I have a feeling that the interview with Lester was edited just to get that tidy soundbite about Ferry — not that Lester didn’t mean it, but that it had been only part of a much more complex response to Ferry’s music. Yet his expression of disappointment with Ferry is classically Bangsian, too — he went through this same thing with his favorites like Lou Reed, the Stones, Van Morrison, etc., in which he built up tremendous belief in the artists, which they then couldn’t possibly sustain over every album release. I think in a way Lester was acting out this expectations-vs.-reality drama as a proxy for his own writing, for his frustration that he kept doing rock criticism over and over when he seemed to contain multitudes of novels. Maybe.

For what it’s worth, when I first met Lester in the summer of 1974, he played Roxy Music’s *Stranded* album for me, and commented repeatedly how “rich” the music was.

He’s right about Ferry’s utter blandness if not non-existence as a person and Ferry’s indifference to rock music recorded after, oh, 1970; but we should point out that Bangs accepted his ambivalence towards Ferry as the decade ended. There’s a dead-on passage in that last published miscellany in which he compares Debbie Harry’s approach vs Ferry’s — Ferry’s manipulation of surfaces still produced extremely moving music, according to Bangs. That he’s dead-wrong about Debbie is a subject for another time.