Last summer, I saw
How To B A Rock Critic,
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's play about Lester Bangs,
at the 1700 Theater at Steppenwolf.
I wrote then that I was on the fence about the performance, "somewhere between my gratitude for Blank and Jensen's
commitment to a great writer and my my skepticism about whether music
writing can be fully dramatized." Meanwhile, I'd wondered what Greil Marcus—Bangs's friend and editor—thought of the play. He recently weighed in in his
"Real Life Rock Top 10" column, these days running in
The Village Voice:
A marvelously fast and convincing
one-man play, set in Bangs’s disheveled New York apartment, which the
late critic (1948–82) finds full of people to whom he proceeds to act
out what he does and why. The structure is, interestingly, on a parallel
with Springsteen on Broadway—riffing through Bangs’s work as dialogue, instead of stopping to sing a
song as Springsteen does to mark a point in his life, Jensen walks over
to a phonograph, puts on a record, and talks over it. The music
instantly confirms whatever case he’s making: The sound that comes out
is so rich it’s as if you’ve never heard Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been
Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” or Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue”
before.
Blank and Jensen get to the heart of
the matter: The play is about Bangs’s struggle to believe that music can
not so much save his soul as allow him, through signal moments of
music, to construct a soul in which he might want to live, and his
struggle to believe that he can pass that truth on to other people. For
Lester, all good music, or all real music, was soul music. It didn’t
matter if it was the nerd soul of White Witch or the heroic soul of Lou
Reed, the doomed soul of Otis Rush or the intellectual soul of Charles
Mingus. Because it was never absolute that what they had, could
he write about it, would truly come to him, his work was full of
longing, revelation, self-mockery, and pain. Jensen gets it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment