Clash of the titans: the brutal battle between Lou Reed and Lester Bangs
Lou Reed always was an enigma. While his innovative, tradition-defying music with The Velvet Underground was far ahead of its time and took rock down a much darker route than anything available in the late 1960s, his personality also stands as distinctive. As a figure so committed to charting his own course sonically, there’s no surprise the complex character behind the art was one of a kind.
Reed stands as an enigma outside of his music because of his unwaveringly outspoken nature. Whether it be Frank Zappa or The Doors, across his career, he made it clear that he hated many fellow artists. From questioning Zappa’s pretentiousness to openly delineating the hippie tedium that The Doors and Jim Morrison propped up, fans could always count on him for a stinging and surprising take.
It wasn’t just fellow influential artists that Reed loathed either. He had no time for journalists, a demographic exposed to the most severe lashings of his vitriol. In 2000, he made his utter disdain for the media transparent when speaking to Swedish journalist Niklas Källner, who, in his first interview, was given the Herculean task of conversing with the glam rock pioneer.
Reed said at one point: “I don’t like journalists. I despise them. They’re disgusting. With the exception of you. Mainly the English. They’re pigs.” Although he certainly didn’t make that exception very clear to poor old Niklas.
It was fitting, then, that Reed’s great nemesis should come in the form of a journalist. This was the other most literate misanthrope of the 1970s, rock critic Lester Bangs. While Reed had many adversaries, there was none as powerful as the moustachioed Californian menace, a man who questioned some of the era’s most notable acts before revisionism had become cool. He made it clear he was a fan of Reed’s experimentalism, but he would also challenge him on what he deemed his own pretensions, leading to brutal volleys of words.
The most notable convergence between these titans arrived in a 1973 piece for Let It Rock, in which Bangs characterises Reed as a “vaguely uncomfortable fat man” and goaded the unflinching New Yorker into commenting on the work of his friend David Bowie, whom he also offended.
“Hey Lou, then doncha think David Bowie’s a no-talent asshole?”, the devilish Bangs asked, to which he was rebuffed with an assertion that the Londoner was a genius. Trying again, Bangs called ‘Space Oddity’ “shit” and “Paul Kantner garbage!”
Reed was not for moving: “It is not! It’s a brilliant masterpiece! Oh, you are so full of shit!”
This brinkmanship would be a sign of things to come in a 1975 Creem article called Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged It Out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake. Once again, Bangs was up to his old tricks, like the Devil leading Jesus into the desert. This time though, Reed was having none of it, and the journalist was in for a taste of his own medicine.
Asking Reed to define decadence, the musician told him: “You. Because you used to be able to write, and now you’re just fulla shit. 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.”
Elsewhere, after Bangs disingenuously told Reed one thing he liked about him was that he was not afraid to lower himself, which he had been doing for years, and used ‘New York Stars’ as an example, the former Velvet Underground vocalist delivered a haymaker in reply.
He said: “You really are an asshole. You went past assholism into some kind of urinary tract. The next time you come up with a phrase as good as ‘curtains laced with diamonds dear for you’ instead of all this Dee-troit bullshit, let me know.”
This fraught war of words makes you wonder what the pair really thought of each other, as, holistically, there were many parallels between them. They both went against the pandering grain with their honesty (or perhaps performative cynicism, depending on how you look at it).
