Notes on Austin by Lester Bangs

Austin, laid back and somewhat indulgent as it is, might be a terrible place for a New Yorker or anyone who wants to move and shake culture or corporations but it’s an undeniably great place to start a band, as I recently learned. No paranoia, no career hang-ups, no star trips (well, not usually), no heroin, no your drummer informing you at Thursday’s rehearsal that he’s just gotta play with this “Smoke On The Water” copy band Friday night instead of with you at CBGB’s because he says he desperately needs the money even though he lives with his parents in Westchester.

None of that kind of stuff. I met this band called the Delinquents, we said, “Okay, let’s do it,” I took my lyrics and guitar down there and we wrote three songs the first rehearsal and a record FIVE the second. Took me months to get a decent set of songs written with the last buncha assholes I worked with in New York, and longer to actually make it onto the stage with our oh-so-elaborate “show” all worked out. Six weeks here, from first rehearsal to Duke’s opening where we wowed ‘em unto St. Vitus in the aisles. It’s almost too easy to make music in this town. The Delinquents have their own thing as well as working with me (in fact they sound completely different in the two contexts), and their thing is surf punks. Dick Dale and “Telstar” and alien beach parties and rantin’ ‘n’ ravin’ about whoever double-crossed you this time while the guitars flare free. Of course they’re great (I think), why else would I work with them? No, they suck. They act real mad when they sing sometimes, which is cute. Do I sound supercilious? Well I don’t mean to. It’s just that this I feel is the essence of punk. When all is said and done. They also have yet another subgroup within the group, called Pelvic Thrust, which takes them more towards RFE/Joy Division territory. Pelvic Thrust’s most famous number is one I forget the title of all about various friends the composer had who OD’d and croaked on this, that, or whatall. It sounds exactly like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with Joy Division overdubbing, except the singer has more life than Joy Division’s. Too bad. We played a frat party on Halloween where all the frats dressed up as punks and even decorated a whole room in black with torn STB posters, strips and straps hanging off the wall, everything spray painted jet black, giant smoke machines in all four corners belching out attars of mystery in which our feet did disappear, while up at the front of the room they’d built a whole little stage enclosed so come to think of it we kinda looked like we were in a big TV set playing. Maybe they figured it’d be more security precautioned for their girlfriends that way. Meanwhile, Becky is hoping no high hep whiskey’d frat takes a notion to go cop some pooz offa one o’ them free-livin’ punk chicks. Becky plays rhythm Stratocaster. But anyway them frat boys sure do have lots of extra moolah to throw around. I never was able to dude a party up to this extreme. We got to be little stars for a nite. We were cute, I’m sure. For instance, I was cute when I OD’d on nasal inhalers, cough medicine, Chlor-Trimeton, and malt liquor to the point that when they finally did call me up onstage to start singing my songs I of course was in no condition but through some transference of memory and association was seeing a traumatic room of my childhood and come on or at least felt like this tragic stricken gloomy poetic young soul who obviously was just too sensitive to live. I slurred through about a verse and a half and half-swept, half-tumbled off the stage. The whole Byronic romantic-agony schtick, with palpable overlay of skid row. Cute, eh? The frats didn’t care. They loved it. They loved everything we did: Byron, Pelvic Thrust, atonal feedback raveups, surf toons – it was all gravy to them. Musta had a wild old time that night. Before the set I walked into a room across the lower forty of the frat house where we were supposed to be able to just tap right up all the beer we could drink, gratis. Of course there was no beer. Somebody pointed me to a 30-gallon brand-new garbage can in the middle of the room filled with some red liquid substance almost brimming over yet still no one would say what it was. “Try some,” they smiled strokingly. What nice folks. Southern hospitality. You really can’t beat it. I looked at this tub of what for all I knew might have been the blood of aborted fetuses mixed with chemical waste from bauxite ecologic rape and a generous quantity of Mello Yello treated with red food coloring. Then on the other hand it could turn out to be a consummate blend, importunate yet magisterial, of several of the finer chateaux in Europe’s most cobwebbed vintage stock. You just never can tell. Momentarily sargasso’d by indecision, I cast back in my mind for some roughly analogous incident, back to my high school days and all those horrid yet great fun beer blasts we had where everybody tried to cop a few free feels off their or somebody else’s girlfriends really made no difference before puking all over our tennis shoes. What ever happened to those good old times? Apparently they were back again for these young citizens and scores, nay, armies like them ‘cross the nation, who perhaps were more fortunate than even we (who were there and repress traumatic memories) realize in having never endured the first go-round of those wonderful old days, which of course was why they were all hopping on it now. Right on ‘n’ more power to ‘em, I say, quaffing another hearty Viking stein of brew, ‘cause as ever power’s to the people and those are one kind of people just as worthy as any other of their day on the sun, just folks and not the first human in history to lob a rotten egg or two your way. But gazing fondly backwards I came upon something which I’d all but forgotten, the noxious memory of which was still enough to jolt me from my reverie. I looked at the big can full of red fluids. “Ah, no thanks anyway,” I said. “Uh, say, that wouldn’t just happen to be one of these things you hear about sometimes, where they take about fifty fifths of all of ‘em different kinds of booze and empty ‘em together in one big vat…” They leered at me. I hightailed it back to our own special little dressing room off stage left. Here’s what our gentle cultured hosts were so kind as to provide our little dressing room with: (1) chair, folding; (2) a broken card table partially propped on some stacked cardboard boxes; (3) great and historic paddles that’d warmed umpteen generations of pledges’ butts, hung upon the wall in precise symmetrical formation all the way around the room, which wasn’t all that far since it only really had two walls in the first place; (4) best of all, our very own BEER MACHINE! Yes, that’s correct: a soft drink dispenser just like by any gas station, except ours had cans of Coors and Miller and Lite in it. Of course, you had to pay. But the beers were reasonable at 50 cents per. Like many magical devices, this beer dispenser contained a surprised within. The surprise was that when you put in your quarters and press down on the handle, no can of Coors came rolling out. But do listen, this is unusually cute. What you had to do, see, was get down on your knees, then stick your hand and then your whole arm almost up to the shoulder in, up, around, back, over, under, and through this monster until you’ve almost broken your arm and worn out the knees on your pants, and only then, just then, did your numb embarrassed fingertips suddenly run smack up against a cool plump little can of beer just waiting there all for you. So you’d wrench it out, around, down, etc., after which you were free to drink. Now, I don’t think it was just my chemical state that made this operation seem more than a little bit like sticking your right arm up a great robot cunt from Stanley Kubrick’s dreams, there to wrench off perhaps a fallopian tube. Freud: whatta guy. What I’m really still pondering, actually, is the possibility that just maybe this was not in fact a defective machine awaiting repair at all. Just maybe this was a deliberate sabotage, maintained this way all the time, in the cause of ribald party winky fun ‘n’ noisome hijinx. What better way to prove your manhood before the whole house than to risk one’s only strong right limb away aloft in the maw of a vibrating corporate clammy cunt complete with rubber around the opening? Frigidity jokes. Comparisons with recent dates. Why, the possibilities were endless. Which led me to a further line of speculation: did they reserve this little manual safari for pledges and unsuspecting but good-natured (hey, I can take a joke; what the hell, guys!) strangers like us, or did they see to it that all of them had to go through these post-penetration exertions and contortions every single time they needed a fresh can?!?! Go on, tell me it’s out of the question! One never really does know precisely how far these lads are into s&m, after all. For which one is thankful. But whatever the state of each housebrother’s private relationship with the beer machine, they loved us, and why shouldn’t they? We were the geek show! The whole band except me had on all kinds of makeup, glitter, masks, beards, weird shit to the max. Add on top of that everybody being stoned and drunk and you had a Halloween surely to be remembered even if you forgot all the exact details. I was so fucked up that at one point, wandering out into the smog of the dance floor, I saw Andy’s girlfriend, and thought we were now in some kinda local New Wave club fulla more or less relatively normal people, and further that the band had been playing for at least eight hours, that it was 6 A.M., I could see dawn breaking cerulean and pink through the ceiling, and I thought Jee-ZUZ do they work these bands hard in these places. Man, I thought, I could never be a rock ‘n’ roll star, I haven’t got the fortitude. I thought the band looked terrible onstage, five poor wasted haggard manikins on a numb treadmill killing themselves in liege to dreams of a train to nowhere, oh I was bathetic, except of course nobody knew even though I thought they all could see ‘cause it was all happening inside just like always with psychedelics. To everybody else I’m sure now that I just looked like some old drunk stumbling around the place: “What’s that old wino doing hanging around with that band?” “Shit, I dunno, maybe he’s one of ‘em’s uncle or something. You know how these musicians are.” “I think probably we should just throw him the hell outa the house.” “Nah, fuck it, he’s about half passed out anyway. He’s probably just their mascot or grampa or something.” So I lurched back around to the dressing room, where I’d managed last time I’d been there to plop myself down on the card table, knocking it off the boxes and spilling beer all over the place four times in four minutes. Now my New York Rocker was all soggy and I was in no condition to read it anyway. Life was hopeless. I snored beneath a monolithic wave of existential despair. Sarte was right in Le Nausee: I was now on that rack at the precipice’s edge where one may shudder with horror to actually find oneself unable to pick up a simple glass of beer. Then again, one may not. The Pacific Ocean broke through the ceiling and froze, backing up on itself. Actually I made that up. I was too stupefied for hallucinations. The band called me back up at some point and I must have sang something though I can’t imagine what, then I remember coming to again to find myself standing in the middle of the stage with my guitar strapped on and plugged in, playing sparse fills that actually fit. What a pro! Then I blacked out again, came to 20 or 30 minutes later just in time to be called up to sing “Louie, Louie,” which ever since Animal House has been appropriated and crowned the Frats’ Official International Anthem in Perpetuity; it brings a tear to the pudgy shelf of cheek as the notes and those perhaps a bit sentimental but always stirring lyrics conjure up sad remembrances of beerbusts past: The night they gang-raped the ugly girl nobody liked in Gamma Delta Phu. The memory of making one puking little pledge eat a bloody Kotex and smack his lips after each swallow squealing “YUM YUM, FINGERLICKIN’ GOOD!!!” The night they homosexually molested, physically abused, and then sodomized collectively those creepy little pledges they didn’t wanna let in anyway ‘cause they dressed Robert Hall’s and came from some crummy little town in Pennsylvania where they talked funny and were Amish or something. Something different anyway. Something no good. And how after that they told the sniveling little cunts that they better not tell anybody or they, the frat honchos, would see to it that word was spread all over school these new enrollees were nothing but Queers. Come on, who would believe it of US? No one. A joke. But hell, that’s all it takes in the first place, was just a damn good joke. Well I got on up and commenced to sing “Louie, Louie.” At first I was just gonna slur my way through it, but then as I gradually realized that not only was I conscious but even relatively sober and lucid and finally reclaimant of my faculties, I began to apply myself, to care, to work at the phrasing, thinking about what to stress or underplay and where and why. I mean, after all, it’s something of a challenge to daub in the shadings on lyrics like “On the ship I dreamed she there/Smelled aroma (the roses? Romilar? Rope Burns?) down in her hair.” It’s not exactly “Miss Otis Regrets,” but it’ll do. I began to play with the rhythm, holding notes or parts of phrases, trying to make them soar out, then biting them back viciously. No doubt I sucked. Nobody cares. In fact they were in ecstasy. So who knows, maybe I didn’t suck. Which just might be the essence of Frat Existence and Philosophy: Hey, you, world – I DON’T SUCK GODDAMMIT!!!!! Right, fine, you don’t, me neither. Hell, for all I or the rest of the band or the whole entire room knew, I could very well be singing the greatest version of “Louie, Louie” of all time! Shit, and nobody there to record it! Though actually the Delinquents did happen to have their tape deck on, told me next rehearsal that it’d sounded great and offered to play it for me. I demurred. But I guess that means I really did sing it better than anybody else ever. Why should they lie to me? The only fly in the ointment, and I wonder if I am the only one that knows it, is that I also know that whether I sang it the best version of all time or the absolute mange-ridden worst in a long slumgullion of stinkeroos, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoe’er. What a song. It’s like the weather. Indestructible, yet still mysterious, inscrutable as Madame Nhu’s death mask. We finally finished up and got off – well actually I’d been finished and off for quite some time – and after packing up we walked around the house a bit, mingled with the natives. We’d mingled with ‘em before the set too. Still didn’t get acquainted with anybody. Since then I have had occasion to converse (somewhat under duress, I should probably also state) with certain denizens of this particular subculture, at which time I learned that they are quite literally impossible to talk to or with, and for that matter even when they’re not around there’s not a hell of a lot to say about ‘em. They’re kinda like, anthropods, or something. Marginally extant. As I trundled from room to room in their palace, I could overhear scraps of bypassed conversations. “-called Johnny Rotten and the other one named himself Sid Vicious. They stab themselves with pins to protest society!” “Sounds sick to me.” “Well, of course I wouldn’t actually go so far as to just lay down and buy one o’ their records, y’know, but still you gotta admit they’re pretty funny.” “-puts out like a generator! Go on, call her! Here, I’ve got the-“ “-ive thousand a month plus dividends, premiums, bonuses, perks, the works! Plus they’re gonna show me how to fix-” “If you puke in the sink again we’re gonna through you on the floor and piss all over you.” “-and so then the fag that’s dressed as Frankenstein says to the girl Mad Doctor-” “I just don’t! I just don’t, that’s all!” Well it was all fairly fascinating even though there was a whole lot I didn’t understand. It’s always broadening to the character to delve into new and unknown social milieus, and then, perhaps even…go native! Outside on the sidewalks all of us in the band gathered to discuss the evening’s events. It seemed that most of them felt that some new and perhaps meaningful rapprochement had been forged, certainly encouraging, one short but significant step on the road to eventual utopias of brotherhood, fraternity (yep!), and understanding, a world where both spike head and Izod might coexist and even help a brother with his load, especially seeing as how they’d both ended up addicted to the same drug. It’s a lovely portrait, but I’m afraid I just can’t quite yet link arms with the joyous masses marching and singing down that golden Freedom Highway to the Wizard’s castle. It seems I have at least one problem that nothing I’ve known can lick. I just don’t like people. But that’s okay too; I imagine they’ll probably be able to get along on their own, without my succor. After all, they are the songs an daughters of the ruling class.

-Lester Bangs, November 1980