Ensayo

A Megatonic Journey with Lester Bangs - Shakin’ Street 
(Shakin’ Street Gazette #15, 10/10/74)
Lately I’ve noticed a new wrinkle on the American landscape: it seems as if there’s a whole generation of kids, each one younger than the last, all of whom live, breathe and dream of but one desire: “I want to be a rock critic when I grow up!” 
If that sounds condescending let it be known that I wasonce just like them; the only difference was that when I held such aspirations, the field was relatively uncluttered—it was practically nothing to barge right in and commence the slaughter—whereas now, of course, it’s so glutted that the last thing anybody should ever consider doing is entering this racket. In the first place, it doesn’t pay much and doesn’t lead anywhere in particular, so nomatter how successful you are at it, you’ll eventually have to decide what you’re going to do with your life anyway. In the second place, it’s basically just a racket in the first place, and not a particularly glorious one at that.  
It almost certainly won’t get you laid. (Rock critics are beginning to get groupies of a sort now, but most of them are the younger, aspiring rock critics—like the kindon Shakin’ Street—of one sex or another.) It won’t make you rich: the highest-paying magazine in the rock press still only pays thirty bucks a review, and most of the other magazines fall way below that. So you’ll never be able to make a living off of it. Nobody will come up to you in the street and say, “Hey, I recognize you! You’re Jon Landau! Man, that last review was really far out!” A lot ofpeople, in fact, will hate you and think you’re a pompous asshole just for expressing your opinions, and tell you so to your face.  
On the other side of the slug, though, are the benefits. Which are okay, if you don’t get taken in by them. The first big one is that if you stay at this stuff long enough you’ll start to get free records in the mail, and if you persevere even longer you may wind upon the promotional mailing lists of every company in the nation, which will not only save you a lot of money on payday and ensure that you’ll get to hear everything and anything you want, but help to pay the rent on occasion when you sell the albums spilling into your bathroom to local used records stores, at prices ranging from $.05 to over a dollar apiece. Plus on Christmas you don’t have tobuy anybody any presents if you don’t want to: just give your mother the new Barbra Steisand album Columbia sent you because Barbra’s trying to relate, your big sister one of the three copies of the new Carole King that you got in the mail, your little sister that Osmonds double live LP you never even opened because you’re too hip…all down the line, leaving you with enough money saved to stay fuckedup on good whiskey over the holidays this year.  
Another fringe benefit which will sooner or later accrue if you hew steadily on this jive ass scrawl, is that you will be invited to press parties for the opening of new acts in town. It helps to live in places like L.A. and New York, because they have more of them there; I know some people, in fact, who have almost literally kept themselves fromstarving for months at a time by eating dinner at a different press party every night. (I know other people who have made entire careers out of attending these things, but that’s a different story.) The food’s usually pretty good to magnificent, unless it’s some bluejeaned folkie and the company’s trying to be with-it by serving organic slop unfit for the innards of a sow; even in such an extremecase as that, though, you can content yourself with sopping up the booze, which is plentiful and usually of high quality. So even if you live at home or haven’t had any trouble lately keeping the wolf from the door, you can get drunk free a lot and that’s always a pleasure, even if you do usually have to sit through some shit like John Prine or Osibisa just for a few glasses of gin. Sure you’re...