral as hell, this thing presents a bunch of exclusives—though not entirely—from mostly Cali bands, including ones you may have heard of, like L7 and White Flag, and ones you definitely haven't heard of, like The Rails, whose only song they've ever released—a lightly punkish bit of alternarock called "Miss Rome Stays Home"—solely appears on this comp.

So, let's get into some of these raucous wig-flippers, starting with L.A.'s very own aforementioned White Flag. If you're a fan of this band, then chances are that you're familiar with their album, Zero Hour, and its title track. But guess what? There's a White Flag song on this album called "Zero Hour" too, but it's a completely different track than the one that appears on their Zero Hour album. And I thought that, maybe, this was a misprint on the part of Cocktail Records, but it appears that in a 2008 expanded edition of another White Flag album, Wild Kingdom, this song appears as "Zero Hour." Really weird and confusing, but I think I got to the bottom of it. And the guitar solo on it is incredible too, by the way. Blisteringly speedy 🤯.

Next, an exclusive from female-fronted San Franciscan punk band Frightwig, called "38 Special." This thing's such an electrifying anthem, man. They date back to the early 80s and they manage to bring those timelessly irresistible melodic power chords with them into the new decade. Just phenomenal stuff from them here.

And an unorthodox punk duo called The Death Folk are on here as well. They feature Pat Smear, of mythical Germs fame, and their song "Jack" loads up on layers of ever-changing and scratchy punk riffs, without any of the other instruments that you'd typically expect to hear accompanying them, such as a bass or drums. Instead, the band's other member, Gary Jacoby, is credited on tuba, but uhh, I don't think I hear any on this song 😅.

And then we've got another Cali group, Sacramento's Groovie Ghoulies, who supply a raw and super catchy power poppy pop-punk cover of Men Without Hats' 1987 hit, "Pop Goes the World." Something of a successful precursor to that whole Punk Goes... covers series that would come about in 2000 from Fearless Records. Had that whole enterprise existed a decade or so prior, you could expect to hear this song on one of their releases; I mean, it sounds damn near perfect for it.

Truth be told, though, this album felt pretty listless throughout the first half of its a-side, but then it managed to pick up a full head of punk steam and never looked back. Some really terrific tunes on this. Another one to throw on my slowly growing pile of great and obscure late 80s-early 90s punk comps that I've come across in the past year or so. Others include Dionysus Records' Sounds of Now! and Trigon's Gimme the Keys !!, two excellent late 80s punk comps from Cali labels that run a bit more garage-y.

And you definitely can't find direct YouTube links to every song that's on this album, but luckily, someone uploaded the whole thing to YouTube just two months ago(!), so you can hear them all in there.

Listen to the full album here.

Highlights:

White Flag - "Zero Hour" Instigators - "The Blood Is On Your Hands" Frightwig - "38 Special" The Death Folk - "Jack" Groovie Ghoulies - "Pop Goes the World" Spiderbaby - "Wake Up" The Rails - "Miss Rome Stays Home"

[sinceileftyoublog]

Georgia Anne Muldrow Interview: Rhythm Is A Form of Gravity

Photo by Antoinette A. Brock

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“The people keep you fresh. They keep you on your toes,” Georgia Anne Muldrow told me over the phone last month. The prolific L.A. musician, whose output ranges from experimental hip-hop to neo soul to jazz and everything in between, is releasing her fifth record in four years on Friday, and the third overall in her beats series. VWETO III (FORESEEN + Epistrophik Peach Sound) follows last year’s Mama, You Can Bet! (released under the name Jyoti), 2019′s collaboration with Dudley Perkins and VWETO II, and 2018′s acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Overload. Unlike any of the previous albums, it was put together with some “calls to action” in mind.

Thought some of the songs were around for longer, VWETO III as an entity was made last year, “over a course of time where things were changing in terms of different recording techniques I was trying,” said Muldrow, harking back to techniques and inspirations from her early years of music making. The record was also, obviously, formed during a global pandemic that caused folks to lock down, and Muldrow is conscious to giving listeners opportunities to reach out on her very active Instagram account. Each of the album’s singles have been paired with those aforementioned calls to action. “Unforgettable”, which combines 80′s-sounding synths with 90′s G-funk, calls for vocalists to submit performances to go along with Muldrow’s vocals on the song. “Mufaro’s Garden”, inspired by an illustrated folktale book called Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, asks for visual artist submissions. On the day of the album’s release, Muldrow will ask for dance submissions to “Slow Drag”, a throwback Hammond-guitar-piano ditty named after the juke joint dance of the same name. Next month, it’ll be “Action Groove”, with calls for turntable scratch ‘n’ sampling remixes from DJs. And it’s not just the singles that exemplify Muldrow’s desire to connect with listeners on a granular level. Many of the songs on VWETO III refer to or are inspired by specific eras, from the Afrofuturist jazz of “Afro AF” to the genre tribute “Boom Bap Is My Homegirl”. That the titles are clearly referential, too, like “Old Jack Swing” or “Synthmania Rock”, shows that Muldrow’s not winking and nodding or trying to fool us, earnestly inviting us to dive in.

Moreover, VWETO III is coinciding with what Muldrow’s calling the Teacherie, classes she’s trying to develop to spread knowledge of what she’s learned throughout her own career, everything from philosophy to instrumental-specific classes. Right now, from her saved Instagram story called “Teacherie!,” you can take an assessment to fill out what you’re interested in. “It helps me to see what skill levels people have and what they want to learn in the class,” Muldrow said. “I seek to continue to stay open enough to make relevant music and have relevant things to share with people.” Overall, Muldrow is the type of artist that uses online platforms the way they’d be used in an ideal world. Her use of NFTs, too, is noble; the album art by Cape Town-based Breeze Yoko is being auctioned off, with 50% of proceeds going to prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance. Even when the offline world returns--Muldrow’s slated to play Pitchfork Music Festival on Saturday, September 11th--Muldrow’s created a blueprint for navigating an increasingly isolating digital world, by seeking out real connections.

Below, read my conversation with Muldrow, edited for length and clarity, as she discusses making the record, being inspired by African rhythms, the influence of Digital Underground, and why her work logically extends into prison abolition. You can also catch her tomorrow on Bandcamp Live at 8 PM CST.

Since I Left You: Why did you decide this was a good time to revisit your beats album series?

Georgia Anne Muldrow: The people love it, you know? I always like to post beats on Instagram and share my poetry or state of mind of what’s going on in the world according to my people, and provide a place of joy and uplift. The voice of the people kind of determined what songs were on there. There are some songs that nobody’s ever heard. Different ideas, something a little bit more energized.

Something for the people. It’s really great that I have direct contact with them. Some of the songs are things I like to try based on the vibes I get from their feedback. It’s great; it’s a beautiful thing for me. I’ve gone through phases where critics love me, but the voice of the people that really support your work is really cool to hear. It’s like a little focus group. I just like sharing my music with folks because it’s my way of contributing love energy to the world in a direct, immediate way.

SILY: A lot of folks are still staying home and needing that connection. You’re connecting with them but also providing a platform for them to connect with each other.

GAM: Yes. I’m way into that and seek to be expanding that in an even more literal sense with my classroom project [Teacherie], like a live webinar sort of thing, that enables folks to speak amongst themselves. A more extended form of what I do on social media. An intimate look at what’s really going on in music. They can see where my emotions end and the music begins and try to make things seamless within their own music. Teach what I’ve picked up along the way, because I won’t be here forever. Spreading the love but the knowledge, too, with the music that I share. There’s a certain quality that you can achieve if you have patience.

SILY: Did you always know you wanted to do these calls for action, like for vocalists on “Unforgettable”? And how did you decide which tracks you wanted to do them for?

GAM: It’s definitely my way of trying to promote some sort of hip hop jam in lieu of the isolation that folks are weathering...I’m really inspired by the early age of hip hop where everyone had different dances. They brought their art books to the hip hop jams. The jackets with the art on it, the MCs rapping. The breakdancing, the DJs. All of the different things in place for it to be complete. That’s part of what got me hooked on production. One night years ago, [when I first played] my stuff, and folks started to dance, it got me hooked--to make somebody move. Somebody can rap over this, somebody can dance to this or draw to this. That’s the reason for the calls to action. Opening up a hip hop jam all over the world. I hope it gains some momentum. That would be nice, for more people to put themselves out there. But I do understand we live in different times right now and people are trying to get by. I still have to post some of the artists from “Mufaro’s Garden” and these rap videos from “Unforgettable”.

SILY: You’re giving people an opportunity, even if they’re just trying to get through the day, to take a break or have a beneficial creative exercise.

GAM: Yeah. Being creative together, and togetherness. The thinking that the songs aren’t complete without dance. Lyrics are a certain kind of fulfillment of music. But the movement of the body is another one. [It] goes back to gravity. Drummers harness the power of gravity and manipulate it so things can fall at a certain time. Same thing with dance--[dancers] don’t manipulate gravity, but interact with it and create an interdependence with it. When somebody’s dancing, they come back down to the ground, and you could let that go and let gravity guide what your dance looks like. Rhythm is a form of gravity--a form of gravity engaging with life. I feel like movement is the fulfillment of all the arts. I just seek to do my part.

SILY: You mentioned being inspired by a specific early era in hip hop, and there’s a lot on here inspired by genre or era-specific trends, like the G-funk in “Unforgettable” and “Boom Bap Is My Homegirl”.

GAM: [Boom bap] is one of the things that I specialize in. It’s a home base for me. In my experience, it’s a very African point of access. A lot of the boom bap rhythms are straight from Africa. Most of them are. Off the shores of West Africa. I heard so many of them, from The Gambia, Senegal, Mali. Over there, you hear so much of it. I want to be part of that. At the same time, I might wake up and make a free jazz record. I don’t feel like a traditionalist; I just want to preserve the culture of Black music from this hemisphere. I love traditional ideas, but it’s not like I’m gonna do this one idea for the sake of staying in a lane. There’s no place that Black music hasn’t influenced, molded, shaped, nurtured.

SILY: When was the last time you were able to perform in Africa?

GAM: I believe it might have been 2017. These years have started to run together. I don’t mind it, though. Keeps me young. [laughs]

VWETO III cover art by Breeze Yoko

SILY: How did the songs on here with vocals come together, whether the ones with your singing or the ones with featured artists? Did the words or beats/melodies come first?

GAM: The beats came first except for “Shana’s Back”. Shana Jensen is my sister; she’s the mother of my niece. Every time she’d come over and I had an idea to compose songs around her, they’d end up being huge songs. She’d be like, “Bye!” [laughs] I guess she wanted something a little more understated. I’d always end up doing big Motown sounds. There’s a song on The Blackhouse called “Shana’s Groove”. It’s a like a reoccurring situation and character. It’s kind of funny at this point.

The other ones, like “Unforgettable”, I’m very much matching the vibe, the punk-funk aesthetic. Sometimes a little hook just pushes it over the edge and gets them into the mindset I was in when thinking about it. Other songs like “Love Call” I just wanted to sound like it was in an arena. Arena rock, funk, Digital Underground-inspired, all the way.

SILY: Are you a big Digital Underground fan?

GAM: I think it shows in a lot of the music I make. I don’t think I can hide it. This record has so many examples of that. I love Shock G so much. He was so bad, as a thinker, a philosopher, a community builder, artist, pianist, maestro. The “Love Call” groove, “Unforgettable”, “[Old] Jack Swing”, you can hear it. I was raised with that kind of music in my head as a child. Unashamed to be funky and make a groove have extra grease on it. That’s what distinguished our sound from other region’s sounds. Getting greasy. While still doing the boom bap and all that other stuff. For me, it was always a goal to represent where I’m from in my music in a non-traditional way. Bringing what I love about the West Coast to whatever I was working on.

Shock G lives in all of us. He brought so many different vibes. A rhythmic pocket that breathes. Somewhat right under "Atomic Dog”. It keeps you moving. It has a breath of life in it. I’m so thankful to have lived in an era where I could hear and experience his work.

SILY: How did “Ayun Vegas” come together?

GAM: Ayun is my little brother. I think I’ve known him since 2014 or ‘15. He’s quite a talent. I love his style. He’s from [New] Jersey. I love his sense of rhythmic dynamic. His use of metaphor, double entendre. I feel like he’s really a gifted poet. He can do all types of different things. He’s an amazing MC--he just released a project with Jacob Rochester called Slaps & Hugs. I’m gonna lean towards people who are creative themselves and insert themselves into everything they do. 

Ayun is very secure in being different. He came out to Vegas, and I had this song. Usually, when I play leftfield stuff, MCs want that beat they can crush and not feel challenged by. This song is really old. I feel like it was made in 2016. I feel like that was the first time when somebody was willing to rap on an idea that was out of the ordinary. It’s not just in your face. It’s something different, but I want you to rap for your life on this. Something more like a movie score, where you find your character. He did it! He didn’t leave one beat behind. 

He’s rhythmically gifted and quite the poet. He almost went into pro football but he chose music. He’s a very enterprising brother, doing all types of apparel. He was working in the visual artist community, in the videographer community. Any time I can showcase what it is that he got to share, I’m there. He’s not afraid to speak the truth. This verse is impressionistic. It’s like somebody is taking a really big brush and making a beautiful image, strong-arming it. It’s dope. I love it.

We did another song together on the Overload album, but it didn’t make the cut. The Japanese version of Overload has a song called “What Can We Do Now”, and it has Ambrose Akinmusire, Ayun, and me. I’d love for that to be heard stateside, because it’s definitely about what’s happening over here.

SILY: Why did you choose to have the proceeds for this record go to Critical Resistance?

GAM: I’ve always wanted my music to be a tool for the motion of people. It doesn’t stop with dance and rapping and singing and drawing. It begins with that. Where it ends up, the movement of people coming into their powers, truths that in order to have a more humane society, we are going to have to throw some of this bullshit away. The spoils of enslavement. We’ve got to get rid of those spoils so we can get to a more realistic place of folks being cognizant of the activities that they take a part in. Jails ain’t gonna help people feel like they’re part of the community. They cage people and endanger their lives and run the risk of ruining somebody’s mental, emotional, and spiritual state even if they did commit the crime they’re in there for.

There’s a sense that all crime is committed from a place of fear. Many crimes people are locked up for is just folks trying to find a way. I don’t see how more fear is going to rehabilitate. The idea that punishment leads to enlightenment. People in the public school system are taught about some of the baddest people that ever lived--mass murders. But they’re not the type of people held accountable. They’re who brought over the imprisonment systems from their failed nations.

I don’t believe in reform at all. Critical Resistance seeks to abolish prisons as we know them. I love that their resolve is so sure and bold.

Photo by Antoinette A. Brock

[iamatt122]

A Biography Within a Eulogy

I have been kicking around ideas for a blog for a while now. I suddenly had the inspiration to write today from a muse that is no stranger to me but may seem a bit macabre to others.

This morning I heard about the passing of Richard Trumka. Trumka was the president of the AFL-CIO for the last 12 years. He was secretary-Treasurer for the 15 years before that. The 13 years before that he was president of the United Mine Workers. His father was a coal miner with a Union job that put him through college. He worked in the mines as a young man as well. These are the same Mine workers who are in the middle of a 5-month strike in Alabama as I write this.  

I had the honor of hearing him speak multiple times and I met him on one occasion. The day I met him changed my life. Here is where the introduction to me comes in.

My father was a Master-at Arms in the Navy, and my mother was a telephone operator for Pacific Bell. As a child in the 80′s I watched as our nation went through this extravagant decadent period of economic prosperity (for the wealthy). Meanwhile, I was the kid with the Payless buy one get one for a penny shoe, and the chip on my shoulder about being in what should have been a middle class working family that couldn’t quite make ends meet enough for my brother and I to participate in some of the extracurricular activities of our peers. My brother was teased about the pink banana seat bike we inherited from somewhere as the other kids rode new BMX racing bikes.  

I didn’t do well in school despite being tagged as a GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) student. My grades suffered and I was sent to live with my uncle who was a teacher in the L.A. area. It was here that I encountered more diversity than I had ever experienced before. My openly gay uncle and I stayed in Long Beach in an apartment about 2 blocks from Martin Luther King Blvd. (If you know you know). I went to school in a predominately Chicano neighborhood near where he taught in Whittier. 

It was during this time I also learned about racism and police brutality. Even before Rodney King was beaten by four officers over 50 times, I had run-ins with the Whittier Police and LAPD. The most memorable impression was an incident where my friends and I were out skateboarding after curfew. We were pulled over and placed spread eagle on a wall. I was the only white kid in the bunch. An officer walked over to me and said, “It’s late. Go on home.” He was taken aback when I told him I was staying with one of my Latino friends and I couldn’t go without him. They patted everyone down and released us. But I could feel the malice towards my friends.

It was also around this time that I got into alternative, punk, and hip hop. I was raised on Country and Western, R&B, Metal, Big Band, Surf Rock, Pop, and Hard Rock. Music is and was a gateway to all kinds of different worlds for me. I never learned to play an instrument. However, music played a huge role in my career path. More on that later.

The rebel DIY attitude and Gen X grunge nihilism did no favors to my grades or my future as a model citizen for that matter. I made dumb kid mistakes and did dumb kid things that I won’t go into detail about here. Suffice to say, “easy money” for a teenager in LA County in the 90′s came with a lot of strings attached. Despite being a white kid raised in suburban San Diego County, I molded myself to fit my environment. I wouldn’t give any of it back for all the money in the world. In the “hood” I learned about friendship, community, loyalty, and respect. I also unfortunately became a Raiders fan and a Dodgers fan, where I learned more about those values along with disappointment and defeat. 

High School brought me back to North San Diego County. My grandparents didn’t want me attending the school in the neighborhood my parents and I lived because there was “gang problems” there(translation: Hispanic and Pacific Islander students). So, I went to Carlsbad High School, where not only was I not a minority, but I am pretty sure the minority population percentage was in the low 30s. This is where I got to lean into being a weird punk rock, goth kid and enroll in Drama. My grades never recovered, and I dropped out in my Senior Year. 

I had been doing technical production for Drama and found a passion for the arts that didn’t involve me being front and center and allowed me to play a supporting role in a small community of nerds on campus (foreshadowing). This new passion led me to an internship at a theatre and eventually my first real Union job (I don’t count the 3 months I worked at a grocery store).

I became a pre-apprentice with IATSE Local 122. I was a professional stagehand. I experienced live music, theatre, comedy, drama, board meetings, tv shoots, conventions, arena tours, stadium tours, and so much more as I honed my craft. I was literally shining a light on some of the music I grew up listening to. 

I was an apprentice when I met Richard Trumka. We had set up audio at the Convention Center for him to speak at a rally for one of the many labor battles we were fighting in San Diego at the time on behalf of hotel workers, grocery workers, teachers, or other workers in what had been a very conservative bastion of California. 

Now, I have ADHD, so I don’t remember specifics. I do great with ideas though. President Trumka’s words inspired me to become more involved with my union than the transactional experiences I had to that point. I was already beginning to learn the value of the Camaraderie in a union thanks to a few wonderful mentors who frankly took on father figure roles in my life that had been absent or temporary until then. Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO represented something new in the labor movement for me personally despite the long history behind it. I finally realized how much community matters and how the labor movement is centered on that community. 

Since that day, I became a trustee of IATSE Local 122, and I returned to school at 36 years old to receive two AAs in Political Science, and in Social Science. I am now finishing up my B.A. in Political Science, minoring in Art and Media Technology. During the 2020 election cycle I was Assistant Campaign Manager for the first Asian American La Mesa City Council Member Jack Shu, as well as acting as volunteer coordinator for the first openly bisexual Black and Latino National City Council Member Marcus Bush. I am still a card-carrying Journeyman of IATSE Local 122, and I hope to be attending Law School next Fall. Everything that I have done has been in an effort to create the community that President Trumka painted for me that day. 

Those who walk uprightly enter into peace.

RIP President Trumka.

[greensparty]

Movie Reviews: The Amusement Park / Punk the Capital

What a week for movie reviews!

The Amusement Park

George A. Romero was a legend of the horror genre. His use of horror as thought-provoking social commentary made his films so much more than just genre films. On the surface they were horror films, but they really had something to say about civil rights, government, consumerism, military, technology and internet culture among other themes. His low-budget indie zombie films Night of the Living Dead is, to this day, one of the greatest horror films ever made! In Oct. 2015, I got to meet Mr. Romero at Rock and Shock. He posed for a pic with me and signed my NOTLD DVD. He could not have been any cooler. Took the time to talk to me and pose for the pic even with a big line. I was so glad that I splurged on that signing / picture as Mr. Romero passed away in 2017. Romero made a 52-minute film about an elderly man at an amusement park in 1973, but it was never released due to the investors finding it to be too gruesome. The film was discovered in 2018, given a 4K restoration and Shudder has acquired it and released The Amusement Park this week.

me with Mr. Romero at 2015 Rock and Shock

Commissioned by The Lutheran Society, the film stars Lincoln Maazel (who later starred in Romero’s Martin) as an elderly man at an amusement park, where he finds himself disoriented and cast aside throughout the day. The entire film is an allegory for how society treats the elderly. It is told in a very 70s horror kind of way, but its clearly Romero.

movie poster

The lost film is always a curious case. Was it actually a great movie that never got completed by the filmmaker, in which case, you have to ask if its true to the director’s vision? Or was it never released because the distributor or rights holders had issues with it? It would be rather exciting to report that this lost Romero film is a masterpiece that has finally been unearthed and was worth the 46 year wait since its completion. Well...I can’t say that. However, it is intriguing. The amusement park itself was such a staple of 70s genre films, i.e. the campy but fun Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. The roller coaster, the bumper car rides, the food, the crowds...all of these lend themselves to metaphors for fear and anxiety of accepting one’s own mortality. Albeit metaphors that hit you over the head to make their point, but still. The pace was a little slow at times, but where it really works it when Romero uses the editing to heighten the anxiousness. It is cool to finally see this get the release it deserves and at 52 min. it works on Shudder!

For info on Shudder: https://www.shudder.com/movies/watch/the-amusement-park/286f545b09818c85

3 out of 5 stars

Punk the Capital

Punk rock music has always been a musical genre that is political at its core. In using the loud, fast and angry music to bring attention to socio-political issues, it forces its audience to think, albeit thinking while slam-dancing...but still. There have been several documentaries chronicling various regional punk scenes, i.e. the L.A. punk scene in The Decline of Western Civilization, Boston’s hardcore scene in All Ages: The Boston Hardcore Film, and Turn It Around about the Bay Area’s scene. Washington D.C. has always been unique to the punk movement in that the nation’s lawmakers are all in the city, so there was plenty for the punk musicians to get fired up about. The D.C. punk scene has been documented previously, notably in Scott Crawford’s doc Salad Days, which focused on the punk movement during the Reagan era of 1981-89, as well as the D.C. episode of Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, which addressed a lot of the music from D.C. but mostly the punk scene that Dave Grohl was a part as the drummer for Scream in the late 80s. Now there’s a new doc about D.C.’s punk scene Punk the Capital. After a festival run, it has played virtual cinemas and this week it premieres on DVD and blu-ray from Passion River this week.

movie poster with Henry Rollins

This doc goes deep into the formation of the scene in 1976. There’s plenty of modern-day interviews from those in the trenches including H.R. of Bad Brains, Henry Rollins of State of Alert (his pre-Black Flag band), and Ian MacKaye of Teen Idles and Minor Threat (his pre-Fugazi bands) among others. What was highly impressive is the sheer amount of archival footage used in this doc. Something that gets addressed in a lot of punk docs and they cover here is the DIY approach (why wait for someone else to make something happen for you, when you can do it yourself) and the straight edge movement (banning drugs, alcohol and bigotry at punk venues). Both topics are woven into the fabric of this punk scene.

MacKaye circa early 80s and Rollins modern-day

Selfishly I kinda wanted to see more of Scream, one of my favorites of the D.C. punk scene. There is a deleted scene with Dave Grohl that has been making the rounds this week, but it would’ve been cool if Grohl and/or Pete and Franz Stahl or Skeeter Thompson had been in the doc. I went into this doc having already known a little about the scene and I think Salad Days went deeper into the political activism of the scene in response to President Reagan, but this was more encyclopedic in other ways. The rare archival materials elevated this above a lot of punk docs. The doc ends around 1984 and I kinda wished it had gone further and maybe addressed the punk and post-punk bands that came along after the Reagan era. But in showing the scene from mid-70s through mid-80s, it dives deep. This doc could easily be used in a college class about the punk movement and its great to see the footage preserved!

For info on Punk the Capital: http://www.passionriver.com/punk-the-capital.html

3.5 out of 5 stars

[kvetchlandia]

Richard Meltzer     Lester Bangs Passed Out on Meltzer’s “Highly Uncomfortable Living Rm. Chair,” 104 Perry St., Apt. 4, West Village, New York City     1972

On December 14th, this December 14th, Lester Conway Bangs, while probably not the greatest writer of his generation, arguably its most vital so far to die, would have been 36. Haunted and driven by demons, so- called, a cheerless many of whom/what/ which — or their kindred ilk — he directly sought, found cum stumbled upon, or was inadvertently ensnared by on the demon picnic grounds of Rock and Roll, he never made it to 34.

Following the lead of a handful of babes in the rock-critical woods, one of which I'll admit (if sometimes reluctantly) to having been. Bangs at the dawn of the seventies played as prominent a role as anyone in both expanding the expressive boundaries of rockwriting as a form and giving it a voice that played the newer, more mannered and cautious, mass-market rockmags like Rolling Stone and Creem — the latter of which he even edited for awhile — as on the dime as it had played the catch-as-catch-can, limited-edition fanzines whence it came. Though he also served as the burgeoning genre’s most prolific scribbler, a mission he sustained with relative ease for the bulk of his days, it is to the man’s lasting credit that he rarely delivered copy on anyone’s dotted line. In fact, he probably “got away with more’’ in major- publication print than all his rockwrite brethren combined, conceivably (however) because it merely simplified matters to have a single Designated Outlaw, one entrusted with a blanche enough carte — and unmonitored options galore — to spike with “authenticity ’’ a rock-media stew of bogus Freedom and ersatz Candor.

Retrospectively cliched or not, there was an existential purity to the sheer commitment evinced by Lester’s prolonged wallow in (and about) the rock- and-roll Thing-in-itself. It was, in many ways, the critical headbang to end all critical headbangs; it would be hard to even imagine, for instance, a professional art-film bozo, a jock-sniffing sports jerk, or a food-review lunatic more uninsulatedy gung-ho vis-a-vis x — either as primary experience or typewrite wankery. His patented shameless multipage gush, coupled with an unswerving advocacy of certain conspicuously over- the-top rock genera (Velvet Underground offshoots; Heavy Metal; Punk Rock), made him a must-read favorite with both cognoscenti and dipshits alike, and he came as close to encountering idolatry per se as any non-musician in R&R. A good deal of which — natch —could not help hitting the self-consciousness fan, but while a man’s life was ultimately undone in the process (“I’m Lester — buy me a drink! ’’), the integrity of his art/craft was essentially unaffected. For, while he might have been a tad too glib-messianic those last couple years, he was by no stretch of things an opportunist, never really giving a hoot for what in squaresville would be known as a career. (Or, perhaps, unlike his role model Kerouac, he simply didn’t live long enough for that, too, to be strenuously tested.)

In any event: dead, cremated, literal ashes. California born (Escondido ’48), bred (El Cajon, ages 9-23), and traveled (I first hung with him in San Francisco, last in L.A.), Lester bought the big one on the opposite coast — his final home, the fabled Apple — April 30/82, ostensibly from a hefty pull of darvon employed, in lieu of aspirin, to placate the flu. Since his death, variously interpreted as a mile-radius teardrop’s once-in-a- lifetime terminal burst, a joke and a half on both himself and his precious chosen whole damn Thing, and — by occasional uncouth louts — the final glorious triumph of his excess, the spectrum of Bangs-in-ongoing-print has dwindled from monochromatic /sparse to colorless/ nonexistent. Of the two books in his name which appeared during his lifetime, quasi-coffeetable numbers on Blondie and Rod Stewart, neither a particularly representative Lestorian effort (or even particularly good: the former admittedly hacked out “in two days on speed,’’ and looking it, i. e., ad hoc and forced; the latter disowned as a clumsy, if innocent, foray into “writing as whoring’’), both are either out of print — officially — or on the back burner of barely having ever been in same, at least as regards this coast, where I’ve yet to see either in bookstore one. Nor have two posthumous whatsems. Rock Gomorrah, cowritten (early ’82) with L.A.’s Michael Ochs, and a projected collection of unpublished fragments scrounged from Bangs’s apartment a day or two after his death, gotten more than inches off the publishing ground — the former for reasons which if herein revealed would get me sued but good, the latter because, in the words of editor Greil Marcus, “the stuff is less tractable than I thought at less than 5000 words or so.’’ Also stalled, and/or abandoned (and/ or nonspecific pipedreams to begin with) : all known plans to reissue out-of- print Live Wire LP Jook Savages on the Brazos, recorded, Austin, TX, Dec. ’80, by Lester Bangs & the Delinquents, lyrics and vocals by guess who. In fact, the only anything by L. C. Bangs readily available where availables are sold is his liner copy for The Fugs Greatest Hits Vol. I, released by PVC/Adelphi some months after he’d croaked, for which he (or rather his atoms) later copped a Grammy nomination, and for which, reliable word has it, he never was paid.

Well, I’ve been proven wrong; it hasn’t been easy recollecting Lester in even half a toto in so much tranquility. Didn’t seem like such a bad idea back when obits were appearing left & right and at least two- thirds of ’em smacked of revisionism at its well-intentioned worst; having ridden the range with the guy, having been as intimate with his daytime/nighttime revealed essence — I would bet my boots — as anyone in or out of various possible beds with him, I had fiery goddam galaxies to say in his behalf that were simply not being said, at least not in print by his designated peers; and, although my no longer living in New York couldn’t help but delay my shot, remote and after-the-fact seemed like the ticket, y’know anyway, for some major necessary rerevision.

But here it is two, two and a half years gone & more, and whuddaya know if all the raw goddam pain (at the loss of, yes, a brother) and jagged fucking anger (at a waste of life, life-force, and relative inconsequential like “talent” and “genius”), an unbeatable duo which for weeks, weeks, months gave the Lester totality so cosmic a shape, scale and intensity, have by their own inevitable burnout given way to the contemplation of standard-issue mere data, of the skeletal remains of a larger-than-life life which have come to make sense (or not) in too neat, too linear, a manner. Well — hey — fuggit: Even if grocery lists, chalk diagrams and hokey storytellin’ are the forms ongoing life-as-life has imposed on the mission, there’s still a heap of essential Lester information that could use, uh, exposure to printed-page light.

What too many write-biz intimates sought to do in the wake of his death was debunk the Lester Legend (solely) by reciting evidence that his bark was worse than his bite. While I’m sure he’d have “wanted it done” (i.e., have the saga-as- litany scraped of treacherous barnacles, or at least of their treacherous vogue), I can’t imagine the projected post-life intent of such a wish as in any way entailing cosmetic overhaul, especially in the service of moral/experiential object lessonhood. Lester’s day-to-day transaction with post-adolescent life-as- dealt was — let’s be conservative — 94 % anything but pretty. If he’d have wanted his entire whatsis to serve up viable scenarios for intimates and non-intimates alike (gee, would the Pope prefer to be Catholic?), there’s no way the deal’d come out even provisionally Lester-functional without interested non-intimates having retroactive access to as hefty an eyeful of the not-so-pretty — in all its hideous, non-Clearasiled blah blah blah — as intimates galore regularly managed to cop and, in their various personal ways, have already learned from. To deglorify an earlier incarnation of shit (which the man himself was clearly hellbent on doing in his waning days on earth) you’ve got to at least speak its name — loudly! — for the whole entire planet: c’mon now, one & all. A solemn responsibility (I call it) which, credibly/incredibly, the smelly sumbitch’s closest associates have, to this day, all but refused to consider.

To wit: For every time anyone saw the defanged, declawed Lester teddy bear rear its cuddly li’l head (see obits 2, 3, 5 & 7) the man was uncountable times the asshole, the buffoon, the sodden tyrant; been those things myself — in semi-prior lifetimes — so I know. Back in ’73, for inst, the soon-to-be-dead Lillian Roxon gushed shameless love for the s.o.b., in New York on Creem business, ordering up a Lester button and leaving it in his hotel box; response to this purest of offerings was “What’s that fat cunt want from me?” About a year later I get this call from Nick Tosches requesting that I please take Lester, who’d shown up at his door on acid, “off my hands”; took him to a party at John Wilcock’s place, during which he verbally brutalized Wilcock’s wife (in green Fingernails) for being a “hooker,” snapped at an affable Ed Sanders for being “the only alkie in the counter-culture,” and had nothing more to say to Les Levine’s Asian girlfriend (wife?) than “Yoko is a lousy gook”; further into the night, at Vincent’s Clam Bar in Little Italy, he literally bellowed ( more than twice), “There’s a lotta tackin’ wops in this joint.” And how can I forget the way he treated me and Nick, his closest approximate friends f'r crying out loud, as our wonderful editor while at Creem? He’d call us each up at 3 a.m. to urgently solicit various (rather specific) reams of pap, needed via Special D toot sweet; we’d climb outta bed, peck away bleary-eyed to whack out the closest possible takes on what he’d claimed he wanted, whereupon he’d reject ’em with a vengeance (“I won’t print beatnik shit”), then run thoroughly like-minded i. somethings — under his own byline — or with our words, usually verbatim, laced throughout. Just a few “examples,” dunno if they sound like big stuff or small, in any event typical Lester, with plenty, plenty more where they came from — y’know times n-plus-many.

In spite of such anticommunal upchuck, or quite possibly because of it — post-adolescent of a post-summer-of-love feather & all that — I did have deep affection for the bastard during my final years in New York; he could really piss me off (and I, I’m assuming, him) but bygones were always eventually ditto. In those days I generally shared his affection for The Edge, and might even’ve gone extreme slightly ahead of him; in January ’72, this is true, he actually dubbed me “the Neal Cassady of rock and roll.” But by fall ’75, when I split New York to at least simulate an escape from the Frantic and Hyper (and he subsequently arrived, ostensibly to embrace same), I was feeling the first stirrings of apprehension re my own prolonged massive intake of Edge Substances (emotional, cultural, but above all chemical) and was on the verge of an early series of attempts to, y’know, cut down, to maybe get off my collision course with all sorts of walls, both metaphoric and real. Lester, meantime, seemed on a rapid upswing in the intake dept.; what had so far served as mere horizon or frame for his trip, or at most been its semi-essential fuel, was now lunging headlong for the foreground of his life ... or should we call it the twin foregrounds (life as Mythic Construct; life as physical/emotional/cultural Hard Mundane Reality).

Hey, the guy was beginning to scare me. Certainly as an advanced — or rapidly advancing — version of what I no longer wanted to be and could (possibly) imagine once again becoming, but more as this vivid, palpable spectre of specialized human decomp not just out there but right there: a pal & a buddy headed (willy nilly?) for the sewer. From late ’75 immediately onward, on those unlikely occasions when separate coasts — underscored by far fewer rockwrite junkets — any longer allowed for it, I was usually unable to handle being in the same room with him, knowing I’d have to witness whole new increments of what could really no longer be passed off as anything but (gosh) misery and (dig it) horror. Where in the earlier ’70s it was almost cute — once in a while — the way Lester would stumble into classic self- directed drunk jokes (like the time he called me from the Detroit airport to tell me he was headed for an Alice Cooper show in London, presumably England, only he’d drunkenly got it wrong and was on his way to London, Ontario), there was this half-week in ’79, for inst, during which he hung out at Michael Ochs’s house in Venice with no daily design but to get skid-row-calibre gone and stay there, that was just fucking grim. Looking an unhealthy as I’d ever seen him, basic shit-warmed over with an ngly bump on his forehead (which he claimed he was “treating with Romilar”), he refused to eat without an Occasion. When, one evening, Michael and I pretty much dragged him to a Mexican restaurant, he refused to actually step inside until he’d fortified himself with the cottons from six Benzedrex inhalers — the local pharmacist was out of Romilar — busted open on the sidewalk with a shoe.

Washing down their remnants with a Dos Equis as his enchilada sat there staring at him, he quoted (or claimed he was quoting) Sid Vicious: “Food is boring.”

So, inevitably, when Billy Altman rang me up from N.Y.Clearly on a California morn, to let me hear it straight from a friend — “instead of from a creep” — my immediate response to no more Lester, steps ahead of all the pain & anger & whut, was holy fucking shit, the fucker finally did it; it’d been in the real-world cards for long-long times for Lester to cease to be. Though even on his gonest days he was no way a classic cornball suicide-romantic — heck, I don’t really think he was all that clinically suicidal (big-sleep fantasies never overtly/covertly lured him, not even metaphorically, from the darkest sub-basement of his World of Dread; nor was Danger, though he often nonstop lived it, itself the merest tickle of a ripple of a thrill for him, a context before the fact) — he’d sure staged more corny, frightful dress rehearsals than Jim Jones plus Judy Garland (squared) for simply ending up dead.

Biggest of which I ever saw was January ’81. I’m at Nick’s place in New York, en route back to L. A. from Montreal, when who should pay a surprise visite but Mr. Bangs, cassette in hand. It’s a tape of these tracks recorded during an Austin romp I’d heard about second or third hand (he’d planned to “live there forever,” it was said, ’til a night in the local drunk tank — on top of who knows what else — totally changed his mind), and in the course of the next 12-15 hours he played it, for us and at us, many times. Also during this stretch, after boasting, rather proudly, that he no longer drank, he managed to ingest at least 36 cough- suppressant tablets (three 12-packs of Ornical — we weren’t always watching) washed down with sizable slugs of bourbon, as there was nothing else but water to wash ’em down with.

All stages of this ordeal, in which Nick and I were little more than foils for surge upon surge of what we’d come to regard as typical Lestorian bathos, were hardly bearable in the state we were in (after far too many “nights with Lester,” going back to the days when we even could dig it, we’d opted for a change to take this one straight), but the morning-after phase was literally one for the books. On the umpteenth playback of what was soon to hit the racks as the Jook Savages LP, Lester insisted that one particular vocal was pure Richard Hell (in Lester’s cosmos an a priori yay); my dogtired no-big-deal of a response was it sounded existentially neater than that, more on the order of Tom Verlaine (a Lester nuh-nuh-no). Suddenly hair-trigger sensitive — in a performance-trigger vein — he tapdanced back with “Then I might as well go sell shoes in El Cajon.” Next cut he compared himself to somebody (very contempo) else, prompting me to comment, for non-pejorative, sleep- denied better or worse, that his vocals (across the board; in general) had the same basic flavor as those on such country-western parodies as Sanders' Truckstop or the Statler Brothers’ Johnny Mack Brown High School LP. Affecting grievous offense, as if any of his b.s. actually mattered (the Lester of ’73/’74 — in any chemical state — would merely’ve giggled), he took things up a full notch of indignant/sarcastic: “Well I guess I’m just no fucking good. ”

But he wouldn’t stop playing the crap, not with every cut looming as a supercharged occasion for kneejerk call- and-response, a challenge for him to goad Nick and/or me into goading him, in turn, into mock-self-deprecatory one-liners ad nauseum — a dress rehearsal, as it were — his puke-stained sweater seemed appropriate — for his triumphant appearance on Johnny Carson, which he had no doubt the worldwide success of his Blondie book would imminently require . . . along with a shot of his mug, cleanshaven, on the cover of People (over which he whined “fear” of besmirched personal image).

Ultimately Nick and I, weary of further compliance in so shoddy an interpersonal number, old buddy or not (and/or old bud in particular), found ourselves laughing in his face; enough was enough, and the sight of this bumbling mammal going gaga for an audience of two-who-knew- better was kind of otherworldly amusing. The object of our yuks, however, took it as us laughing with him: Great Moments in Standup/Audience Rapport! Swollen with illusory (or whatever) whacked-out self, Lester then proceeded to announce his program: (1) to save Rock & Roll; (2) to become president (presumably Oi the U.S. of A.); (3) to move to England and in turn save their Rock & Roll. As mere dipshit goals, nos. 1 and 3 meant topically little to either of us — geez, we’d all but buried the Anglo-Am mainstream as even an idle, y’know, sometime hobby or whatnot — but (2) hit us firmly, instantaneously, in the breastplate.

Lester’s neurons, no recent model of health to begin with, had made the short-circuit of Lester Bangs . . . [tenor saxophonist] Lester Young . . . (latter's nickname] Pres . . . Pres/U.S.A. per se!!!

Guffaw, guffaw — we guffawed — though I guess we could've gasped (or shuddered). Then: a heavy silence, as cosmic (or whatever) as it was awkward, filled presently by the man himself:

"Hey! I'm gonna buy some import albums! I'll get a whore I know to lend me her charge card! Cab fare too!" And he was off; no amiable nudging, no “Get the fuck out of here" could take the place of timeless vinyl hunger. Gone at last — and we gave him (in all solemn, empirical, non-jive reckoning) six months to live.

But of course he fooled us, by (nearly) a whole damn calendar year. Surprise, surprise: but an even bigger surprise was the extent to which he managed to actually turn things around — well, almost — during that extra annum, especially during its. and his. final months. Not only was he still among the living, not only did he no longer seem conspicuously earmarked for premature exit — the Lester with whom I spent a rather refreshing week in February '82 gave every indication of having already gone beyond mere survival (as an issue) and appeared, astonishingly, to be thriving on the theme.

In L.A. following his mother's eventually fatal stroke and staying with his 56-year-old half-brother in Studio City, he accompanied me one night to a low-stakes poker game attended by members of the Blasters, the perfect setup, you’d figure, for Lester to revert to type. But no, he just minimally fun-&- games'ed it like anyone else — no lookin' for opportunities to “be Lester," no showing off for rock-roll peers either verbally or intakewise. no diving for the evening's jugular and letting 'er rip — and after two beers (!). without so much as a grimace, he declared he’d had enough. Postgame he engaged Phil Alvin in a lively musical dialogue, but at no point did fightin' words fill the air, or were axes even poised for grinding. The pair agreed to exchange tapes — a wholesome friendship in the making — and next day Lester complained (true, true) that reefer had been smoked.

As the week wore on in consistent, low- key fashion. I was struck by the fuckload of inner capacities the guy was perceptibly calling on, left, right and center, to extend his defiance of Death to the domain of just plain living, capacities I hadn't caught sensory evidence of — all previously told — for more than 11 minutes total. A far cry from anything as cheaply benign as, let's say, more frequent eruptions of "Lester washes the dishes" (see obit 04), what I got to witness was kind of on the order of a whole new Lester, one who'd finally found a non-lethal, functionally less jagged (though in no way “benign") rhythm for his life. Engaging him in tight quarters with more open-heartedness per se than I*m sure I’d ever mustered (sharing an Edge does not always make for brotherhood-by-numbers. let alone by pure, unedited inclination), I willingly submitted to his rap/rant and bought its tenor if not its verbatim transcript; by the time he returned to New York, his mother still hanging on. I’d seen and heard a New Lester series pilot that could credibly have played — prime time — on the Pro- Life Network.

For starters, he’d learned to slow down, to proceed apace through a given experience without easy reliance on everpopular on-off switches. He'd gotten far more selective about the company he kept, seeking out, for the first time in his known adult life, social interactions stressing soulwarming interpersonal comfort over thrash-trigger me-you tribulation. A good deal less insistent upon strapping each day to an emotional chopping block (as recalled, for inst, in that old chestnut of his, “I need to be in love!"), he'd begun to let his life embrace emotional motifs of greater duration and resiliency. And. as stuff like this fed back to his theoretic apparatus, even Lester's ideas (as stated) began to display an unexpected day-to-day congruity; no longer, it seemed, would he write an anti-racist wowser for the Village Voice in one breath and scream, "Fuckin’ niggers!” at Village Oldies the next. Lester-as-flux had had its thoroughly engaging run. and for this to give way to a “maturer” unpredictability was not the worst of possible outcomes.

Even the drastic reduction in Lester’s intake of physical poisons bore little trace of on-the-wagon-or-bust — y'know, as if any day, minute, second the tension of it all would cause him to snap right back with equal vengeance — particularly with its status as but part of a whole-body package that included both eating at regular intervals and a radical olfactory modification: He now took baths. (One afternoon in ’74 Nick and I met Lester at some ritzy midtown hotel. Though he’d been in the room all of an hour, the smell was like a dog had died there, and been left to rot, weeks or months before. Consequently, we vetoed his offer to call down for drinks on Creem’s tab, suggesting, to his consternation, that any dump of a bar would be more, uh, whatever. Many of his heterosex liaisons had foundered on the rocks of precisely this issue.)

In terms of cultural orientation, no longer was he monomanically enslaved to rock & roll (-or-perish). For virtually the first time since the sixties he didn’t need, burningly, brand new Big Beat LP’s in his mail slot each (and every) day; the state of the Art, wobbling on a multi-year terminal gimp, no longer served as his external psychic barometer, his armband of first-person pride (or shame); having finally produced Music of his own, to severe personal specifications (regardless of the giggles it inspired in jerks like me), he no longer needed to prove anything with it or through it. Crucially, though some would probably like to deny it. he no longer saw Rock’em-Sock'em as a viable metaphor for his (or any, kindred or otherwise) state of being, viewing it as the all too easy — and ultimately, revoltingly, unsatisfactory — crystallization of (mega-numerous) blank and scattered lives. Lester's break with rock-roll mythos as his be-all/end-all of etc., which I have no doubt (had he lived) he’d've sooner rather than later made official, was as profound, and profoundly moving, as his break with the Myth of Lester. As one committed jackass who’d made the same painful transition — goodbye, Rock-Automated Self! — I knew how tough a bond the chronically intermingled personal/cultural can be to crack (and my heart went right out to him).

It also warmed my cockles, considering his record in the mere civility dept., to see him relate (graciously) to his half- brother’s wife, this unaffectedly pretty 21- year-old rural Mexican the macho blusterer, a stuntman by trade, had recently acquired, maritally, while on location Down South. Though she knew pun near zero English, my first sight of her she was watching some random English-language crap, while hubby rested for a shoot of the Fall Guy series, on the tiny TV in her fussy suburban kitchen; materially cozy for the first time in her life, she seemed lonely, disoriented, far from home. Silent and solemn, she visibly stiffened — shyly? menially? — at the intrusion of Lester, my girlfriend Irene and me. only to be put at ease by Lester introducing us, without missing a beat, as, well, friends of the family. Like it mattered to him that she feel like family — and thus shared in all aspects of etc. — and for a moment the loneliness left her face; she smiled broadly, shook (or at least took) our hands, went back to her tube.

But what came off as so genuine when he was dealing with his family, his friends, kind of sputtered into the ether when he tried to branch it to the family of Man. Whenever he got to talkin' Hard Humanism, which had all the earmarks of being his preoccupation of (Rock- replacement) record, he’d make these broad, lecture-ish, relatively flavorless statements which often didn't wash.

Never wholly credible 'cause once again he seemed to be performing — without booze/etc. but surely with a script — he’d say thus & such about human courage and folly that not only had an artificial ring, it tended to run in direct opposition to what had clearly been his experience. Even his word choice sounded stilted, alien, not his own; when he spoke of "women" he could easily have been reading straight from a column in Cosmo.

A lot of which suggested a Lester so hellbent on being a good boy once and for all that to merely work overtime cleaning up his own act was scarcely sufficient; he had to render a transpersonal commentary that made his good intentions “universal,” even if the topical universality he’d taken an option on was simply the first he found it comfortable song-&-dancing a provisional connection to. There were moments when his bill of particulars made me uneasy, realizing that to intellectually challenge any of this would be like kicking mud on some kid’s newest/truest pastime, 'specially when it was one so socially redeeming, so non- self-destructive. one which, for all intents and purposes, I basically shared with him anyway. What really counted was the miracle of Rock Tough Guy #1, after 15 years of rocknroll plug-in and little else, during which he'd come to thread that needle upside down (and asleep), to the point (even) of smugness, flipness, pomposity, out on a goddam limb over something else: a neophyte at last! (I could dig it.)

Anyway, finally, on the last night of Lester's stay — which worked out as our last time together, period — we did something we’d previously never found the appropriate nexus for: trading rants (in earnest) with blank tapes a-rolling.

For something like five-six hours we went apeshit re such topics as: the sellouts & prejudices of mutual colleagues; novels and novelists; New York as (quite possibly) the coldest outpost on Emotional Earth; the usual standard rockish garbidge (plus some un- and some non-). We also hit on shrinks-we- have-known, with Lester's rap on this rooty-toot of a subject being the single one, from the four-and-a-half hours I’ve so far transcribed, which most tellingly nutshells the excruciating self- examination he had to've undertaken — and undergone — just to be sitting around discoursing as fluidly as he was, to’ve transcended whatever the fuck en route thereto:

“Like I went to a psychoanalyst, one in New York and one in Detroit, for a total of, I dunno, three-and-a-half years. I finally concluded, I mean yeah I’m insane, I’ve got my problems, my sicknesses are fucking me, yeah, I’m sure they both probably helped me, y’know, I know the last guy in New York, it's like everybody I know was totally appalled by my drinking and drugging, well like you, right, and everybody else had the same reaction, y’know, except my shrink. He’d say, ‘No, that's alright.’ I went out to this, he had a country retreat, a whole bunch of us would go out there on weekends. And the first time I went there like I got drunk on Friday night, and Saturday morning I got up and washed down a bottle of Romilar with a bottle of beer while sitting on a slick rock by the stream. I got this great idea for something I wanted to write, I stood up on the rock in boots like these and whoosh, went like that and smashed, see it, the scar on my nose? That's how I got it, smashed my face open.

“And he thought my druggin' and drinkin' was great, y'know? He said, in fact he kind of told me I'd be not as great of a writer if I gave all this stuff up. And I said, 'Yeah, but look at all these people, they rot away, they end up like self- parodies like Kerouac and Burroughs and all that sort of shit.' And he said. 'No. no, not everybody's like that.' I said, How could I someday be 55 years old and have to take a handful of speed to sit down at the typewriter?' Well he said, 'People do it. heh heh heh!' Well both my shrinks, especially this guy, they had real great humanist compassion and empathy and all that, but I know what both of 'em did, and in the long run in essence they were no good for me, because they were getting off on me being there. It’s like they’re so bored, one housewife alter another, 'I don’t love my husband, I don't know why.’ Then they get someone like you or I that's actually interesting, that has ideas, and so it's fun time for 'em. I mean if I hadda follow this guy’s advice I’d be dead, uh, pretty soon.”

Hmm: one effing eery end-of-quote as, alas, all is now dust — reactively acquired caution or no. Possibly possibly possibly, any tonnage of prudence would inevitably have proven insufficient for the autopilot courses he was still, evidently, all too capable of flying. Or, reversing horses and carts, maybe his tortured shell was already jus’ too beat-to-shit, with even a radical lessening in his scale of abuse being too little — archetypally — too late. And then there’s this pharmacological biz about purified cells succumbing to doses they’d have been more than up for when poison was all they knew. (And can we ignore the Wrath of Influenza?)

Even if, to some bitter-enders, his death remains as shrouded in formal “mystery” as those of Eric Dolphy and Warren G. Harding, all-of-the-above can't help but provide a not-unlikely profile of how Lester came to die. Throw in a few more mainline Causalities (cultural: rock-roll glut, esp. coupled w/ too literal an intoxication with Kerouac, Celine, et al; primalpsychological: a childhood more woeful than most, his Jehovah's Witness mom — pushing 50 when she had him — mind-setting, almost singlehandedly. a chronic “inability to cope"; geographic: the Apple, even when it wasn't absolute Edge Central, affording him. given his makeup, scant opportunity for inner peace) and you'd easily have an explanation that 'd hold up in a court of his cronies/cohorts/camp followers.

But if Lester was the pawn, victim, and (indeed) fellow traveler of such easy- Aristotelian a-implies-b, he was also, in those last fitful months, a scatterer of all such shit to the winds, a man who showed his true destiny muscle by throwing all the elements out of on-the-head mythopoetic sync just when they threatened, conspiratorily, to reduce him to merely another Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Mr. Kerouac. Screamingly, courageously, he committed himself, as wholly (really) as possible, to a counter-causal gameplan which even if flawed — and accidents, y’know, happen — did actually manage to defuse (at least where I live & breathe) the mythic oompah of any time-delayed rat-trap he may subsequently (or previously) have fallen in. If there's anything almost pleasing about the timing, the anti-drama, of Lester's death, it's the monumental Mythic Disjuncture factors he'd set in motion were thereby — implicitly, explicitly — to forever effect.

LESTER’S (WRITERLY) LEGACY — “One of rock’s most colorful characters, Bangs made his reputation as a pugnacious, participatory journalist who was not above picking fights with rock stars in pursuit of a good interview." So wrote one voice of prevailing wisdom, Patrick Goldstein, in the May 9/82 L.A. Times; nothing — latter part — could be farther from the truth. If Lester (the writer) more than once battled Lou Reed into (and beyond) the wee hours of etc., it was not to get a story, it was to live a story: to encounter all the rock-related being his writerly credentials (as a wedge) were able to afford him (as a person)'. Nor was he in any way enthralled by the sickening spectacle of stars being stars; artists, maybe, but stars, fug 'em. When he as mere citizen found himself face-to-face with the pose, pretense, and professional guardedness of such gaudy, extraneous creatures, Lester could not (for the life of him) deal with such crap but to cut right through and speak, directly, to the mere citizen in them, or (failing that) force the situation into functional self-destruct — before the fact of anything so dispassionate as actually “writing it up."

That his eventual write-ups tended to display utter contempt for the entire food chain of music-corporate life, often biting, intentionally, a grimy hand that could not’ve been more willing — his mighty Credentials & all — to feed him, heck, fatten him, was but half the take-no-shit of Lester's essential statement as a writer de rock; forcefeeding the stuff, his stuff, the stuff-as-writ, to the only marginally less corporate (or grimy) running dogs of rockwrite publishing was at least as pugnacious a gesture of this-is-what-I-am/this-is-what-I-do/take-it-or-be-fucked. Since the extent of his success in shoving it down so many otherwise unyielding editorial throats may have had less to do with his willful intent than theirs — camouflage, for inst, for their being life-deep in major-label record company pockets — its significance at this juncture is, at most, merely ironic; the reciprocal influence, in any event, of his ease at getting published upon subsequent moments of raw critical-expressive spew was procedurally nil. In fact, what may most enduringly matter about Lester's approach to his chosen profession, way ahead of dandy journalistic touchstones — "courage," “integrity,” “pride in craft" — that he ate for breakfast like so much broken glass (but which, really, you can still get from Nat Hentoff and Howard Cosell), is the “anti-professional," forcibly non-dehumanized square-one struggle he by design submitted to — and could not. with any kernel of his humanity, avoid - in order to pump out critical prose of any scale of note. (Pugnacity with form; with ritual creative context; even — especially — with roleplaying writerly/critical self.)

That he was ofttimes a great writer/critic, so-called, was but icing on the cake. That scant few others, on the hottest days of their lives, have even approached him — or particularly cared to, considering the requisite gravity and passion of the chore he’d set — probably says as much about their investment in lesser quals of cake as it does about the relative inadequacy of their writerly follow-through. Rockwriting is, and nearly always has been, the trade of simps, wimps, displaced machos, brats and saps; of, in Lester's own words, “ass-kissers of the ruling class”; of fuddy-duddy archivists with cobwebs on their specs; of pathetic idealizers of a lost youth no one has ever (even approximately) experienced or possessed; of sycophantic apologists for chi-chi trends, musical and extramusical alike, without which (so they've always claimed) “rock is dead”; of binary yes/no cheeses with the cognitive wherewithal of vinyl, shrinkwrap, the physical column- inch. Rockwritin' Lester, like anyone else in the trade, was certainly each of these things from time to time, though (probably) none of 'em, singly or in tandem, for longer than the odd off review. Sadly, though his untradelike comportment surely tantalized mere tradefolk while he lived — at least in terms of Style — and even begat a not-half-bad (early-’70s) clone in “Metal Mike" Saunders, his actual abiding sway among such clowns, beyond the occasional liftable riff, was — as it continues to be — infinitesimal.

Finally: the twin silly questions (1) where a still-living Lester might hypothetically've taken it (i.e., beyond the rockwrite fishpond) and (2) what such imaginary newstuff could/would conceivably’ve meant to his basic audience. Second one first. Okay, that Lester's rockstuff generally read so hot as personal testimony is one thing; for it to have been perceived by so many as being eminently, genuinely about something — something rather specific, in fact something "rear’ — is something else. When you get down to it, the gospel of Lester's radical about-ness rested largely on a big hunk of readerly illusion, the illusion of a functional one-on-one between the guy’s fertile imaginings and the psychic infrastructure of rock & roll as dealt; there could be harsh discordance, of course, but as long as a firm relationship could (for whatever readerly vested interest) be consistently inferred between Lester’s mindgames and rock’s g-g-games per se, you at least had the stamp of a viable — if totally simulated — one-on-one. But, really/truly, while Lester’s psychic playground may surely have been one drastically twisted maze, its actual correspondence (sympathetic, hostile, whatever) to rock's own labyrinth, one so airtight and dank as to make his seem like wide open etc., was far too often naught but a matter of readerly convenience. Everyone loves a cipher, a living/ breathing anagram or two. even some — hey — with flaws more rampant than Lester’s, but for the man’s writerly service to’ve been gauged (almost solely) vis-a-vis his reliability as a stand-in cipher-of- x, y’know for readerfolk too lame — or lazy — to suss out x themselves, is the real tragedy of the trip, particularly when the first-&-final glue of most folks’ attachment to his writing was never much more than their own desperate attachment to an x they could, and should, have been accessing more independently (and less desperately) to begin with.

So, anyway, here's the rub. Had Lester lived long enough to both sever his own desperate rock connection — officially, in sheets read by his fuckheaded fans, simply by writing other stuff — and, furthermore, to back it up with an equally official rejection of the Fount of Neurosis from which he'd sung its tune (and they'd listened), it ain't really much of a longshot to imagine him losing a huge percent of the fuckheads — certainly the most gung-ho among 'em — in, well, no time flat. And, c’mon, how much of an immediate, uh, new audience was he likely to yank in writing up (as he insisted he would) such transcendently pivotal mere-humanistic trifles as the dearth of love (as we know it) in scene X or Y . . . how this set of new-age culture jerks uses that set of new-age culture jerks as props in regards to bluh . . . New York editors who pull rank (pshaw!) along collegiate lines [a hard-hitting exposé] . . . or, I dunno, something about shams and follies in clothes and/or grooming?

Plus, well, though, um — (even if) — then again: Aside from loss of ad hominem authority due to the fickle scumbait nature of the pop-world Beast, aside from the fact that many of his generic partisans would prob'ly now be targeted, topically and even personally, in scathing printed-page rants, aside from the limited run such goulash (Sensitive Ties His Laces, w/ Brass Knucks & Footnotes) has ever had — hey — can ever/will ever have . . . aside, aside, aside — the most glaring fact fact is how few times, as of his death, he'd as yet even aspired to the heights (or whats) or non- rock journalism. Four-five-six, some number like that, in the Voice and wherever else, all of ’em still pretty much rockwriterly appendices to the rockwrite “adventure," meaning he had a good ways to go before he'd’ve got the wings/chops/ legs for a total-pulp plunge (or at least a regular shift) at full oldtime capacity (but with newtime thrust and content). Which would’ve been no fall from grace no matter how you scope it — give the boy time (for fuck sake) to stumble and bumble and get it right — but how would any possible Lester have dealt with a (previously amenable) shithook book co. like Delilah telling him not now, sonny when he handed ’em a ream of copy on (let’s imagine) friends who’re fuckups? Personal persona limelight Lester had learned to live without — but writeperson limelight? (It would not’ve been easy.)

Okay, he's dead. All this brand new grief and hardship never befell him; never will. But words on pages remain: What is their lot? Lester's standard fare was so paradigmatically “of the moment" that he was the rockmag shootist. But books of the stuff? Nah; it’s kind of nebulous how even his best mag outings will wear when inevitably (??) anthologized. For someone so public in his orientation, both as input and output, he was — don't laugh or even smirk — one of rock’s more precious and fragile "private moments.” Private moments you can always document — coercively, of course — but try and play ’em back and. well . . . we'll all see, I reckon.

LESTER LEAPS IN — Y’all know all by now how Lester leapt out of New York; lemme just finish with how he leapt in. His first night in town, just a visit, fall "72, he stayed with me and my girlfriend Roni, West Village, 104 Perry St., apt. 4. Arriving semi-direct from JFK, he split pretty quick for the nearest grocer, returning with three six-packs of Colt 45. What he did for the next day and a half — all he did — was wade through 18 big ones, half quarts, as follows: start can, drink fast, get tired; fall out, dropping remainder; awaken following can’s impact with floor; stagger to fridge for fresh one; repeat cycle. What he mumbled or muttered during any of the 18 pre-fallout phases I simply do not recall.

So like hey y’know wo hey hey wo-wo hey, OLD SPORT: love ya, hope I didn’t cramp yer style, g’bye.

--Richard Meltzer, “Lester Bangs Recollected in Tranquility”  Dec. 6, 1984