Introducing Lester Bangs at the Brillobox
The most coveted and deeply satisfying feeling in the world is when you’re a teenager and discover a secret that few other people know about, a secret that whispers to you that you are not alone. And you cherish this secret, forever wanting to keep it to yourself and only share it sparingly with others who might know the pain you feel or your sense of what is beautiful and marvelous. If everybody found what you had, which you found through the providence of good luck and by looking hard, working at it—if everyone cherished what you cherished—it would cheapen it and make it banal. So, you only tell a select cadre about Philip K. Dick or the tiny swimming hole, or the special tree, or Lester Bangs.
Bangs is all about discovering the achingly beautiful and sussing out the ways music can change the souls of those who connect viscerally to it. It’s his deep readings of various songs that speak so invigoratingly to me, and his words reveal him to be a fellow-seeker of those mystic moments which both isolate him and connect him so intensely to his readers, we who share his desire to drink at those intoxicating and secret wells.
Discovering Lester Bangs showed me that there was an art to discovery and an art to articulating the circuitry of the connections he felt—the greatest at ever voicing the thrill of primal discovery and of realizing its bounty.
It’s a fine thing to appreciate a book or a song or a new art form and to live in its fevered grip. It’s quite another to be able to, by the act of the pen, lay out the foundations and nuances of why a piece of music works. When I think of all the snarky Sasha Frere Jones blather out there, I am amazed that Bangs’s purer form of criticism—even-handedly parsing both the lyrics and the tune, laying his soul open so the music can wash through its sieve, ever-reaching to find the emotional core—is not more widely practiced.
What a coincidence, then, that the album that meant the most to Bangs was the one that means the most to me—Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
John Schulman is the co-owner of Caliban Bookshop.