rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

Interview with a Flawed Desire

I am haunted by Lester Bangs, that is my idea of Lester Bangs. I didn’t know the man, although I heckled him one drunken night at CBGB , when he was fronting Birdland back in the 20^th century. I was the schmuck who kept yelling "Lou Reed was right" throughout their set and if any of the 16 other people who were there that night are reading this, I apologize. Anyone purporting to write about rock and roll in this day and age works under the shadow of Lester Bangs. He is our Shakespeare, and when I say our I don’t just mean music journalists. I mean all of us. Lester Bangs saw through the soul of man and told the tale with unblinking honesty and with buckets of love in his heart for us all, even as he waved us goodbye some time before his death in 1983.

The search continues. I attempt yet another trans-dimensional excursion to snag that interview, to find out what questions wind up getting asked and answered. This time, though, I stayed away from storefront psychics who need to make appointments (shouldn’t they just know when you’re coming?) and hooked up with the spiritual center of the Eternal Saturday Night, a convenience store clerk named Steve. Steve had me arrive at the Quikeez at midnight with 12 bucks and a bucket of hot wings. He led me down a long hallway behind the coolers. Much longer than the store itself. A door to my right flew open, bathing the hallway in the cool blue light of a thousand black and white televisions. Steve disappeared in a puff of purple smoke and I was suddenly sitting on a plastic chair in a prison visiting room with a phone in my hand looking through bulletproof glass into the red rimmed, beaten eyes of Kurt Cobain.

Who spoke into the phone that was in his hand.

"Lester doesn’t........"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah .... doesn’t want to speak with me, I know," I answered. "How have you been?"

"Good question," he smiled, "I’ve been better..... I think. It’s hard to remember now. ‘Been down so long it looks like up to me.’ as the song goes."

"‘Been down so long it looks like it’s up to me’‘s the way I try to take that curve."

"In the best of times, I suppose?" he countered archly.

"Well, yeah" I said weakly , "That approach only works when the son is shining."

"And in the dark hours?"

"Kill them all, just like everybody else."

"So how, when the dark hour just never ends, do you kill them all?"

"With a shotgun in your mouth?"

"Bingo."

"But you swore you didn’t have a gun."

"I lied."

‘Yes you did. You lied and you lied down and I’m not sure which one was worse or hurt worst."

"Why is it your call?"

"Good question."

"Why is it your call? Hell, why is it even your concern? So you bought a few records....."

"Actually, I only ever bought one."

"Oh, really," he thought for a few seconds, "Which one?"

"‘Nevermind’. Got it used on cassette. I was curious, you’d gotten a lot of press, you know."

"Tell me about it. So, what did you think?"

"Honestly?"

"No, lie to me, sweetheart."

"Ok, loved ‘Teen-Spirit’, especially the video. but I always thought you sounded like you took the Pixies and the Replacements and threw them into some kind of Tom Scholz/Boston classic rock cuisinart, diluting the spiritual intent of those vital bands and distilling it into snake-oil angst custom made for Wal-Mart America."

"Christ, you are a rock critic, aren’t you?"

"Yes, thank you."

"It wasn’t a compliment." He shoots. He scores.

"You’re right. I’m intellectualizing things I know nothing about, nor have any real connection to other than some feelings engendered by listening to a record. It was your life in those grooves, as they say, and while our continual second guessing can get a little old or seem a little cold at times, don’t you see any value in others attempting to maybe find some personal answers through your work and life?"

"But you said it, man, it’s my life...."

"Then why did you throw it away?"

A hush fell over the dream sequence.

"To end the pain."

"What about the joy?"

"What joy?" he smirked.

"Good question." I smirked back.

"Well, what do you know of it?" He was getting riled now.

"I have my.... sources." I tried to say it like Lugosi and I think I pulled it off.

"SOURCES!?? What the fu....." He was going all cartoon now.

"Sources." I hoped the word fell like a hammer. "Sources of pain, yes. Sources in my life of pain. Physical, mental and spiritual pain. Ghosts of words and deeds and failings that still wake me up nights hating myself and, yes, wanting to die, but I’ve taken the time and done the work to also find sources in my life of joy and strength and love and hope. Yes, some days, hell MOST days, it looks like evil’s going to win but we have to fight it. Each of us. All of us. Every minute of every hour of every day. That’s why they call it the never-ending battle between good and evil, you idiot. There are no god and devil duking it out on some transcendent plain in technicolor over ownership of our souls! There’s just us! Me, you, them, us, dammit."

‘What, your hyper stylized ‘rock and roll community’". He sneered. For a moment I hated him. If only for that sneer.

"No," I spoke calmly, " Life. That which is in this world and strives to understand itself. That which defines both good and evil. That which is capable of love, which is stronger than death. Everything you left behind."

"Courtney." He sighed, "Frances. I love them so much."

"I think they know."

"But, you know, if you’re looking for a reason, let alone a good one, I think you gotta file this one under ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’. I don’t think I died for anybody’s sins but mine and I don’t think I died for my sins either. It’s not that grand, man, it only gets that gothic in the movies. I just couldn’t go on, no matter how terrific you or anybody else thinks I had it. It’s easy to say, ‘Man, if I was a big rock star I wouldn’t kill myself, man, I’d spend all that money and have all them women and do all those drugs and party all those parties and just sit back and love being loved by millions’. Yeah, millions of strangers who all want a piece of you and half of them see you as nothing more than a money-producing monkey while the other half are electing you Jesus for their half-baked ‘generation’. What the f#$K is a ‘generation’ anyway, really? 7-8 years, tops? Gotta have a Jesus! Gotta have a Dylan! Gotta have somebody to tell you how to dress for Gap commercials in the freaking future, man. It’s not that damn important. It’s rock and roll music, for chrissakes."

"Apparently it was important enough to you that when it failed you, you murdered yourself, no?"

"Christ, you are a rock critic."

‘Yes, thank you."

"You’re welcome. This time. Is rock and roll ‘big’ enough to need a Jesus?"

We both said "Good question" simultaneously.

"Well maybe it do and maybe it don’t," He Kingfished, " But if’n it do, den I’m not him is all I’m a-sayin’".

‘Well, Kingfish", I countered in the character of Andy Brown, " Dat’s not entirely up to you now, am it?"

"Meaning?" He said, himself agin.

"Meaning the savior is the invention of the saved and not the man at all."

"So they can turn me into...."

"Number one, who’s ‘they’? Everybody else, right?", I didn’t wait for an answer, it was a rhetorical question, "Number two, they don’t turn you into anything. We turn your work around in our minds and our hearts and our souls and we decide what we get from it and we confer whatever power you have on our lives to your name and name alone. You have nothing to do with it."

"Not anymore, that’s for certain."

"Not ever. Not really."

He looked at me with eyes like the outstretched hands of a drowning man. He started to speak and stopped. He pressed his free hand against the bulletproof glass and tried to speak but stopped again.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Never mind." He said and, with a dismissive wave of his hand, was gone.

Again.

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