Psychotic Reactions: Lou Reed vs Lester Bangs

Lester Bangs's “feud” with Lou Reed comes to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex in 1975, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. But Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 16 he would die if he kept it up. And he raced to the bottom.

Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene, and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is bored by polite chit-chat. Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes. This was published in Creem in 1975. It was one of the many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BS, shall we?” – he is extremely obnoxious. As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. But drugs notwithstanding, I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester. Lester wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle. 

Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture. LB: “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?” LR: “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” LB: “David Bowie has ripped off all his stuff that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!” LR: “What does Iggy have to do with it?” LB: “You were the originals!” LR: “The original what?” I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with an unexpected blast at Iggy: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is… stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while… I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five chord change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was never any good anyway….” Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin. 

I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?” He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rant Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do–hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams…?” The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, man!” “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself.” Then he’s pressing me again. “What’s an Obetrol?” I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time!” “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out. But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.” The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s addicts and then there’s speedfreaks… Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of  Dextroamphetamine.” 

“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?” “No… You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…” “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting Ralph J. Gleeson for some reason. I was getting a little dazed. “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…” I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months. “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?” He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, and he shook his head. “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”

“That’s three percent out of my songs.” “Like with all this decadence and glitter – how much of it would have happened if not for you–” “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.” “What’s decadent about that?” “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.” “You are. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just full of crap. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.” I let it pass. Because he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated and stood for so many years. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance, he's apparently ready to clean up much of his act’s exoskeleton. “I dismissed decadence when I wrote ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….” Barbara interrupted, “Lou… it’s getting late.” Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He seemed now a petulant kid, up past bedtime. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.” “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.” “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy guy, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album. -"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature" (1988) by Greil Marcus 

“Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Once Hyman missed Reed’s cue to end a song one night while playing with The Jades. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles very hard. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.” While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “All of a sudden Lou would show up with these girls. They were all weird. I had no idea where he found them.” Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” Sigal noted that some boys in their school were “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “faggots,” in the nomenclature of that time. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Jeff Tweedy: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are the only lyricists I've heard that come close to Bob Dylan's level. Reed and Dylan are going to rock out. Cohen, no so much.

Anthony DeCurtis: Lou Reed started many genres and he inspired as many artists as Bob Dylan, usually better artists than Dylan inspired. Without Lou Reed (and The Velvet Underground) it’s likely we wouldn’t have punk music, post-punk, college rock, indie rock, noise rock, grunge, new wave, no wave, etc. Dylan reimagined and molded folk-rock genres into his vision and his is a really beautiful vision. But Lou Reed created new genres out of whole cloth. Also, Dylan’s an invented person, a fact he doesn't like to reckon, unlike Lou Reed who has projected a character in order to protect his real self. 

There is no real Bob Dylan and almost nothing he says can be taken as the truth with regards to himself or his life. He’s an entirely manufactured character. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a plain observation. Of course, it doesn’t diminish the greatness of Dylan's music, but we shouldn’t assume that his songs have much basis in his real life (whatever that is). Indeed, Dylan once got an award from the ASCAP in 1986. There was a celebratory dinner, which Dylan showed up to with Elizabeth Taylor. Leonard Cohen was there and he actually did a little press conference with Jennifer Warnes. Warnes said that at one point Dylan took Elizabeth Taylor by the hand and marched her over to meet Cohen and said, "Liz, I want to introduce you to a real poet." Source: medium.com