Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs Book

Critics tend to lead fairly boring, sedentary lives. Infamous rock critic Lester Bangs, when he sat still long enough, thumped out 16 crackling pages an hour for the likes of Rolling Stone and Creem. His prose was distinctively streetwise, indulgent, corrosive and humane, the result of seeing rock'n'roll as an attitude rather than a style. Grounded in jazz masters such as Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, he championed the so-called alternative canon: Velvet Underground, MC5, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. His spats with his idol Lou Reed were legendary. The singer once said of Bangs, "He's fat and he's got a moustache. I wouldn't s**t in Lester's nose". Like the music he revered, he came from the suburbs, the product of an alcoholic father and a devout Jehovah's Witness mother. He took his inspiration as a writer from the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac, with more than a nod to Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski. Throughout his life, he hankered after creating the Great American Novel but also wanted to be a musician and the conflict sapped energies which were constantly maintained through a nauseous brew of cough syrups, drugs and alcohol. Jim DeRogatis, early on in his labour of love, Let It Blurt, shrewdly relates the tale of when Bangs went on stage with the J Geils Band in 1974 and tapped away at a typewriter in front of 13,000 people. It was the epitome of his life--and he typed nonsense. Bangs would have been in his element with the Internet; as it was, he created the blueprint for a generation of bilious music journalists such as Julie Burchill and Nick Kent, whose book The Dark Stuff treads similarly rewarding ground. DeRogatis, who was the last person to interview Bangs before he died in 1982, has diligently undertaken prodigious research (though over 100 pages of appendices is too much) to reconstitute a life that its owner seemed determined to throw away. Read alongside Bangs' collected journalism Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the American cousin of Charles Shaar Murray's Shots from the Hip, to catch the true spirit of his mastery of a vitally ephemeral medium. But, remember, as the song goes, "It's Only Rock'n'Roll". --David VincentRead More