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By
Bob Mehr
To
Jim-Now It’s Your Turn. Best, Lester
This brief inscription, scrawled across the inside cover of his quickie bio
of Blondie, were Lester Bangs’s parting words to fledgling rock critic Jim
DeRogatis. It was mid-April 1982, and the future Sun-Times staffer,
then a senior at a Catholic high school in
Jersey City, had just
finished interviewing Bangs for a journalism class assignment. Two weeks
later, while transcribing a tape of the chat, DeRogatis heard on the radio
that the 33-year-old Bangs had died.
The experience would
set DeRogatis on the path to become Bangs’s Boswell. Let It Blurt. The
Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic finally
saw light in 2000, positing the dead critic as rock writing’s Jack Kerouac,
Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson rolled into one and kicking off a
lively reappraisal of his work. Cameron Crowe, another former disciple, paid
homage to Bangs the same year in his love letter to adolescent rock fandom,
Almost Famous, but DeRogatis took Bangs’s edict closer to heart. At
the Sun-Times, the Minnesota-based Request and
Rolling Stone and as a freelancer (working for the Reader, among
other publications) he’s demonstrated an uncanny ability to infuriate
readers and subjects alike. Now with his third book about to hit the shelves
and Sound Opinions, his radio show with the Trib’s Greg
Kot expanding to TV, he’s a veritable cottage industry of rock criticism.
Though DeRogatis has
achieved far greater temporal success than Bangs, the specter of his idol
still looms large. DeRogatis’s new book, Milk It! Collected Musings on
the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90’s, is being released in the
long shadow of Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, the second and
much-discussed Bangs reader. (An expanded reissue of DeRogatis’s 1996 debut,
Kaleidoscope Eyes, also comes out this month as Turn On Your Mind:
Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock.)
But while Bangs’s
early demise meant that others would ultimately shape his literary legacy,
DeRogatis has the luxury of shaping his own. Milk It! is
loosely organized as a primer on the rise and fall of alt-rock, but it’s
also DeRogatis’s first attempt to compile his work in a manner befitting a
critic who’s made his mark. It’s a greatest hits set—part anthology, part
autobiography—similar in form to Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the
Rest and Nick Tosches’s Reader.
DeRogatis cites both
those collections as favorites, but his own work isn’t as outré as Meltzer’s
belles lettres or Tosches’s Old Testament tone poems. In some ways, he’s
chosen a convenient role model in Bangs: Like his own idol Kerouac, Bangs
was remarkable not so much for his wordsmithery as for the synergy his
writing achieved, the heat that baked out between the lines. But DeRogatis,
who at the Sun-Times typically gets a few hundred words to reach the
broadest audience possible, doesn’t often approach the drug-fueled intensity
Bangs built up in his rants. Few of the best pieces in Milk It! come
from the daily—they’re from magazines, alternative weeklies, and Web sites
where he has room to stretch out a bit—and even when he’s got leeway, he’s
more bulldog than butterfly. His strongest stuff—examining the economic
verities of Lollapalooza, challenging the misguided revolutionary politics
of Rage Against the Machine, or probing the ethically questionable
relationship between New York Times critic Neil Strauss and rock
ghoul Marilyn Manson—is bolstered by his reporting skills. Before turning
pro as a music critic, he worked for five years as a reporter and city
columnist at the daily
Jersey Journal.
Risking the wrath
of Steve Albini (who hasn’t spoken to DeRogatis since the two squabbled over
Urge Overkill in 1993) must seem like child’s play after you’ve covered the
real Mafia.
Milk It!
opens, almost
dutifully, with a fat section on Nirvana. The late-’93 Request piece
that kicks things off—a preview of the band’s final studio album, In
Utero—is notable for a lengthy detour into Cobain’s growing interest in
guns. For two pages DeRogatis proceeds to challenge the singer about his
uncharacteristic new obsession—a line of inquiry met with consternation by
the band’s publicist and eventually “a vacant, detached look” from Cobain.
This section and the
two that follow—on Hole and Pearl Jam—showcase many of DeRogatis’s
strengths, but they also point to the pitfalls inherent in his hype-busting
persona. DeRogatis strives to portray himself as a writer with a big
critical stick and a well-tuned bullshit detector, so it’s hard to fathom
why the one artist whose sales job he buys over and over is the fabulously
transparent Courtney Love. Admittedly, the widow Cobain does provide many of
the book’s highlights, including the juicy quote-athon “Courtney Unplugged”
and “The Nirvana Wars,” originally published in Spin and still the
best dissertation on the messy legal battle over Cobain’s musical estate.
In the foreword to
Milk It! Keith Moerer, DeRogatis’s former boss at both Request
and Rolling Stone, pegs Love as someone who-will “probably always be
interesting, but never particularly admirable.” DeRogatis, however, declares
her “one of the great self-invented characters in rock history right up
there with Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop” before going on to praise “her
razor-sharp wit and lightning-quick intellect.” He never calls her out on
her noisy but disingenuous campaign against the major label system (she
eventually signed a three-album deal with Virgin) and doesn’t hold her to
the same artistic standards he does, say, Patti Smith. It’s OK with him that
“Courtney’s biggest talent is probably just being Courtney.” Love loves
DeRogatis back, in her way: “Even though Dero can be a dick, he’s only
exercising his right to free speech, and ultimately he’s got balls and takes
on the man—a lot,” she writes in a blurb on the back of the book.
Milk It!
doesn’t work as a
comprehensive history of music in the 90s—the focus is too narrow, and
recaps of the careers of Wire, John Cale, and Kraftwerk bog the narrative
down. By DeRogatis’s own admission, he views the era largely through the
prism of the hometown scene, devoting big chunks of the book to Smashing
Pumpkins (“Melancholy and the Pear-Shaped Boy”) and Steve Albini and Urge
Overkill (“Positive Bleeding”) and a decent amount of space to the likes of
Red Red Meat, the Jesus Lizard, and Tortoise (all marshaled under the
subheading “Freaks and Geeks”). For Request he constructed a
month-by-month chronicle on the rise of Veruca Salt (“The Building of a Buzz
Band”), and on behalf of the Bay Area mag BAM, he took a journey into
the avaricious mind-set of Liz Phair (“Sex in Rock 101: Selling the Maiden
Phair”). For all the ink spilled trying to explain Phair’s recent
Matrix-produced sellout, you needn’t read further than DeRogatis’s 1995
piece on the canny Oberlin grad, where—despite a healthy respect for her
music—he exposes the extent of her Faustian ambitions.
As Greil Marcus
observed in his intro to the first Bangs anthology, 1987’s Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the late critic wrote most powerfully
about artists he was conflicted over or disappointed by. That’s true of
DeRogatis too, but while Bangs could count on Richard Hell for a spirited
debate on the nature of life and death, be confounded by a genuine oddball
like Captain Beefheart or challenged by a group as vital and contradictory
as the Clash, DeRogatis deals with comparatively minor talents whose typical
riposte to his criticisms is to call him a “fat fuck.” Bangs got to face off
with world-class churls like Lou Reed; DeRogatis’s marquee dustup pits him
against comically lightweight Third Eye Blind singer Stephan Jenkins, whose
music he finds “incredibly boring and ordinary and average.” While Bangs
lived and worked in a world peopled by rock ’n’ roll animals,
DeRogatis is stuck at a PR mixer full of music-biz pets. But he makes
the best of it by using them to get at larger issues in the industry.
Writing about his
onetime favorites R.E.M. over the course of three cover stories for
Request, for instance, DeRogatis slowly peels away the facade of the
“little old band from
Athens.”
By 1996, in “Automatic for the Press,” he’s revealed Messrs. Buck, Mills,
Berry,
and Stipe as cash-hungry control freaks who’re out of ideas. “After eighteen
years as a band, what is motivating the members of R.E.M. to continue?” he
asks. “And, perhaps more important, has their incredible success boxed them
into a corner where it’s impossible to challenge themselves artistically?”
DeRogatis returns
again and again to the themes of thwarted promise, profitable compromise,
and creative collapse, making them central to the history of alt-rock’s boom
and bust. Interestingly, Lester Bangs’s own ruminations on the death of the
’60s dream could double as a eulogy for the dashed hopes of the ’90s—and
what was the Lollapalooza Nation if not a labored attempt to recapture the
communal spirit of the
Woodstock
generation? Substitute “R.E.M” for “Rolling Stones” in Bangs’s essay “1973
Nervous Breakdown: The Ol’ Fey Outlaws Ain’t What They Used to Be—Are You?”
(anthologized in Mainlines):
“There’s no point in
blaming them,” Bangs wrote. “They’re helpless. In the past ten years the
Rolling Stones created an enormous situation in which they’re just a factor
now. They’re ironic victims of the endless new world which it was their
triumph to create, because their efforts helped make it possible for hordes
of other hopefuls to move into a relatively vacant atmosphere of
electricity, expectation, and money. Flooding the market. Which is where
both we and the Stones stand right now; up to our asses in brackish water.”
There’s nothing this
eloquent—or melodramatic—in all of Milk It! DeRogatis is not
contemporary rock criticism’s great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, or
romantic visionary—that is to say, not its Lester Bangs. But he’s
enthusiastically assumed the role of its most dedicated journeyman and
unapologetic gadfly. And when the problem with music is that one has to
settle for Stephan Jenkins instead of Lou Reed, that might be a worthy
enough charge.
Jim
DeRogatis celebrates the publication of
Milk It! Collected
Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90’s and the
forthcoming Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock
on Friday, October 17, at the Hideout. A cover band featuring DeRogatis on
drums will play hits of the alt-rock era and “the greatest psychedelic rock
songs ever.” The $5 suggested donation goes to P.L.A.Y, a music and arts
program for abused and neglected teens.
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