There's something I remember reading. It was a quote by Lou Reed on why Lester Bangs had turned on him so hard. Lou said something along the lines that when someone worships you as a god, it can be disappointing when they find out how human you are. It was rare enough for him to speak cordially to the press, much less saying something gracious about a journalist.
As for "something along the lines of" I have no choice but to paraphrase. The actual quote, or the context it came in, is nowhere to be found. Now I'm not sure whether I first read it online or offline, but it seems like something that should be on the internet somewhere or other. But apparently it isn't.
2 comments:
Okay, there's no doubt Lou Reed was a very talented prick. We all knew who he was. I can't say the same for Lester Bangs who was never in the same class as genius rockstars. Of course, we'll never know if Lester would have outgrown his obsession with Lou since wikipedia tells us he died at the age of 33 in 1982. The bio also mentioned him being fired by Rolling Stone because he'd written a cruel article about Canned Heat.
We get your point about remembered things no longer available or at least findable on the internet. Google is largely to blame for having monetized searches - and of course a number of out of the way websites have simply gone.
I remembered Lester Minow's speech about tv being a 'vast wasteland'. If you substitute the word 'internet' whenever 'television' is named you get a pretty strong impression things haven't changed much since 1961.
https://www.janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastland.htm
There's a reason they say to never meet your heroes. So many talented or otherwise inspiring people are jerks in person, although I'm sure there are exceptions. Reed's thing is that he appears to have been extraordinarily thin-skinned (the better to do intravenous drugs?) As for Lester Bangs I've read a number of his pieces and he could be extremely funny. He could also be very unfair and some of the things he wrote probably due verge on slander. My impression is that he wanted to bust out of rock criticism and do fiction and/or serious nonfiction, but never quite made the leap while he was alive.
I've run experiments where I've found that sometimes direct, accurate, word-for-word quotes don't bring results on the thing you're quoting, so Google is definitely doing some shenanigans. As for the out of the way website, I wonder how much of that is phones. When everybody surfed the web on computers with full keyboards using all ten fingers they might have gone to more interesting places.
I've read the words surrounding "vast wasteland" before. The six principles he lays out are new to me, and might be more useful.
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