Friday, February 28, 1986
Daily Nebraskan
CI
ock singer's unexpected death
s winter s c
romance
Page 13
'CC'0
FRIBflY NIEflT T!!
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"If the boojie-wo(H)ie kills me, I
don 't mind dying. . . "
Huey "Piano" Smith
As the last bitter-cold days of
Ih'cember stripped off any Christinas
nilit -endowed romance, I learned that
someone 1 had known, shaken hands
with and spoken with in Los Angeles
had died.
I met D. Boon, DennesBoon, in a bar.
He was the lead singer, guitarist and
songwriter for The Minutemen, probably
the most important hardcore punk
band that ever was. I won't say it "was"
important, because things in Los Angeles
have a habit'of scabbing over, regener
ating, regrouping and bucking up in a
short time.
Charles
Lieurance
I'nlike Black Flag, The Minutemen
didn't make what they did look easy.
On stage t hey sweated, leaped, bounded,
experimented and reacted," stripping
away t hat 95 percent of rock music that
has become theater.
In the conversations 1 had with
lJoon. he was by turns menacing, warm,
belligerent and polite. He looked like
the sadistic kingpin of an old detective
movie, probably some B-classic set in
Hong Kong or Chinatown.
The Minutemen had the best rule in
all of music history. It even beats the
Sex Pistols' rules for "gelling the swin
dle." The Minutemen's rule was full of
hope and at the same time blasphem
ous: songs should not last more than a
minute. The Minutemen.
In the course of a live show, The
Minutemen played what seemed like a
hundred songs funk, jazz, blues and
hardcore faster than you'd dream
possible. Boon's muse gripped him by
the throat with such fierce passion that
much of what came out of that clenched
face could only be called the blues.
When I held out my hand to shake
his, it didn't feel cold or clammy. I
don't even remember the feel of his
palm, whether it was rough or perfectly
smooth. It's an easy thought, but it
struck me: I didn't know he was going
to die.
He was riding in a van headed across
the desert outside Tucson, Ariz. There
was an accident. The last thing he
thought about was shaking my hand. Or
whatever was on the radio.
I didn't know Lester Bangs was going
to die, either.
In New York City, where 1 went to be
the artist I wasn't cut out to be yet, he
taught me that listening to rock 'n' roll,
creating and dismissing its mytholo
gies, mostly adoring the stuff, was as
important as performing it. He taught
me a deep hatred for rock critics who
seem to enjoy Flaubert more than the
Ramones.
In the world of pop culture, a dead
rock critic is worth a lot less than a
dead rock star. Some might say the only
good rock critic is a dead rock critic.
Either way, Bangs was good, the best.
Lester Bangs probably won't be
remembered by enough people. He lis
tened to music better than anyone I
ever knew and he listened like' every
body else listened, on a cheap stereo,
in a cheap apartment, t o cheap records.
He wrote a book about Blondie that
may be one of the finest books ever
written about a rock band, but few
people will pick it up because they
think it's pages and pages of Tiger
Beat-style data about that group. It's
not. It's about listening to music. It's
about how to save popular music from
becoming pablum, how to sort the
hopelessly corporate from the real. He
made a record with a band called The
Delinquents. I may be the only person
in the Midwest who owns the album.
I met Bangs a year before he died. If I
told you he looked bad then, you'd
think I was trying out for prophet. He
looked very bad, thin and pale but
hopelessly involved in an ear-to-ear
grin. If anybody could have sung the
song lyrics that open this column sin
cerely, it's Lester Bangs.
His hand was cold. He loved bands
and would rather hang around them
and listen to music than have a million
dollars. A lot of critics probably say
that. Bangs meant it. Before he died he
didn't think of shaking my hand. He
thought of Jonathan Richman's "Road
runner." It was hot white thunder in
his head.
See DEATH on 14
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FELLOWSHIP
Show up at: 1330 TvvinRidge
At 7:30 I'M Friday Feb. 28th
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EDDY CLEARWATER
"""'CHICAGO DLUES BAND
, misv& vxv i
Eddy's been rocking the
blues for nearly thirty years,
entertaining audiences from
Chicago to Europe.
His music ranges from Otis
RushMagic Slim-influenced
West Side Blues to Chuck
Berry based rock-n-roll.
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