THE LESTER MANIFESTO

Lester Bangs was a self-determined savant, so destined for genius that he invented entire constellations where a man of the reasonable talents it takes to be the Best Rock Writer Ever might be a star. Lester Bangs was an invention of the critical intelligentsia; the Illuminatic losers (and Patti Smith) who spent their days selling Mink DeVille’s reputation door-to-door, looked like Elvis Costello in their dreams, and needed a saint/scapegoat for their nascent profession so badly that they deified the first of their ilk to do what rockers do every day (die). Lester Bangs was a clown, in the tragicomic sense. Like Pagliacci if Pagliacci’s doctor was also Joey Ramone’s stepfather, and the great clown found a workaround—from seeing himself every night—by imbibing enough Romilar cough syrup and root beer to ensure the kind of blackouts that made every morning in the bathroom mirror as thrilling as a curtain rising for the first time.

Lester Bangs was also a moralist. He was, as Maria Bustillos wrote in The New Yorker (a website for people who are new to yorking), a moralist with a “bone-deep love of the truth.” So let’s not start this devotional to the man with a lie. CREEM had been planning on some sort of tribute to Lester Bangs, with what would have been his 75th birthday as a peg, since the magazine was resurrected. We hadn’t decided what this tribute might consist of, but it was assumed it would probably be a medium-sized section of hagiography and/or slander; a loving appreciation, but not so googly-eyed that anyone would think our language and politics had been trapped in amber since 1976. It was going to be effusive, affecting, and roughly 8 to 12 pages. Along the way, in some sort of financial snafu that the powers-that-be have determined to be none of middle management’s business, some money went wherever it is money goes. Hopefully to sex workers, but probably to lawyers. So CREEM needed to fill some pages, and we needed to do so without going over a budget that had gone from Chris Farley to David Spade seemingly overnight. As we’re constitutionally opposed to asking the living to work for free, the obvious solution was to expand the Lester Bangs section. After all, we do love the man. He is inarguably one of the architects of CREEM s whole ethos and reason for being. We still read his writing for edification and pleasure. If the comments that readers leave on Instagram (at least those left by the strange angry men who think that being trapped in amber is preferable to succumbing to the “woke mind virus” that’s keeping us from putting The Nuge back on the cover) are any indication, it’s not like having him in the magazine could make the writing any worse.