Almost Lester Bangs:
Cameron Crowe, Almost Famous & The Birth of Uncool

By Claude Iosso

Rock’n’roll won’t set you free, but Lester Bangs could.

Sure, music is great (this is a rock e-zine after all). It can inspire you in the good times, the gaudy garland when life is a Christmas tree. It can sustain you in lean times, a 200-watt bulb when life is dark. But when the CD stops spinning, you’ll still be you, with all the successes and failures you had before.

Bangs, the legendary rock critic featured prominently in Cameron Crowe’s new movie Almost Famous, would pull you off the couch where you’re anesthetizing yourself with late-night television and tell you to take a walk. On the dark streets you would live, suddenly alert to the danger of teen hoodlums and the ache of unfulfillment in your heart.

Actually, Lester would probably tell you to play Astral Weeks and shut up, but the celluloid Bangs would counsel you to be honest with yourself, no matter how brutal that truth might be. That’s the message I drew from Almost Famous, a film about the birth of uncool on a rock tour.

The movie follows William Miller (Patrick Fugit), who at age 15 has bluffed his way into a glorious assignment, covering a band on the rise called Stillwater for Rolling Stone. It’s a blatantly autobiographical film for Crowe, who indeed joined the magazine’s staff as a teenager in the 1970s. I expected it to be on some level a self-congratulatory tale about a preternaturally clever kid who sees through all the bullshit. I’m pleased to report that the kid is alright, endearingly naive and only stumbling onto wisdom with the help of Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

For those of you who know Lester Bangs as just one of the quirky names tossed out in R.E.M.’s “End of the World,” he was a feverishly brilliant writer who in the 1970s tore away the tattered shower curtain of objectivity critics tried to hide behind. Bangs wrote hundreds of reviews for Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice. After years of alcohol and drug abuse, he died at 33 in 1982.

Hoffman, who seems to pop up in every good indie film these days, does Bangs proud, whipping off hilarious one-liners in a casual deadpan. When young William admits that his classmates hate him, Bangs shrugs. “You’ll meet them again, on their way to the middle,” he says. Bangs dispenses grand truths like a wayward guru, a record-lined den his mountain top.

As a rock critic myself, I was compelled to learn more about Bangs. Would he really have preached what the movie version does? I ran out and bought Bangs’ collection of essays, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. I haven’t read enough to know whether Crowe lifted from Bangs’ writings or just used the Bangs character to articulate his own message, but I’ve got something more important to tell you.

Bangs is fucking genius! I’m not the first person to figure this out, but I want to make sure I’m not the last. Bangs rambles all over the place in his essays, telling you about what drugs he’s using and replaying his exchanges with his psychiatrist. He coined the word “punk” to describe the anti-establishment garage rock of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but his prose is crammed with slang terms he must have made up. “Yaksak,” “kitschvat” and “zit-lumpen” are just some of the words that floated in Bangs’ muddy stream of conscious.

You want daring? In a review of a Sham 69 record Bangs ends every one of his sentences with an exclamation point. Here’s a sample: “Wow! His eyes bulge! He’s pissed off! So am I! Who isn’t! But piss stinks different here! We’ve all got our causes!”

Bangs certainly compares to Hunter S. Thompson in his excesses, but he reminded me of Mark Twain also. He likes to be funny sometimes and his observations reach beyond music to the comic vagaries of life.

I was going to write a sober evaluation of Almost Famous, despite the editor’s call for a broader, more personal essay. Neutral reviews are what I’ve done, and they can be less embarrassing. That was before I read Bangs and learned about the path to glory.

It’s election day and I should wrap this up so I can get informed and vote in the primary. I’m feeling mild despair though. That damned senatorial race. Deborah Senn should be my hero for battling the most odious businesses out there, the insurance companies, but she comes off like a shrill harridan. Meanwhile corporate friend Slade Gorton looks so warm and avuncular. Big business must be casting its invisible net over my consciousness, subtly but insistently squeezing my testicles.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Bangs isn’t the only thing good about Almost Famous. It’s a classic journey story. William, a lonely geek nearing high school graduation, finds more adventure than he ever dared hope for when the members of Stillwater, impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of their work, invites him to join them on their national tour.

The movie reminded me of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as William discovers an exciting new world utterly foreign from the one tightly controlled by his strict mother. Like Charlie in Willy Wonka, William struggles to find his moral bearings in unfamiliar terrain crowded with bad examples. I know Willy Wonka is a children’s movie, but Almost Famous possesses a similar innocence.

Crowe consulted his wife Nancy Wilson (formerly of Heart) and Peter Frampton, and Stillwater’s tour scene is convincing, complete with the sex and drugs. Fortunately, the lens doesn’t linger on the drinking and debauchery. I’m not a prude, but the illicit mayhem of rock tours has been covered in so many real and fictional accounts already that little new could be presented here.

As one would expect from a movie about a rock tour in 1973, there’s an abundance of music from that era. It sounds a lot better than I remembered. Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Yes, Fleetwood Mac and the Who are just a few from the long roster of AOR hitmakers Crowe honors. I have despised many of those bands for all their absurd pomp, but Crowe makes them look good, selecting songs that have a minimum of bombast and pretension. When Stillwater shamelessly sang along with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” on the tour bus, I was about ready to belt it out in the theater, and I don’t think I was alone.

Crowe is something of a modern-day Frank Capra, his movies promoting honesty and integrity against the world’s pressure to sell out. ...Say Anything, Singles and the high-profile Jerry Maguire are all films about good triumphing over evil, about guys learning how to be sweet. Almost Famous is no exception.

Bangs admonishes young William not to be friends with the rock stars he writes about. “Be honest and unmerciful,” Bangs intones.

William is starstruck though and finds this no easy task. He can hardly resist buddying up to Stillwater’s magnetic lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) and he quickly falls in love with a tantalizing 16-year-old groupie (Kate Hudson), who calls herself Penny Lane.

Still, Stillwater gives William plenty to writer about. Hammond repeatedly squabbles with lead singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee), and nearly quits the band. A big-time manager takes over Stillwater midway through the tour, promising a major payoff. Then band members tell all during a harrowing plane ride.

The casting is first-rate. Crudup is sufficiently strong and silent while Lee is hilariously intense as the insecure frontman. Fugit is enough of a no-name to excel in his spectator’s role. Frances McDormand, playing William’s mother, somehow manages to win the audience’s sympathy even as she angrily claims Simon and Garfunkel are drug addicts out to corrupt her children.

Almost Famous rambles a bit and there were times I enjoyed what I was watching, but couldn’t remember the point. It’s Bangs again who gives the movie coherence.

William calls the Creem critic in a panic, after Rolling Stone editors disgusted by the fawning tone of his notes threaten to scrap the story. Bangs sympathetically tells him that the false lure of friendship with his rock’n’roll heroes has dulled his journalistic edge.

“They make you think you’re cool. I know you, and you’re not cool,” Bangs tells William. These would be damning words from anyone else, but they constitute high praise from Bangs. In a speech that is the focal point of the entire movie, Bangs asserts that only uncool people, in their loneliness and yearning, are capable of creating great art.

At the end of the conversation, William thanks Bangs for being home. “I’m always home,” the critic answers. “I’m not cool.” Of course, so confident in his solitary confinement with the hi fi, Bangs ultimately appears very cool.

So William ends up learning the opposite of what one would expect. Instead of making a transition from nerd to slick fellow by association with long-haired rockers and loose women, William just learns to cope with who he really is. Posturing catches up with all of the main characters by the end of Almost Famous.

I knew a woman in college who said she wouldn’t answer the phone if someone called on a weekend night. She didn’t want anyone to know she was still home then. I still worry about that, but Lester Bangs has set me free. I can say right here and now that I’ll probably skip beers at the Elysian this Friday night so I can wrestle with the muses at home.

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