Lester Bangs Quotes

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.

The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.

Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else while you're uncool.

I suspect almost every day that I’m living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don’t like myself. What’s more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we’ve got and, simplistic as it may seem, it’s a person’s duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We’re all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.

All humans are the same sex, except albinos.

Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad—that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?

It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

... the twin concepts of nihilism and the antihero have had it. What began with The Wild One and James "nobody understands me" Dean, ran with increasing vehement negativism up through the Stones and Velvets and Iggy ... [I]t may be time, in spite of all indications to the contrary from the exterior society, to begin thinking in terms of heroes again, of love instead of hate, of energy instead of violence, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction.

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

But since death is inevitable we don’t have to deal with it (it’ll deal with us when it decides to). What we do have to deal with is the psychic, physical, and fusion diseases wrought during our so-called lives as byproducts of the elemental clash. In other words we’re all terminally psychotic and no doctor, hospital, pill, needle, book or guru holds the cure. Because the disease is called life and there is no cure for that but death and death’s just part of the set-up designed to keep you terrified and thus in bondage from the cradle to the crypt so ha ha the joke’s on you except there’s no punchline and the comedian forgot you ever existed as even a comma.

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

A fellow writer told me that Richard [Hell] once told her that the best thing about being a rock 'n roll star would be the option of constructing his environment so that he would never have to be around anyone he didn't want to know from, which not only sounds like building your own concentration camp but is just exactly what most of the declining rockstars of the Sixties have done to themselves.

Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

Art", "Bop" and "rock and roll" and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it's nothing but a wham-o toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it's nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don't worry about the fact that it's a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that's gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it is the strogest, most virulent, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could ever destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, a mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

If there's nothing more poisonous than bigotry, there's nothing more pathetic than liberal guilt.

The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get ‘em up dancin.’ It’s not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of “community,” i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.

[Springsteen] sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.

The dramatic interplay was more in Lester’s wheelhouse, particularly the scene where Billy Bob contemplates suicide. Wracked with guilt over disappointing his coach (and, in retrospect, possibly suffering from post-concussion syndrome), Billy Bob sits on the back of his pickup with his football trophies, a bottle of tequila, and a Mossberg 12-gauge pump shotgun when he’s confronted by Mox. “Championship trophy. Steelers. We were 9. Remember this shit? Playing Pee Wee?” “Yeah,” Mox says. “It was fun.” “No, it wasn’t. I remember being yelled at.” Billy Bob throws the trophy. “Too fat, Billy Bob!” Bang! “Too slow and dumb!” He pulls the pump handle. Bang! “It was great,” Robbins, the director, says. “I remember that night shooting that scene, and you don’t do that once, you do it over and over again from different angles. And he was just able to deliver that performance over and over again, and those were real tears and real emotion coming out of him.” Lester drew on pain from his personal life, thinking of his late father and his sister Linda, who died at 35. He also pulled from his own struggles with suicide. Inconsolable after Linda passed, he had put a loaded gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “God,” he says, is the only explanation. “I actually have the bullet, still. It’s not a dud; it’s live. It just didn’t go off,” Lester says. “I was kind of dreading [that scene] because I knew where I’d go. But I’m an actor and I’m making a commitment to the character. To do that, you have to go 100 percent and just hope you pull yourself out of it.

That the story was cut off does not make it less of a story.

On top of all that, both Transformer and the single from it are enormous hits. Lou Reed is not only a legend: he's a star. In one of the interviews he did last summer, Lou said: 'I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room.' ¶ He was right. You sit yourself down, and sure enough you become aware pretty fast that there's this vaguely unpleasant fat man sitting over there with a table full of people including his blonde bride.

If Lou Reed seems like rock's ultimate closet queen by virtue of the fact that he came out of the closet and then went back in, it must be also observed that lots of people, especially lots of gay people, think Lou Reed's just a heterosexual onlooker, exploiting gay culture for his own ends. And who knows but that they may be right.

If you feel yourself responding cynically when someone relates that 'Dylan's returned to protest songs' as if it's exciting news, it just may be that your instincts are in healthy working order.

But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he's having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that's why: either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him. When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as it was about its subject matter, and I remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose key was the ridiculously spiteful 'Idiot Wind,' I found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome; I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: 'Goddamn, he's still got it!' Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan.

One does wonder, however, what Gallo would have made of Dylan's tribute to him; and one receives a possible answer in [Donald] Goddard's book, where Gallo's ex-wife describes borrowing a hundred bucks from Joey's father to buy records so that the Prince of Brooklyn, always a fan of contemporary music, could catch up on what had been happening in soundsville during that decade he'd been away reading [Wilhelm] Reich in the slams: 'He got especially mad over a Byrds album called "Chestnut Mare" that I wanted him to hear. "Listen to the lyrics," I said. "They're so pretty, and so well done." "I don't want to hear any fags singing about any fucking horse," he says--and he's really venomous. "It's not about a fucking horse," I said. "If you'll listen, it's about life." But he doesn't want to hear about life either. . . . Next thing I know, he jumps out of the bathtub, snatches the record off the machine, stomps out in the hall stark-naked and pitches it down the incinerator.

Paul McCartney makes lovely boutique tapes, resolute upon being as inconsequential as the Carpenters which in itself may be as much a reaction to John's opposite excesses as a simple case of vacuity. You could hardly call him burnt out--Band on the Run was, in its rather vapid way, a masterful album. Muzak's finest hour. Of course he is about as committed to the notion of subject matter as Hanna-Barbera, and his cuteness can be incredibly annoying at times.

George Harrison belongs in a daycare center for counterculture casualties, another of those children canceled not (so much?) by drugs this time but something perhaps far more insidious. His position seems to be I'm Pathetic, But I Believe in Krishna, which apparently absolves him from any position of leadership while enabling him to assume a totally preachy arrogance toward his audience which would be monumental chutzpah if it weren't coming from such a self-certified nebbish.

Maybe that's why the old Beatle albums are so irritating today that just now, as I was playing Rubber Soul while writing this article, I took it off to type in silence, and my friend working nearby agreed that what once was ecstasy, the heart's rush of being in love for the first time, had through some curious process become a mere annoyance. The Beatles today are out of time, out of place, out of sync with a present reality that isn't particularly grim (from this chair, anyway) but neither is it exactly amenable to certain types of artifacts.

The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephemeral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock 'n' roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I'd like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn't stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural resources.

I never met anybody who didn't like Rumours It got played a lot around my house in the year of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' and 'White Riot,' and I think the reason why so many people who got airsick of being in the same room with Eagle records might find songs like 'Dreams' bringing them to tears was that Fleetwood Mac transcended FM Hollywood, not only by playing and singing with open-eyed passion but by articulating the painful questions of love (and the real answers that hurt). 'Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they're playing' may have been obvious, but that was its very purity: you had been there, and could remember all too well when you first learned you can't change anybody.

I never met anybody who didn't like Rumours. It got played a lot around my house in the year of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' and 'White Riot,' and I think the reason why so many people who got airsick of being in the same room with Eagle records might find songs like 'Dreams' bringing them to tears was that Fleetwood Mac transcended FM Hollywood, not only by playing and singing with open-eyed passion but by articulating the painful questions of love (and the real answers that hurt). 'Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only love you when they're playing' may have been obvious, but that was its very purity: you had been there, and could remember all too well when you first learned you can't change anybody.

While I still don’t wanna hear how everything is hunky-dory like a lot of those disco people and Barry Manilows are trying to sell us, I’m just completely fed up with cheap stupid nihilism especially when it starts acting trendy. I know society is sick and life is getting more complicated by the second, but if all you’ve got to say is get fucked life sucks you stink I stink who cares I’m bored whip me beat me kick me there's nothing else to do then I think you and everybody else would be a lot better off if you just kept your fucking mouth shut in the first place, not to mention your self-destructive habits to yourself instead of parading them around like The Red Badge of Courage or something. And this isn’t like If You Can’t Say Anything Nice Don’t Say Anything At All, it's more like… why restate what's been said and refuted already?

Jazz was way out front, clearing a path into a new era of truly free music, where the only limits were the musician’s own consciousness and imagination, a music that cut across all boundaries yet still made perfect sense and swung like no music had ever swung before.

Why are you talking to them, they're not important! Brownnose this one! He can HELP you!

Someone I deeply love was committed to a hospital mental ward and almost the bigtime cuckoo's nest last year; I went barging out there like some halfassed Sir Lancelot, she eventually got herself out, but when I walked into that place I saw the most graphic evidence of what society can do to people, and just how totalitarian this supposedly free society can get when some administrator arbitrarily decides that you're not quite fit to mingle with the rest of the herd. What I saw in there was a whole bunch of people who as far as I was concerned were not crazy at all. Well, there was one guy who though George Benson was sending him telepathic messages, but then that guy used to get raped by his uncles every day when he was about four years old while his father just sat there and cried. What I'm saying is that what I saw in there was a whole bunch of people who were just frightened literally out of their wits, and with good reason. There are some people who are like dogs who have just been beaten and beaten and beaten until it really seems kind of awesome that there's anything left at all. ¶ Meanwhile the staff treated them with a mixture of contempt, condescension, and bored patience.

A few intermittent pounds were hardly enough, however, and – reluctantly – the comrades soon found themselves looking for jobs. It was the first and last time Eno would be driven to this unconscionable extreme. Eschewing his more outrageous garments and armed with his diploma, he wandered into the Camberwell Labour Exchange in the late summer and found himself a placement as an assistant paste-up artist with a local advertising free-sheet called the South Londoner. As he confessed to Lester Bangs, Eno took to the work surprisingly easily: ‘I didn’t hate it. I became very successful at it. I started off at the bottom, doing a very menial job, and in the four months I was there I got promoted again and again and again, and I ended up earning four or five times as much as I’d started with, and sort of running the office. And then I realized that I could carry on doing that and never do anything else, because I wasn’t doing anything else.’ The ‘anything else’ Eno was failing to do was music: ‘I kept saying to myself, “Oh well, I’ll do some music this weekend”, and then I wouldn’t, I’d be too tired and I’d say, “Oh, I’ll do it next weekend”, and then I wouldn’t do it, so I just gave it up after a while. It was exactly what I knew a job would be like – not horrible enough to make you want to get out, just well paying enough to make you comfortable and to keep putting things off.