MILES DAVIS BIOGRAPHY
BORN: MAY 26, 1926
DIED: SEPTEMBER 28, 1991
Miles Davis – legendary trumpeter and bandleader, explorer of unknown musical paths and enduring icon of hip – would be celebrating his 90th birthday next year had he not departed in 1991. Yet by all measure his sound and stature is more alive than ever. In the upcoming year, the news of a major musical collection covering twenty years of historic live performances, and a full-length motion picture have already begun to generate headlines and other major media attention. A number of other projects are afoot as well, promising to add more interest to and raise his legacy higher than ever.
Immediately out of the gate is the release of Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4, a 4-CD collection featuring primarily never before released performances from a twenty-year period when the trumpeter delivered groundbreaking music every time he hit the stage at an event under the Newport banner. The set includes Davis performing in the company of his most influential groups, from his Kind of Blue sextet (John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb); his classic 1960s quintet (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams) and his two-guitar fusion ensemble of the mid-‘70s (Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Dave Liebman, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, Mtume). Produced by Columbia/Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, the historic release arrives on Friday, July 17 – 60 years to the date since Davis’ premiere performance at Newport in 1955 when he performed “’Round Midnight” in the company of an all-star band (Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Percy Heath, Connie Kay), inspiring Columbia Records to sign the trumpeter and initiating a thirty-year run of classic recordings.
In addition, this year’s Newport Jazz Festival pays tribute to Miles’s fruitful relationship with the annual event, and his enduring friendship with jazz impresario George Wein, whom he first met in 1952 when they were both beginning to make names for themselves. Many groups performing on the stages at Fort McAdams will play tunes written by or associated with Miles, and Grammy Award®-winning author and music historian Ashley Kahn will curate two seminars each day on the renowned trumpet player at the festival’s new Storyville stage.
Miles Ahead is the title of the major motion picture co-written and co-produced by actor/director Don Cheadle, along with Miles’s nephew Vince Wilburn, Jr. and his son Erin Davis. The film tells the story of a few dangerous days in the life of music icon Miles Davis (played by Cheadle), the virtuoso, fighter and genius, as he bursts out of his silent period and conspires with a Rolling Stone writer (Ewan McGregor) to steal back his music. The film has been funded in part through crowd funding on social media, and promises to be popular, introducing the trumpeter and his legacy to another generation. The score for the film—featuring both recreations of Miles’s classic performances, as well as original music channeling contemporary styles and sounds—has already achieved critical praise as Cheadle recruited keyboardist, composer and producer Robert Glasper to compose additional music for the film, along with the legendary Herbie Hancock as consultant. Other well-known musicians and Miles’s alumni participating in the film include Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Gary Clark, Jr., Antonio Sanchez, while Glasper is also working on a remix project of the original soundtrack music.
Miles Ahead doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will surely grab headlines and will be greeted by crowds of moviegoers hungry to know how this exciting and long-awaited labor of love turns out—and by all indications, they won’t be disappointed.
Over six full decades, from his arrival on the national scene in 1945 until his death in 1991, Miles Davis made music that grew from an uncanny talent to hear the future and a headstrong desire to play it. From his beginnings in the circle of modern jazz, he came to intuit new worlds of sound and challenge. While the vast majority of musicians – jazz, rock, R&B, otherwise – find the experimental charge and imperviousness of youth eventually running down, Miles forever forged ahead, trusting and following instinct until the end.
In doing so, Miles became the standard bearer for successive generations of musicians, shaped the course of modern improvisational music more than a half-dozen times. This biography attempts to explain those paradigm-shifts one after another, through his recordings and major life changes.
The factors leading to that process are now the foundation of the Miles Davis legend: the dentist’s son born in 1926 to middle-class comfort in East St Louis. The fresh acolyte learning trumpet in the fertile, blues-drenched music scene of his hometown. The sensitive soul forging a seething streetwise exterior that later earned him the title, Prince Of Darkness. The determined teenager convincing his parents to send him to New York’s famed Juilliard School of Music in 1944, a ploy allowing him to locate and join the band of his idol, bebop pioneer Charlie Parker.
It wasn’t long before the headstrong young arrival grew from sideman to leading his own projects and bands of renown, from the restrained, classical underpinning of the famous “Birth of the Cool” group (Miles’s first foray with arranger Gil Evans), to the blues-infused hardbop anthem “Walkin’”, to his first famous quintet (Coltrane, Chambers, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones) with whom his recordings on muted trumpet helped him develop a signature sound that broke through to mainstream recognition. His subsequent jump from recording with independent labels (Prestige, Blue Note) to Columbia Records, then the Tiffany of record companies, propelled his career further from a limited jazz audience and a series of late ‘50s albums (Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess, Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain) secured his widespread popularity.
Miles’s group shifted and morphed through the early ‘60s until he settled for a four-year run with his classic quintet, a lineup that is still hailed today as one of the greatest and most influential jazz groups of all time. Their albums together—from Miles Smiles, ESP and Nefertiti, to Miles In The Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro—traced a pattern of unparalleled growth and innovation.
Had Miles stopped his progress at that point, he’d still be hailed as one of the greatest pioneers in jazz, but his creative momentum from the end of the ‘60s into the ‘70s would not let up. He was listening to the world around him—the amplified explosion of rock bands and the new, heavy-on-the-one funk of James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone. From the ambient hush of In A Silent Way, to the strange and unsettling – yet wildly popular Bitches Brew, he achieved another shift in musical paradigm and a personal career breakthrough.
Bitches Brew was controversial, a best-seller and attracted another, younger generation into the Miles fold. Thousands whose musical taste respected no categorical walls flocked to hear Miles, and a slew of fusion bands were soon spawned, led by his former sidemen: Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever. The studio albums that defined Miles’s kaleidoscopic sound in the ‘70s included a series of (mostly) double albums, from …Brew to 1971’s Live-Evil, ‘72’s On The Corner and ‘75’s Get Up With It. The covers listed populous line-ups that reached up to 11 musicians, adding new names to an ever-widening circle of on-call talent.
By the end of 1975, Miles was tired – and sick. A period of seclusion ensued, full years to deal with personal demons and health issues, bouncing between bouts of self-abuse and boredom. It was the longest time Miles had been off the public radar – only amplifying the appetite for his return.
When Miles’s reappeared in 1981, expectation had reached fever pitch. A final series of albums for Columbia reflected his continuing fascination with funk of the day (Rose Royce, Cameo, Chaka Khan and later, Prince), and the sounds of synthesizer and drum machines (Great Miles Shift Number 8). The Man With A Horn, We Want Miles and Decoy found him still working with Teo Macero and still surrounding himself with young talent, including bassist Darryl Jones (Rolling Stones). In 1985, his album You’re Under Arrest — with unexpected covers of recent pop charters (Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi La
uper’s “Time After Time”) — brought the long Davis-Columbia association to a close. He embarked on a new relationship with Warner Bros. Records and producer Tommy LiPuma, scoring successes with Tutu (written in a large part by his bassist Marcus Miller), Music from Siesta (also with Miller), Amandla (featuring a new breed of soloists, including alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, tenor saxophonist Rick Margitza, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, keyboardist Joey DeFrancesco, and others) and Doo-Bop (his collaboration with hip hop producer Easy Moe Bee.)
Those titles proved Miles’s farewell, still pushing forward, still exploring new musical territory. Throughout his career, he had always resisted looking back, avoiding nostalgia and loathing leftovers. “It’s more like warmed-over turkey,” the eternal modernist described the music of Kind of Blue twenty-five years after recording it. Ironically, in 1991, only weeks after performing a career-overview concert in Paris that featured old friends and collaborators from as early as the ‘40s, he died from a brain aneurysm.
Like his music, Miles always spoke with an economy of expression. And for Miles, it had to be fresh, or forget it. “I don’t want you to like me because of Kind of Blue,” he insisted. “Like me for what we’re doing now.”
3rd Blindfold Test Miles Davis by Leonard Feather
Down Beat Volume 58 No. 12, December 1991, p.69
(First published by Down Beat, June 1964)
'You have to think when you play; you have to help each other - you just can't play for yourself. You've got to play with whomever you're playing. If I'm playing with Basie, I'm going to try to help what he's doing - that particular feeling.'
Miles Davis is unusually selective in his listening habits. This attitude should not be interpreted as reflecting any general misanthropy. He was in a perfectly good mood on the day of the interview reproduced below; it just happened that the records selected did not, for the most part, make much of an impression.
Clark Terry, for example, is an old friend and idol of Davis' from St. Louis, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra has always been on Davis' preferred list.
Davis does not have an automatic tendency to want to put everything down, as an inspection of his earlier Blindfold Tests will confirm (DB, Sept. 21, 1955 and Aug. 7, 1958).
The Cecil Taylor item was played as an afterthought, because we were discussing artists who have impressed critics, and I said I'd like to play an example. Aside from this, Davis was given no information about the records played.
The Records
1. Les McCann-Jazz Crusaders
All Blues
(Pacific Jazz)
Wayne Henderson, trombone; Wilton Felder, tenor saxophone; Joe Sample, piano; McCann, electric piano; Miles Davis, composer.
What's that supposed to be? That ain't nothin'. They don't know what to do with it - you either play it bluesy or you play on the scale. You don't just play flat notes. I didn't write it to play flat notes on - you know, like minor thirds. Either you play a whole chord against it, or else . . . but don't try to play it like you'd play, ah, Walkin' the Dog. You know what I mean?
That trombone player - trombone ain't supposed to sound like that. This is 1964, not 1924. Maybe if the piano player had played it by himself, something would have happened.
Rate it? How can I rate that?
2. Clark Terry
Cielito Lindo
(from 3 in Jazz, RCA Victor)
Terry, trumpet; Hank Jones, piano; Kenny Burrell, guitar.
Clark Terry, right? You know, I've always liked Clark. But this is a sad record. Why do they make records like that? With the guitar in the way, and that sad fucking piano player. He didn't do nothing for the rhythm section - didn't you hear it get jumbled up? All they needed was a bass and Terry.
That's what's fucking up music, you know. Record companies. They make too many sad records, man.
3. Rod Levitt
Ah! Spain
(from Dynamic Sound Patterns, Riverside)
Levitt, trombone, composer; John Beal, bass.
There was a nice idea, but they didn't do nothing with it. The bass player was a motherfucker, though.
What are they trying to do, copy Gil? It doesn't have the Spanish feeling - doesn't move. They move up in triads, but there's all those chords missing - and I never heard any Spanish thing where they had a figure that went
That's some old shit, man. Sounds like Steve Allen's TV band. Give it some stars just for the bass player.
4. Duke Ellington
Caravan
(from Money Jungle, United Artists).
Ellington, piano; Charlie Mingus, bass; Max Roach, drums.
What am I supposed to say to that? That's ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music? It's a mismatch. They don't complement each other. Max and Mingus can play together, by themselves. Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke.
Now, how are you going to give a thing like that some stars? Record companies should be kicked in the ass. Somebody should take a picket sign and picket the record company.
5. Sonny Rollins
You Are My Lucky Star
(from 3 in Jazz, RCA Victor).
Don Cherry, trumpet; Rollins, tenor saxophone; Henry Grimes, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.
Now, why did they have to end it like that? Don Cherry I like, and Sonny I like, and the tune idea is nice. The rhythm is nice. I didn't care too much for the bass player's solo. Five stars is real good? It's just good, no more. Give it three.
6. Stan Getz - Joao Gilberto
Desafinado
from Getz-Gilberto, Verve
Getz, tenor saxophone; Gilberto, vocal.
Gilberto and Stan Getz made an album together? Stan plays good on that. I like Gilberto; I'm not particularly crazy about just anybody's bossa nova. I like the samba. And I like Stan, because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can. Which takes a lot of imagination, that he has, that so many other people don't have.
As for Gilberto, he could read a newspaper and sound good! I'll give that one five stars.
7. Eric Dolphy
Mary Ann
(from Far Cry, New Jazz).
Booker Little, trumpet; Dolphy, composer, alto saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano.
That's got to be Eric Dolphy - nobody else could sound that bad! The next time I see him I'm going to step on his foot. You print that. I think he's ridiculous. He's a sad motherfucker.
L.F.: Down Beat won't print those words. [But I do!]
M.D.: Just put he's a sad shhhhhhhhh, that's all! The composition is sad. The piano player fucks it up, getting in the way so that you can't hear how things are supposed to be accented.
It's a sad record, and it's the record company's fault again. I didn't like the trumpet player's tone, and he don't do nothing. The running is all right if you're going to play that way, like Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan; but you've got to inject something, and you've got to have the rhythm section along; you just can't keep on playing all eighth notes.
The piano player's sad. You have to think when you play; you have to help each other - you just can't play for yourself. You've got to play with whomever you're playing. If I'm playing with Basie, I'm going to try to help what he's doing - that particular feeling.
8. Cecil Taylor
Lena
(from Live at the Café Montmartre, Fantasy).
Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone; Taylor, piano.
Take it off! That's some sad shit, man. In the first place, I hear some Charlie Parker cliches. . . . They don't even fit. Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain't nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it. Just to take something like that and say it's great, because there ain't nothing to listen to, that's like going out and getting a prostitute.
L.F.: This man said he was influenced by Duke Ellington.
M.D.: I don't give a shit! It must be Cecil Taylor. Right? I don't care who he's inspired by. That shit ain't nothing. In the first place he don't have the - you know, the way you touch a piano. He doesn't have the touch that would make the sound of whatever he thinks of come off.
I can tell he's influenced by Duke, but to put the loud pedal on the piano and make a run is very old-fashioned to me. And when the alto player sits up there and plays without no tone. . . . That's the reason I don't buy any records.
You can find this blindfold test reprinted in Bill Kirchner's Miles Davis Reader, a collection of articles about Miles Davis and his music by various authors, which is still available (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1997).
Lester Bangs, 1948-1982
Robert Christgau
Village Voice, May 11, 1982
At around 8:15 Friday, April 30, Lester Bangs mounted the stairs to his place at 542 Sixth Avenue, a little north of 14th Street. Just over the flu, he'd gone home for some sleep after almost drowsing off at his friend John Morthland's that afternoon, but later he'd called several other friends--from the street, he hadn't had his own phone since 1980. His downstairs neighbor Abel Shafer thought he looked kind of gray and asked after his health. Lester reported that he was feeling great. That's what he'd always tell people, but over the previous six months it had been true most of the time. He'd gotten so serious about cleaning up his act that even his apartment, renowned for its squalor, was comparatively neat, which isn't to say there weren't a few chicken bones and half-empty vials around. Leaving the door unlocked as usual, Lester lay down on the couch. Sometime in the next half-hour guitarist Nancy Stillman, whom he'd invited over for an evening of music-making and record listening, yelled up for the keys and got no response. Eventually Abel Shafer, who knew her face, came down and let her in. When she entered the apartment, Lester was on his back with one arm dangling to the floor--a familiar enough posture, except that this time he wad dead.
I recount all this so that nobody gets the idea that Lester Bangs wanted to die. Unless he was fooling a lot of people that day, Lester wasn't walking around in desperate need of transcendence or obliteration or some confusion of the two. A drug may have killed him--the medical examiner is still trying to figure that out--but on April 30 that drug would have been an episode, not a rut or a habit or a way of life. Maybe his cleanup wasn't permanent, and certainly it wasn't going to solve all of this problems. But the author of "I Saw God and/or Tangerine Dream," launched by several bottles of cough syrup into mystic visions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was putting drugs and booze behind him. The last time he'd fallen off the wagon, in March, he'd even gone and joined AA. The worst you could say about his frame of mind on April 30 is that maybe he didn't hate death as fervently as usual.
For while most people spend their lives trying to ignore death, Lester really did hate it, actively, just as he hated its philosophical counterparts, nihilism and solipsism. Scared, excited, sour, friendly, homely, cuddly, beat, weird, goofy, defenseless, guileless, seamless, motivated, skillful, old-fashioned, unreasonable, moralistic, angry, benign, phenomenally intelligent, and all lit up, he wished sometimes that he could disappear from the face of the earth and was all too aware of what a waste that would be. And he found in rock and roll's crude, spontaneous, eternally adolescent synthesis/confusion of eroticism and rage, transcendence and obliteration, the artistic counterpart of his own terrific vitality. For him, music and writing were matters of life and death.
Lester was born on December 14, 1948, and grew up in El Cajon, California, 25 miles east of San Diego. After his father burned to death in 1957, his mother became a Jehovah's Witness, but that was not to be Lester's way. In 1969, while more or less attending San Diego State, he published his first record review in Rolling Stone, and he never stopped. Over the next 13 years he wrote more pages than anyone will ever count--for a free associater who could turn out a 17,000-word rumination on the Troggs overnight and a 40,000-word fanbook on Blondie in three or four days, three million words may be a conservative estimate.
From 1971 to 1976 Lester worked in Detroit as an editor of Creem, defining its cheerful punk-gonzo fuckyouism and keeping alive the dream of insurrectionary rock and roll as Rolling Stone turned to auteur theory and trade journalism. Not counting his wonderful heads and subheads and captions, Lester wrote three or four pieces a month. There were mammoth reports on reggae and Iggy and the Allman Brothers. There were endless segments of The Lou Reed Show. There was a feature in which Marshall Thieu charged that Jethro Tull had no "rebop," a review in which 1973 pheenoms White Witch were identified from their album cover as the same "dorks" who'd peered out from behind British Invasion mopcuts in 1965 and illegible calligraphy in 1969. For several years after he'd severed all ties with a magazine that prospered by adapting his shtick to the values of late heavy-metal fans, Creem readers voted him their favorite critic anyway. At the same time he had become a hero to thousands of nascent punks and new wavers.
Lester's move to New York in the fall of 1976 was brave, fortunate, and completely, natural. It was brave, because, for any writer New York is the big time, and Lester was never entirely secure about his intellectual status. It was fortunate because the incestuous years at Creem had turned him slightly stale and cynical, maladies mitigated by both the discipline of free-lancing and the leftish principles of a Manhattan bohemia, which touched his conscience without ever denting his contempt for rad-lib cant. It was natural because this small-town Southern California boy took to Greenwich Village, especially its fringes, as if he had never imagined that anywhere else could be home. Although he put in time at the Bells of Hell and showed up at the rock clubs now and then, he was never on-the-scene, preferring to socialize privately. But he was enormously amiable, willing to converse with almost anybody--and to blame anybody whose spiel even hinted at fraud or special interest.
Early in 1978 Lester's rather extreme and compulsive notion of integrity induced him to start making music as well as writing about it, a reckless decision that he justified with the superb 1979 single "Let It Blurt" and the impressive 1981 album Jook Savages on the Brazos. But after his first band threw him over because he wasn't commercial enough, he came to realize that his real future was where it always had been, at the typewriter. The problem was publishing. Although he was a more coherent, punctual, professional journalist than 90 per cent of the editors who considered him a lunatic, his autodidactic moralism, chronic logorrhea, and fantastic imagination rendered him unsuitable for the slicks. Anyway, rock criticism is below police reporting and horoscopes in the literary hierarchy, and while Lester wanted to write--and did write--about almost everything, rock criticism was what he was best at.
Maybe this is because it was Lester as much as anybody who defined what rock criticism ought to be--because he was the great one. He wasn't long on the values ordinarily sought in a critic--balance, consistency, analysis, judgment. But his writing was dense with the crazy, unschooled virtues of the music that moved him most deeply--again and again his conceits came from nowhere and hit some fundamental question right where it hurt. Finally, he asked too much of the world--that's why he wasn't long on balance, consistency, analysis, or judgment. But he made up for his lack of critical distance with his indefatigable sense of humor, and in the end, he was the most honest and sheerly gifted writer I've ever worked with-and one of the most honest and sheerly gifted I've ever read.
Lester and archivist Michael Ochs had just finished work on Rock Gomorrah, their version of Hollywood Babylon, when Lester died. He planned to go to Mexico this summer and put together a novel about New York. Among his surviving blood kin are two half-brothers, a half-sister, and some nephews, including Ben Catching, who gave him his first copy of On the Road. Nancy Alexander, who accompanied Lester to New York and who for the past two years has kept in touch with weekly phone conversations from Florida, wanted to be remembered as one of his survivors as well. I suspect she isn't the only one.
Lester Bangs: Truth-teller
BY MARIA BUSTILLOS
The second post in a series in which we ask what book or writer our contributors have returned to again and again.
Every reader, starting from childhood, draws his own map of the world of letters. There is liable to be some outside guidance here and there, naturally. Certain landmarks are supplied to us, say in English class. But teachers aren’t found only in school. As a kid, my chief literary mentor was the rock critic Lester Bangs, who wrote for Creem magazine and The Village Voice in the seventies and early eighties. He shaped my nascent taste, and taught me to read much the way I still read now. And as much as I relied on his irresistible humor and wisdom for advice on how best to blow my birthday money at the Licorice Pizza record store, I sought him out still more to learn about books, in particular the forbidden and arcane books no conventional teacher would ever mention.
Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He was fat, sweaty, unkempt—an out-of-control alcoholic in torn jeans and a too-small black leather jacket; crocked to the gills on the Romilar cough syrup he swigged down by the bottle. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation, uneven and erratic as it was.
Bangs, who was born in 1948 and grew up in El Cajon, California, had been driven out into the wider world by a complicated, shambolic family: his mother, Norma, was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and his father, Conway, was an incorrigible drunk. Many imaginative kids who feel trapped in oppressive surroundings find solace, pleasure, excitement, and every other kind of relief in music and literature: in Bangs’s case this tendency was exceptionally pronounced. The community of Witnesses Bangs’s family belonged to believed in an end-is-nigh ideology, and they disapproved of Christmas presents, birthday parties, and education beyond reading the Bible. Here is the root, perhaps, of the seductive ease and fluidity with which Bangs riffed on culture high and low. As the Witnesses equally rejected Coltrane, Miles Davis, Superman comics, and science fiction, so did this rebellious son love and accept them all equally and on the same plane. Bangs’s biographer, Jim DeRogatis (“Let It Blurt”), described Bangs’s nascent rebellion—and his growing sense of the untrustworthiness, incompetence, and hypocrisy of authority.
“The drawer where I kept my Classics Illustrated collection was subject to stringent, arbitrary and rather sudden swoops of censorship,” Les wrote at age twenty. “Things like ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells and ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ by Jules Verne, my literary mentor of the third grade, would suddenly appear in ripped piles atop the ashes when I’d go out to empty the trash into the incinerator on a winter morning. My mother thought science fiction was demented nonsense; all the Witnesses do. They hold that since the Bible never mentions life on other planets, there must not be any, and no one can sway them from their conclusions.”
And yet Norma indulged Lester enough that he seems to have managed a childhood of nonstop reading, listening, writing. “Days home from school faking flu I would put Trane on loud … and stand up on a hassock reading Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’” he wrote. But there are indications, too, that mother and son were very close. When Bangs found himself broke and washed up, his mother and sister would enclose sawbucks along with the Watchtower tracts they sent him. They had all shared Conway’s disgrace and death: they loved him, it seems, but he died in a fire, drunk and alone, having fled the family in shame.
The adult world outside Bangs’s childhood home bore unmistakable evidence of the same weaknesses he’d discovered inside it. The false Donna Reed visions of a happy, healthy, snow-white America of the postwar years, the disillusionment of the Vietnam war, and Nixon’s downfall; everywhere, the rebellion that had begun to precipitate in the Summer of Love now saturated the air and fermented. Bangs developed a pure hatred of the lies and whitewashings of religion and government, his mutiny balanced against a bone-deep love of the truth—no matter how messy or unpretty it might turn out to be—which he equated with the refuge he’d found in literature and music. In fact, the messier, the more “real” art could be, the better. He talked about this in what might be his most famous review, of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”:
[T]he fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled almost to none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid … [“Astral Weeks”] assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. It sounded like the man who made “Astral Weeks “was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison’s previous works had only suggested; but … there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.
Along with many of his contemporaries, Bangs concluded that if “authority” was not to be trusted—and clearly, it wasn’t—then whatever “authority” detested must be O.K., or probably great. Hence the reactionary excesses of the nineteen-seventies, the chancy legacy of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Cocaine: a pure plant-derived substance that wouldn’t hurt you. Government: barely worth ignoring. If the squares were in favor of monogamy, then monogamy must be avoided at all costs, whether it appealed to you or not.
As for Bangs’s audience, the children of those years were far more sheltered from adult culture than they are now. While the rock stars whom we so admired were getting high and indulging their vast sexual appetites, the adults who were in charge of children were hell-bent on terrifying us with tall tales about sex and drugs and rock and roll: take acid and you might throw yourself out a window, certain you could fly, or become permanently convinced that you were a glass of orange juice. The cruel fates of these mythical victims were transparently bogus even to ten and twelve year olds, particularly those whose older siblings were already getting us stoned. Growing up at that time felt something like “The Truman Show”: the young intuited that they might break through the papier-mâché walls at any moment and into the “real world,” which probably really was scary but at least would be real. We sought reliable guides who wouldn’t lie to us, infantilize us, or sugar-coat anything, however flabby and wild-eyed they might be.
Sure there were other magazines and there were other writers. But for a certain cohort of bookishly-inclined kids, there was only one magazine and only one writer. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn that my contemporary, the late David Foster Wallace, had dedicated his first co-written book, “Signifying Rappers,” to Lester Bangs.
***
Bangs, then, was a moralist. He understood that what young people wanted was something still more than to break free of parental bonds. We wanted to know exactly what was being hidden from us. Bangs’s great gift to the kids who formed his most passionate following was the news that this information was available to us; it could be found in books.
It would be difficult to say where the expression of Bangs’s moral universe was clearest, because he’d habitually compress a sublime insight into any old photo caption or throwaway remark, in whatever throwaway piece about whatever throwaway band. But a lot of fans, I suspect, would nominate the aforementioned review of “Astral Weeks” for the honors.
“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.
All this would send the questing reader straight to “Les Fleurs du Mal.” There was scarcely a book mentioned during Bangs’s tenure at Creem that I didn’t eventually hunt down (including a new edition of Borges’s “The Aleph”; I couldn’t make head or tail of that.)
In this way, a whole generation of kids was led to see “subversive” or countercultural literature through the lens of rock and roll—and also to become attuned to a new kind of critical voice, a voice far more intellectually honest than that of the academic critics. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” holds itself at a lofty, self-regarding remove from its determinedly hip subject matter, but Bangs never held anything at arm’s length in his life; he was rushing headlong into the sea of the world, arms thrown wide open, to embrace it, to drown in it.
Let’s take “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?,” published in Creem in 1970. I was too young to have read this when it came out; I would have read it in one of the thick bound volumes I used to spend summer afternoons with at the library, some years later. This is just to give an idea of the fun that Bangs could provide in such an afternoon, if you were a young teen-age fan fiendishly devoted to the Stooges and their “crazed quaking uncertainty.” Because Bangs had already won you over with his uncannily exact description of your own love of the Stooges: “an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times, but … they also carry a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity.”
The perfection of this assessment led you breathlessly through the rest of the piece, which mentioned: Malcolm Muggeridge, the Panthers, the Yips, Holden Caulfield, “I took acid four days ago and since then everything is smooth with no hangups like it always is for about a week after a trip?” (ugh, speak for yourself, Lester); “fantasies of a puissant ‘youth culture,’” “Jimmy Page’s arch scowl of supermusician ennui,” Mountain, Cream, Creedence, “imagine throwing a pie in the face of Eldridge Cleaver! Joan Baez!” “the onetime atropine-eyed Byronic S&M Lizard King,” an MBE returned, “a giant pie stuffed with the complete works of Manly P. Hall,” “that infernal snob McCartney and those radical dilettante capitalist pigs the Jefferson Airplane,” Marxists, A. A. Milne, Mick Jagger (“a spastic flap-lipped tornado writhing from here to a million steaming snatches and beyond in one undifferentiated erogenous mass, a mess and a spectacle all at the same time”), “the bastion (Bastille) stage,” “the oppressor is fat and weak, brothers!”
Artaud, Tinkertoys, épater la bourgeoisie, Ed Ward, the “I Ching,” sock hops, “A.B. Spellman’s moving book ‘Four Lives in the Bebop Business,’” “Trout Mask Replica,” “the essence of both American life and American rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Mark my words.”
“Some peglegged Golem hobbling toward carny Bethlehem,” Porky Pig, “beautiful Pauline Kael.”
It ends like this:
Some of the most powerful esthetic experiences of our time, from “Naked Lunch” to Bonnie and Clyde, set their audiences up just this way, externalizing and magnifying their secret core of sickness which is reflected in the geeks they mock and the lurid fantasies they consume, just as our deepest fears and prejudices script the jokes we tell each other. This is where the Stooges work. They mean to put you on that stage, which is why they are super-modern, though nothing near to Art. In Desolation Row and Woodstock-Altamont Nation the switchblade is mightier and speaks more eloquently than the penknife. But this threat is cathartic, a real cool time is had by all, and the end is liberation.
Don’t even doubt that I looked up every single book, every musical reference, hell every single word I didn’t understand. You bet your sweet bippy, I did.
Bangs openly lamented having been born too late to hang with the Beats, but he loved William Burroughs and wrote about him constantly. Suburban librarians generally hadn’t the faintest clue what was in any of these books (or maybe, just pretended not to) and any curious teen-ager could borrow them freely at the public library, or buy them at a bookshop, head shop, or thrift shop. “Naked Lunch” certainly made a striking contrast with, say, “The Catcher in the Rye,” a book you might be reading at school. I was surprised to find, returning to “Naked Lunch” just a few years ago, how full of sap and hilarity it still is. The funniest thing is that “Naked Lunch” turns out to be a moralistic book, making a better, truer, scarier case against becoming a junkie than whatever nonsense you were liable to be hearing in health ed.
The literature of mysticism and the occult, representing as it did the anti-religious, was also of interest during this time; parents were still attending church regularly. Hence the popularity of unreadable Satanist tracts, astrology, Aleister Crowley, and assorted metaphysicians of all nations. What did the anti-religions have to say? I can still remember the pseudo-mystical mantra-recommendation sung by Todd Rundgren on the album, “Initiation”: “Steiner, Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, and Boooo-dah.” I went dutifully along to the library to investigate and was soon bored out of my tree. By golly, that Madame Blavatsky is a pill. In general, you were liable to get some crackpot literary recommendations from your favorite rock stars. But Bangs could draw the marrow forth even from the metaphysicians. In the essay, “James Taylor Marked for Death,” he wrote:
Number one, everybody should realize that all this “art” and “bop” and “rock-’n’-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’s the strongest, most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What’s truest is that you cannot enslave a fool.
Here was one of Crowley’s favorite notions (“Nothing is true; everything is permitted,”), by way of Nietzsche, but Bangs brought it out of occult Thelemist incomprehensibility and into the question of discovering a practical intellectual justification for the satisfaction of every appetite. This was the way the twenty-somethings we admired were living. Why these strictures? What good were they? What if we simply chose to live real life in the U.S.A. entirely unhampered by any of them at all? It took some time, but eventually one inevitably blundered into Nietzsche himself, and asked the old question from a philosophical or logical, rhetorical or moralistic perspective. Was nothing true? Was everything permitted? What was spiritual freedom? Was Kerouac free? Was Burroughs? Was Bangs?
What he was really leading us to was the one true church of intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness. There was subtlety and elegance in his reasoning, generosity, and the best kind of skepticism: the skepticism that turns back on the author himself. This last aspect of Bangs’s writing was the most revelatory to me. It was the virtue I sought most to emulate, then and now.
Indeed no other writer gave me this feeling again so purely until I ran across David Foster Wallace, so many years later, and found he’d learned the very same thing; I suspect he learned it from the same doomed, messed-up, wounded, alcoholic genius of a teacher.
In 1977, Bangs accompanied the Clash on tour, which resulted in an immense three-part interview published in the NME.
Finally [Mick Jones] looked me right in the eye and said, “Hey Lester: why are you asking me all these fucking questions?”
In a flash I realized he was right. Here was I, a grown man … motoring up into the provinces of England, just to ask a goddamn rock ‘n’ roll band for the meaning of life! Some people never learn. I certainly didn’t, because I immediately started in on him with my standard cultural-genocide rap: “Blah blah blah depersonalization blab blab blab solipsism blah blah yip yap etc. …”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“Blah blab no one wants to have any emotions anymore blab blip human heart an endangered species blah blare cultural fascism blab blurb etc. etc. etc. …”
And even though this was meant for kids to read, note that there’s not a particle of condescension in it. That, too, made young people love and trust Lester Bangs with unswerving devotion. Indeed I’ve never swerved once in all these years.
Maria Bustillos is a writer living in Los Angeles. Read her recent piece for Page-Turner on the reading lists of George Orwell, Henry Miller and others.
https://lacatorcequince.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/taller-de-critica-musical-con-patricia-godes/
