Almost Famous (Lester Bangs)
You cannot make friends with the rock stars. If you’re gonna be a true journalist. If you’re a rock journalist, first, you will never get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. Fuckin nothing about you that’s controversial man. It’s gonna get ugly.And they’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls, they’ll try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs… I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously And righteously dumb. Now, you’re smart enough to know that. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day that it ceases to be real, right? And then it just becomes an industry of…cool. I’m tellin’ you, you’re coming along at a very dangerous time for rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, the war is over. They won. And 99% of what passes for rock ‘n’ roll these days, silence is more compelling. That’s why I think you should just turn around and go back, you know, and be a lawyer or something. But I can tell from your face that you won’t. I can give you 35 bucks. Give me a thousand words on Black Sabbath.