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Topic: Lester Bangs

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	Guardian Unlimited \| Archive Search
		Bangs, if he were he still alive, would certainly have had reservations about being depicted in a film where the spirit of 1970s rock'n'roll is evoked through a scene in which a fictional rock band bond on their tour bus by singing along to an Elton John track.
		Bangs hoped that New York would provide him with the inspiration to write the literary masterpiece his admirers were all waiting to read, but by the late 1970s his drinking and drug abuse were destroying too many brain cells.
		Bangs and Kerouac were genuine soul-brothers from different eras - both damaged by suffocating mothers, both obsessed with music and literature as twin avenues for spiritual transcendence, both chronic alcoholics and hopeless romantics incapable of sustaining a healthy love affair.
	www.guardian.co.uk /Archive/Article/0,4273,4391826,00.html (2486 words)

	PopMatters Music Feature \| Burying Lester Bangs
		Frequently taking Bangs as a role model, they fill countless pages, virtual and otherwise, with self-righteous, narcissistic logorrhea, the implicit assumptions being that true genius needs no editing, you can never be too nasty, and the focus rightfully belongs on the critic instead of the nominal subject of the piece.
		Lester Bangs was unquestionably a gifted writer, one who displayed his talent at a tender age, but like many precocious children, he continued his attempts to impress with exhibitionist flash far past the point good taste would recommend.
		Bangs did so as a young man idolizing Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, then became an idol to his readers, then was terrified by what happened to his friend Peter Laughner, and finally died in an unsuccessful attempt to clean himself up.
	www.popmatters.com /music/features/031105-lesterbangs.shtml (2087 words)

	Words On Words/Almost Lester Bangs
		Bangs, who was known to slurp cough syrup and died of an apparently accidental Darvon overdose in 1982, may have been Crowe's mentor, but probably would have been displeased with the movie.
		Bangs first emerged as a reviewer for Rolling Stone - decades before their discovery of fashion and boy bands - back when they were on the cutting edge of the emergent counterculture.
		Bangs was clearly pleased not to have to be ``on'' and acting like Lester Bangs, the Wild Man of Rock.
	www.wordsonwords.com /reviews/AlmostLester.html (901 words)

	Everyone's a Rock Critic: Lester Bangs (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Bangs: Yeah...Well, I wrote a novel in 1968 when I was in junior college called Drug Punk about drinking Romilar cough syrup, but this is the first book I've written that's been published.
		Bangs: I mean, okay, I edited Creem magazine for five years, and we had, like hundreds of thousands of readers who really dug it that we were telling Dylan and the Stones and all these people to go jump in the lake.
		Bangs: Well, after making it incredibly hard for me to do it, they told me they liked it, and since the book has come out I've been over to Chris and Debbie's apartment, you know, and interviewed Chris for my next book, and I guess relations are friendly, I don't know.
	www.rockcritics.com /interview/lesterbangs.html (3088 words)

	Did Lester Bangs die in vain? - Salon (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		At his best, Bangs was one of the few rock journalists -- but by no means the only one -- who could make you feel the urgent need to hear a record you hadn't known existed, or convince you that you understood the person who recorded it.
		Always ready to call their bluffs, Bangs faced his subjects -- like Lou Reed, with whom he conducted a lengthy and highly amusing pissing contest -- as a peer and expected them to do the same.
		Bangs was the precociously creative son of a devout Jehovah's Witness, raised in abject cultural poverty in Southern California.
	dir.salon.com /ent/music/feature/2000/04/04/bangs (740 words)

	Lester Bangs tribute
		Lester discussed the music with his readers, he shared his discoveries, and he approached the reader with the enthusiasm of a friend, not a Big Shot Rock Critic.
		Bangs wrote "there is more than a little of what killed Peter in me" and that statement resonated, loudly and clearly: It also applied to me. Bangs asserted that Laughner died "in part because he wanted to be Lou Reed".
		Bangs), and it wouldn't be until I was much older and more able to grasp the enormity of Bangs contribution to, not only music writing, but writing itself, that I became well versed in the book of Bangs.
	www.furious.com /perfect/lesterbangstribute.html (1303 words)

	Let It Blurt - bio of Lester Bangs
		Lester's early writing influences are discussed (Ginsberg, Kerouac and the usual suspects) and the reader sees him come of age into the seventies where magazines such as Rolling Stone and Creem are starting to take shape.
		As was documented in Bangs recent appearance in the film "Almost Famous" (in the capable form of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) Bangs was constantly wrestling with staying pure to his roots and not "selling out" and he applied that same harsh criterion to those he critiqued.
		DeRogatis (who was the last person to interview Lester alive) creates a compelling read about an era of rock history that's just now becoming "historic." And it's not far fetched to think that in death, Lester Bangs may be greater than he was in life.
	www.forbisthemighty.com /pages/let_it_blurt.htm (668 words)

	Lester Bangs - Biography - AOL Music
		Lester himself said, "music is about feeling, passion, love, anger, joy, fear, hope, lust, emotion delivered in its most powerful and direct in whatever form." All of that comes through in his recorded work, to a point.
		I don't think that Lester's music, some of which is very good, was able to replicate the same emotional intensity of his best written work.
		Perhaps that's the difference between being a member of a band and being a solo performer, but Lester Bangs the musician was not an embarrassment; even when his muse failed him, his gut feelings more than made up for it.
	music.aol.com /artist/lester-bangs/143845/biography (333 words)

	Gadfly Online.
		Lester was unsparing in his scorn for phoniness and the second-rate, but his purest venom was reserved for fallen idols (and none of these jerks ever lived up to Lester's rigorous standards).
		Lester's persona, like that of Hunter Thompson, leapt out of his writing with all the graphic zeal of R. Crumb's Desperate Character (this effect was reinforced by the fact that Crumb designed Creem's Boy Howdy milk bottle logo and drew several covers for the magazine).
		Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches formed the core group that was frequently augmented by James Walcott and other talented layabouts.
	www.gadflyonline.com /archive-lesterbangs.html (3586 words)

	Dancing About Architecture: Lester Bangs Essay
		Rock and roll was far from dead in 1981, but Bangs had fallen in love with rock and roll, and at the age of 33 he felt abandoned by it.
		Lester Bangs (hereafter referred to simply as Lester) was born in 1948 and raised a Jehovah's Witness in California.
		Lester could take the opposite approach too; his 1977 obituary for founding Pere Ubu member Peter Laughner is poignant, beginning with a simple sentence - "Peter Laughner is dead" - and following it with Laughner's drug history and sordid life, in which Lester sees similarities to his own.
	www.dancingaboutarc.com /essays/bangsessay.html (1285 words)

	Lester Bangs and the Delinquents
		Lester Bangs recorded an album with the Austin, Texas base Punk group "The Delinquents" in 1980, entitled "Jook Savages on the Brazos".
		Lester lives on in the biographical book "Let it Blurt, the Life and Times of Lester Bangs" by Jim DeRogatis who was influenced so much by Bangs that he became a writer for Rolling Stone and was fired as well.
		Whether you hate or love Lester Bangs, he must be remember as one who brought the musician down to earth and his writings for the most part are pure poetry.
	www.lesterbangs.50megs.com (290 words)

	Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic - Jim DeRogatis
		While even the brightest lights of his profession were awkwardly grafting intellectual, sociopolitical and stylistic frames onto rock 'n' roll, sometimes brilliantly if never wholly convincingly, Bangs' pieces burned with a palpable obsession to delve beneath the surface noise and dredge up something both primal and exalted in the music he loved.
		The standard line amongst Bangs obsessives is that he wrote more like a rock star than a rock critic, which is not strictly true; if anything, his pharmaceutically-fueled run-on sentences and long, winding cadences owed much more to jazz (and the jazz-crazed writings of the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac).
		Bangs wrote his most influential work in the early '70s, a fallow, listless era for rock 'n' roll.
	www.culturevulture.net /Books/LetItBlurt.htm (746 words)

	village voice > news > The Right to Be Wrong by Richard Hell
		Lester was this big, swaying, cross-eyed, reeking drooler, smiling and smiling through his crummy stained mustache, trying to corner me with incessant babble somewhere in the dark at CBGB's, 1976 or so.
		Lester was lovable and perceptive, but the writing is wired thinking-aloud; it's pure process, and my feeling is that Lester had too many blind spots and neuroses for writing that depends so much for its value on the shapeliness of his mind and reasoning.
		Lester was large and he was interested in doing what was right—which sometimes entailed willfully offending those whose values he opposed—not merely being right in his taste and musical standards.
	www.villagevoice.com /issues/0333/hell.php (1018 words)

	westword.com \| Music \| Bang! Bang! You're Alive (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Lester Bangs, pictured in Michigan in 1975, invented a new language of music criticism.
		Bangs prolonged the big nihilist's notoriety in the late '60s when hippies twirled psychedelic supreme and grooviness filled the predictable airwaves.
		Bangs to parade her son around on a leash wearing placards with apocalyptic slogans.
	www.westword.com /Issues/2000-06-08/music/music2.html (651 words)

	Amazon.de: Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic: English Books: Jim ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Traces the life of visionary rock critic Lester Bangs from his childhood in Southern California to his untimely death at the age of thirty-three, describing his place in the turbulent rock music culture of the 1970s.
		I was no fan of Lester Bangs' critical ravings when he was alive, but you don't have to be to be hooked by Jim Derogatis' bio of the man. He captures Bangs in all his high and low moments with an eye for detail and with great empathy, but without blinders on.
		Lester was a handful (he was a hellacious housemate), but he was also a funny, sweet and sensitive man...an amazing writer and thinker.
	www.amazon.de /Let-Blurt-Lester-Americas-Greatest/dp/0767905091 (992 words)

	Lester Bangs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Bangs died in New York, overdosing (through drug interaction) after treating a cold with Darvon and Valium.
		Bangs is also mentioned in the 1981 Ramones track "It's Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 World)" from the album Pleasant Dreams.
		Bangs is depicted by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous (2000), in which a budding music journalist idolizes him.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Lester_Bangs (1005 words)

	R A I N T A X I o n l i n e Winter 2003 - Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
		To write rock criticism having never read the work of the late Lester Bangs is a bit like attempting to ignite an audience never having heard of Iggy Pop: you can do it, but you'll have no idea how much better your predecessor was.
		Bangs, in short, was more than a rock critic; he was a writer, in the truest sense of the word.
		It is tempting to wonder, because if Bangs were still around, rock critics might actually inflame passions and fuel debate rather than support a status-quo party line for fear of their own cool index.
	www.raintaxi.com /online/2003winter/bangs.shtml (584 words)

	Who is the next Lester Bangs? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		The Lester Bangs wannabes are tiresome, the Simon Reynolds wannabes are worse.
		Poor Lester Bangs, a brilliant, uneven writer (the second anthology gives a much better sense of what it was like reading him at the time than the first, which is way too consistent) who somehow has become, in death, elevated to a godhead.
		Lester Bangs was a man! You got no right to criticize what he was swingin'.
	ilx.wh3rd.net /thread.php?msgid=4211435 (4893 words)

	* Dusted Features [ Crochety Nagging: Notes on Lester Bangs ] *
		What with hindsight being 20/20 and all, sifting through the work of Lester Bangs can be a daunting proposition mostly because of the place he holds in the world of rock criticism.
		Bangs made no effort to codify one particular style or ideology, but rather to approach as many as he could.
		But at the end of the day music critics, like critics of any art form in general, are confronted with the fact that much of our time is spent trying to convey what are personal moments of introspection and meaning to a populous much better suited for figuring that stuff out on their own.
	www.dustedmagazine.com /features/145 (1711 words)

	Amazon.ca: Let It Blurt: the Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic: Books: Jim Derogatis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Bangs agitated in the seventies for sounds that were harsher, louder, more electric, and more alive, in the course of which he charted and defined the aesthetics of heavy metal and punk.
		The first surprise is that Lester had a sad life from his very youth, struggling against his mother dedication to the Jehovas witnesses and the symbolic death of his father.
		And Lester through the years loved by women and not able to decipher true love, trying to become a rock musician when he was a star on his own is wasting his life in front of us thanks to booze and substances...
	www.amazon.ca /Let-Blurt-Lester-Americas-Greatest/dp/0767905091 (1487 words)

	Words On Words/Lester Bangs
		Where Bangs was clownish and an unashamed fanboy, Meltzer, though frequently funnier than Bangs, often cited philosophers and arcane sources beyond the typical scope of Uriah Heep fans.
		Bangs, Meltzer, Greg Shaw, Nick Tosches, John Mendelssohn, Lenny Kaye, a pre-Arista Patti Smith and Rob Tyner, lead singer of MC5 (a Detroit band), showed up, along with Altman and Fernbacher, having forfeited their amateur status by selling reviews to Creem.
		Bangs and some of the others were billeted in a dormitory at Buffalo State.
	www.wordsonwords.com /reviews/LesterBangs.html (997 words)

	Lester Bangs - Music Books at Randy's Rodeo
		Lester Bangs achieved - in death if not in life - something no other rock critic ever has: stardom.
		In another sense, Bangs' status as a legend is a bit of a joke (one he certainly would appreciate).
		Bang's friend and colleague, Greil Marcus, maintains that a critic's primary obligation is to tell the truth.
	www.randysrodeo.com /books/bangs.php (654 words)

	Lester Bangs: 1949-1982 (via CobWeb/3.1 planetlab2.cs.virginia.edu) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		This is less a book about Blondie, although that's most of the material, than it is a book about the state of rock in 1970's, the origins of punk, and the insane journalism it inspired, of which Mr.
		When Lemmy of Motorhead was called old he said he was glad he was old becuase younger people missed a lot of great music and a lot of great times and he pitied them.
		Rock criticism as a form was born and bred in the mid-and late ’60s, and the most exciting voices of that epoch belonged to a triumvirate that James Wolcott later dubbed “the Noise Boys” — Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches and the late Lester Bangs.
	www.newsgarden.org.cob-web.org:8888 /chatters/homepages/alllie/bangs.shtml (872 words)

	"Some sliver of authenticity from the truckloads of stinking garbage" - Salon
		I was sorely tempted, after reading the first 50 pages of "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste," a new collection of ranting and raving from the late, much-lamented rock critic Lester Bangs, to pull out my old Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter from the closet where it is moldering and start BANGING away.
		Sure, it might be harder than ever before to push our way through the shrouds obscuring us from the real shit, to try to pry out some sliver of authenticity from the truckloads and truckloads of odious stinking garbage that surrounds us at every remove, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the effort.
		Lester on Black Sabbath is a revelation, Lester on punk is magisterial, Lester on Jamaica is a tour de force of brutal honesty.
	dir.salon.com /story/books/review/2003/09/03/bangs/index.html (381 words)

	Glide Magazine Reviews - Let It Blurt: The Life & Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic
		As the sub-title of this book points out, many people in the know consider Lester Bangs to be the best there ever was, which is a bold statement considering how many great ones there were in the golden age of the music press.
		Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous”) lived like a maniac: lots of drinks, lots of drugs (Romilar was his poison of choice), lots of days in a row without showering and terrible eating habits, yet he was the king of his domain.
		Not to be lost in the hazy shuffle and fast times of Bangs is the fact that he was a passionate, incredibly talented writer with fresh concepts and a knack for saying what you’ve always known but never thought of.
	www.glidemagazine.com /5/reviews503.html (790 words)

	Lester Bangs- Last interview
		Lester Bangs was the great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock writing- its Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one.
		We were winded by the time we made the climb up to his three-room apartment, which was dominated by thousands of albums and piles of trash- an exaggerated version of every teenaged rock fan's lair, though its occupant at the time was thirty-three years old.
		Lester Bangs: I remember the first interview I did with Charlie Mingus, and it was like this kind of.
	www.furious.com /perfect/lesterbangs.html (2045 words)

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