"drunk kids just graduated from high school and taunt as high tension wires just straining out of their bucket seats champing at the bit bursting up into summer like swimmers coming up from a dive to break the surface and shoot half out of the water and grin at the sun."
Poor White Trash Rampant on a Field of Garbage
Fiction
Nonfiction
Dirty Words (Rating-R)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Poetry
Nested Frames
A Few of My Favorite Things
Birdland With Lester Bangs
Lester tries to live the dream.
Computer World [IMPORT] by Kraftwerk

Transformer [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] by Lou Reed
I first heard this on night when I was up studing for a test. I laughed so hard I almost choked. :"Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side."

 

Lester Bangs
1949 -1982

"The main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed."
     
 
Lester Bangs
(Kiss, Kiss!! I miss you Lester!)
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste : A Lester Bangs Reader
Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic by Jim Derogatis
Blondie by
Lester Bangs

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. Bangs was a prime example. The man COULD write.
 
 

 

 

Once upon a time there was a music called rock n' roll. You've probably heard of it. Rock n' roll had the magical power to make people happy. You could go to the store and, for the price of a black plastic disk, buy happiness. At least sometimes. Then a group of people known as rock critics appeared and claimed they could identify which records that were magic or at least "good." They generally couldn't but were often amusing anyway. Many of the more iconoclastic members of this brotherhood were published in a magazine called CREEM including one who was magic himself. He's generally given credit for naming "Heavy Metal" music and defining the ethos of punk before there was punk. He could nail the way we felt about music and life, crystallize it into such prose that it touched our hearts. He could also make us fall down laughing by ridiculing our rock idols. He thrilled us and infuriated rock stars. His name was Lester Bangs. He welded his wit not like a saber but like a pin and used it to burst bubbles of arrogance and pretension. No rock star's ego was safe with him in the world. We need him today, but alas, he died in 1982, died alone, died of the flu and darvon when none of his "friends" cared enough for his genius to keep him alive.

You might have seen Bangs depicted in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. How accurate the depiction was I don't know but I do know that I looked forward to my Creem magazine every month, read it cover to cover, read the articles and reviews Bangs wrote first and read them smiling. I know he made me happy.I even know that I only remember certain rock groups because he took the time to skewer them. All this, alas, was long ago. 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. If you missed those times and Lester Bangs I pity you too.

"drunk kids just graduated from high school and taunt as high tension wires just straining out of their bucket seats champing at the bit bursting up into summer like swimmers coming up from a dive to break the surface and shoot half out of the water and grin at the sun."

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, p.62

"I think the whole reason pop music was invented in the first place was to vent sick emotions in a deceptively lulling form. They were literally explosive with all the pent-up lust and fear and guilt and dread and hate and resentment and confusion. And it gave a kind of anarchic power, which can still move us."

Blondie by Lester Bangs, p.70

"The main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed."

Blondie by Lester Bangs, p.70

Pills and thrills : He was called the world's greatest rock writer. Twenty years ago this month, he swallowed a cocktail of drugs, fell into a coma and died. Nick Kent remembers the brilliant, tortured Lester Bangs...Kurt Cobain's diaries, soon to be published, include long passages in which the Nirvana singer directly addresses Bangs's spirit, seeking advice on how to become a better musician.

The Noise Boys : Middle-aged obsessives with long memories may recall an era when writing about rock & roll was a truly transgressive act. 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. These style-flashing outlaws raised the bar of outrage so high in their heyday that others have been content to limbo under it ever since.

Kraftwerk | 1975 - by Lester Bangs : As is well known, it was the Germans who invented methamphetamine, which of all accessible tools has brought human beings within the dosest twitch of machinehood, and without methamphetamine we would never have had such high plasma marks of the counterculture as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Blue Cheer, Cream, and Creem. The Reich never died, it just reincarnated in American archetypes ground out by hollow-eyed, jerky-fingered mannikins locked into their typewriters and guitars like rhinoceroses copulating....

Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic : The thing about Bangs was that his writing was wild
enough to constantly inhabit the reader’s mind; why else would you be reading the biography of a rock critic if you hadn’t already known something of his work?


 

 
   

Copyright Alllie 2002