Lester Bangs: Rock ‘n’ Roll as Literature, Literature as Rock ‘n’ Roll

Lester Bangs: Courtesy of Wikipedia Originally published in Mojo, March 1994

Whither Rock Gomorrah, the great gonzo hack’s unpublished swansong?

Over a decade has passed since the world lost Lester Bangs, the greatest gonzo hack that “rock ‘n’ roll writing” has ever spawned. And already six years have passed since Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, Greil Marcus’ collection of Bangs tirades from the outer limits of the amphetamine zone, introduced a new generation to his crazed, electrifying rantspeak. After all this time, it’s as if Bangs had been a cult rock star in his own right, not just a cult scribe. As the dust-jacket of Marcus’ book proclaimed, this was “rock ‘n’ roll as literature and literature as rock ‘n’ roll.”

When Psychotic Reactions came out, I’d half expected to be disappointed—to find the prose had dated, or was merely megalomanical. But actually, I was strangely moved by this self-obsessed, self-destructive man’s sheer determination to articulate his responses to the music of anti-heroes like Iggy and the Velvets. The book seemed almost to function as punk autobiography.

Only one thing remained unanswered for me: I’d always wondered what Bangs had done in the year between February 1981, when I made a mini-pilgrimage to his vinyl-infested lair in Manhattan, and April 1982, when he died after taking just three Darvon, an American brand of painkiller. I’d heard about a book called Rock Gomorrah that he’d written with Michael Ochs, the LA-based rock-photo archivist, but I didn’t know much more about it.

Was it the rock equivalent of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, as the title suggested, or merely something he’d cobbled together over a long/lost weekend of speed psychosis, like his Blondie biography? I finally got the answer last summer, when—on a completely unrelated matter—I went to talk to Michael Ochs. It transpires that Delilah Books had stumped up no less than $25,000 for an “oral history” of rock ‘n’ roll, the idea being for Ochs and Bangs to hit The Great American Highway and interview as many rock and pop legends as time permitted. “Well, we forgot about it and got back to whatever abuse we were into at that time,” says Ochs.

But a year went by, and Ochs was barely ekeing out a living from his archives, so he called Lester and said: “Let’s fucking do this book, dammit.” Lester said fine, but he’d given up drink and dope. Ochs said he too was straight, so they blacked out a couple of months and set to work.

Meeting halfway, in Chicago, Ochs and Bangs rented a car and parted for an odyssey most of us only fantasise about. (”Needless to say, Bangs turned up without a driving license, so I had to do all the driving.”)

In the Windy City itself, they talked to ex-Chess producer bass and soul man Syl Johnson, then headed south, arguing all the way. “Lester and I were great friends, but we disagreed almost totally about music. You know, he’d play Metal Machine Music and I’d be trying to turn him onto the Jaggerz. But we got some really good interviews and kept our costs down by sleeping rough on couches at friends’ houses.”

In Nashville, they interviewed Brenda Lee; in Memphis, rockabilly guitarist Paul Burlison and producer Jim Dickinson. When Ochs got “sick as a dog” in New Orleans, Bangs synthesized a remedy from some over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. “He should have been a pharmacist, not a writer,” says Ochs. But to his amazement, says Ochs, Lester stayed clean the whole way through the trip.

When it was all over, Ochs returned to LA and Bangs to New York. Ochs, loathe to entrust Bangs with the interview tapes, took them and transcribed them himself. When he’d done half of them, he sent the transcriptions to New York with the tapes. “I sent them without registering the parcels and the Post Office lost half the tapes” says Ochs. “Lester hit the roof, screamed at me.”

The result was that both men did some supplementary interviews. Ochs talking to the likes of the Turtles and Sonny Bono in LA, Bangs interviewing Ronnie Spector and Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein in New York. “Unfortunately,” says Ochs, “the problem with Lester was that he’d write pages and pages of stuff on his obsessions—like Astral Weeks—but he didn’t know rock history that well. And that, in the end, was why the book was never published. It was written, and it was finished—it was because he’d decided to celebrate finishing it that he died—but it wasn’t that good. I showed it to John Morthland, who’d found the body, and to Greil Marcus, who agreed with me that out of respect to Lester’s memory it shouldn’t be published.” Thus the intriguingly-titled Rock Gomorrah: The Scandalous Lies About The Woodstock Nation! languishes in a vault in Venice, California—an unseen testament to Lester Bangs’ last ride.