Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Updated: Aug 8
Chances are if you’re considering a book of writings by Lester Bangs you came to him the same way I did: by way of your love of music—or maybe it was from Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as him in Almost Famous—because writing about music is what he’s ostensibly known for. In fact, it’s almost exclusively what he did from his first published review in Rolling Stone in 1969 (about MC5’s Kick Out The Jams) until his death in 1982. I say "ostensibly" and "almost" because while editor Greil Marcus notes in his fantastic introduction, “Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews,” he also concluded, “[A] story is what [this book] is to me: the story, ultimately, of one man’s attempt to confront his loathing of the world, his love for it, and to make sense of what he found in the world and within himself.” Yes, Lester Bangs wrote about music, but music was not what he wrote about. He wrote about the world, about society and relationships, about politics and history, about race and ethnicity, about sex and gender … Music, and his love for it, was just the soundtrack, the backdrop, to which he set his words.
And what words. Referring to Bangs’ untimely death, Greil Marcus also noted, “That the story was cut off does not make it less of a story; it does not make it an impoverished tale. That the story was cut off means that the story is painful.” Painful it is. Painful and beautiful and hilarious and heart wrenching and inspiring and sad and moving and exhausting and insightful and honest and vulnerable and a dozen other adjectives that can’t do Lester Bangs or his writing any justice. He and his words are all those things and so much more not because (or simply because) he was a brilliant writer (because sometimes he wasn’t) but because he was honest with himself and with his readers, because he never took himself (or music or rock stars or anything else for that matter) too seriously, and because he gave as much (or more) of himself as he expected from anyone else.
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is perfectly assembled, and while Greil Marcus notes that the work was a team effort, it is clear that his warts-and-all love of and for Lester Bangs has everything to do with the book’s success. In the final piece in the collection, “Untitled Notes, 1981,” Lester concludes, “They were all entertaining pieces—in fact, there are a lot of people who think to this day that I did the best work I’ll ever do while at Creem and since moving to New York have turned into an increasingly embittered, gimme-a-break moralist, occasionally amusing but increasingly bitter old washed-up hasbeen. Fuck ‘em. I got lucky: this bullshit became my life while I was ensconced in the relatively decidedly pissant environs of Creem, so once I woke up I made it out and can say that though I have my days just like everybody else I still think I have a future.” Unfortunately for him, and for us, that future was cut short. At least we still have his words, immortal and timeless, and perhaps now more necessary than ever.
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