HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		LESTER BANGS PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG originally printed in The Wire By Hua Hsu Like it says on the cover of this latest edition, the occasion for this re-re-reevaluation of Lester Bangs is last year's smash film Almost Famous. As former Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe's thinly veiled bildungsroman, it remembers lovable pug Lester (Philip Seymour Hoffman) this way: down-to-Earth and supportive when he first meets Crowe's young William Miller character in dirtbore San Diego; sage and upright when counseling the youngster thorough his first assignment with the enemy, Rolling Stone; and, finally, lovably grumpy when he hangs up on Miller for playing the swill merchants' games. Indeed, his lectures to Miller leave you actually believing in the awesome potential of three chords and the truth. Psychotic Reactions operates similarly. It is editor Greil Marcus' rendition of Bangs, and perhaps it sacrifices a little wit and splendid catastrophe for direction. In his introduction, Marcus writes: "This book is my version of the work Lester Bangs left behind. It is not a summary, or a representative selection, but an attempt to make a picture of a man creating a view of the world, practicing it, facing its consequences and trying to move on." Fine, but sometimes for Lester the meander was the message. Since its initial publication in 1987, Psychotic Reactions has aged well. Certain parts feel more colloquial and chatty than ever, and one constantly wonders whatever happened to the twin poles of integrity and slavish worship that fueled Bangs' binges. Marcus trims some of the blubber and emerges with a fistful of hits and some outtakes for taste's sake. The Lou Reed staredown saga is presented intact with its own chapter heading, conveying some sense of the warfare waged when two men weirdly obsessed with each other get cheek-to-cheeks; his untitled notes on Reed are quite sweet, too. There are also some sure classics, like "James Taylor Marked For Death," "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise" and the title piece. (For the easy completist without access to Creem back issues, check Jim DeRogatis' Let it Blurt bio for Bangs' megatonic "How To Be A Rock Critic.") Part of the fun is seeing Bangs maneuver through the muck and murk at the more depressing business end of music criticism. His ravaging of Chicago is devastatingly sly, and he had some impressive ways of writing about things for which he had little apparent interest. In "My Night of Ecstasy With the J. Geils Band," inspiration crashes and he chances upon the most profound thing ever said about P. Wolf et al: "VDKHEOQSNCHSHNELXIEN (+&H-SXN+ (E@JN?" Marcus estimates some thousands of pages of Eno, prostitutes, and the Stones that didn't make the cut for his volume. More significantly, LB's premature death at 33 meant he never got to that clarity or perspective where he could truly appreciate (or reject?) what he had become-the guy whose name had become a brand which looked pretty cool scrawled next to "Led Zeppelin" on young William Miller's blue binder. Was Lester really a fan like the rest, or is that the image everyone else wanted for him? And did he really like the Godz? Maybe the reason we love Bangs so much is because he fulfills some weird fantasy about lovable losers and slipping through the backdoor to coolness. He wasn't necessarily the smartest or most encyclopedic critic, but unlike some of his surviving peers, he rarely felt the obligation to understand or scoop the new-fangled poop. He simply knew what he liked-getting religiously bludgeoned between two speakers-and wrote the living shit out of it. But according to Marcus' introduction, Bangs' words felt mismatched, his phrases unsure and lumbering, when he took on an artist he held in the highest esteem-Mingus, Miles, Beefheart, the Stones. The omission of these pieces is unfortunate. Not only do we miss out on an awed, stumbling and speechless Lester growing over time, such pieces would have shown him going well beyond the "white boys with loud geetars" aesthetic he became so famous for championing. One of Lester's most infamous articles-"White Noise Supremacists"-gives an idea of both the awkwardness of phrase Marcus referred to and Bangs' occasional White Negro-isms. In an infinitely noble, if not awkward, attempt at investigative reporting of New York's punk and new wave scenes, he digs for evidence to support his theory that these skinny white kids find racism cool, only to end up revealing more about his own hang-ups. Like his friend Richard Pinkston told DeRogatis, "Lester may have been racist or sexist by reflex, but not by heart." Alongside his "Drunk Punk Ofay Pretending He's A Nigger" (not included), "White Noise" is oddly autobiographical, a rather unstable dude growing out of his amateur Lenny Bruce phase and thinking about what an asshole he once was for casually dropping the N-word around Bobby Womack and David Ruffin. Though some people find this later work awkward and overly "parenthetical," Lester was making some real personal breakthroughs. It would have been great to see where they might have led. These days, his legend has become synonymous with longwinded sentences that sheltered rock's noisy, obscure or mis-appreciated individualists. But three of his later shorter pieces hinted at the tender vittles deep inside. His eulogies for John Lennon and friend Peter Laughner-as well as his ruminations on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks--speak volumes about his own combustible life, and they end up being the pages least fettered by his coy word games and asides. He concludes each piece uneasily, like he's trying to be indifferent to Laughner and Lennon's specific deaths, out of respect for what they represented and what his personal philosophy dictated. But at the end of his New York Rocker piece on Laughner, above the disgusted swirl of dystopian martyr chic and ripped T-shirts, he concludes that there is no justice, there's just us. While Marcus' editing is impressive, it leaves a very stylized sense of who Lester was. His Bangs is gonzo and outrageous, often brilliant and very touching. It's a somewhat different portrait from the putrid, lovesick Lester that lives in DeRogatis' biography. Careening from friend to friend and occasionally disappearing from sight, DeRogatis' Bangs is a little more in touch with the struggling and writhing that mingled genius with ink. Everyone can find it in them to admit that Lester Bangs' work was great, but most of us end up hating him for it anyway. In conversation with the editor of an American music magazine last year, I admitted to having a thing for Bangs' work. "I guess he was good," he responded, "but he inspired so much crap." I nodded, not quite sure if he was talking about me.