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Lester Bangs

Lester Bangs

Photograph by Roberta Bayley, 1976.

29 articles

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Exile in Detroit City: A Imaginary Conversation with Lester Bangs

Comment by Metal Mike Saunders, Brain Damage, 1 June 1974

SO WE FINALLY decided it was time to come to terms with Lester Bangs... ...

Epistle to a Young Critic: A Letter from Lester Bangs, February 1975

Letter by Lester Bangs, unpublished, February 1975

Thirty years ago, RBP contributor Susan (then Suzan) Compo was an apprentice punkette and aspiring rock scribe living in Tustin, California. An avid reader of ...

The Clash: Clash City Rockers On Tour

Report by Kris Needs, ZigZag, December 1977

DERBY KING'S HALL. The thickset geezer with the appearance of a frustrated rugby player – too short to make the scrum but just as tough ...

Everyone's a rock critic: The lost Lester Bangs interview

Interview by uncredited writer, unpublished, 1980

FOLLOWING the release of Blondie, Lester Bangs was interviewed for a radio program called News Blimp. A copy of the tape was sent to me ...

Lester Bangs: 'Let It Blurt'/'Live' (Spy 45)

Review by Richard Riegel, Creem, February 1980

Lester Bangs Walks It Like He Talks It ...

Blondie by Lester Bangs (Fireside/Simon and Schuster)

Book Review by Robot A. Hull, Creem, October 1980

Lester Bangs One Out ...

Lester Bangs: Jook Savages on the Brazos (Live Wire Records)

Review by Byron Coley, L.A. Weekly, 7 May 1982

Lester Bangs Writes a Good 'Un ...

Lester Bangs: Ballad of a Loudhearted Man

Obituary by Nick Kent, New Musical Express, 15 May 1982

"Lester Bangs is the rock critic's rock critic, a man gifted verbally in much the same way that James Brown is gifted as a dancer. ...

Lester Bangs: 1948-1982

Obituary by Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 10 June 1982

  NEW YORK CITY ...

The Immortal Lester Bangs

Obituary by Robot A. Hull, Unicorn Times, July 1982

"...but there is a death in the balance and you better look long and hard at it, you stupid fuckheads, you who treat life as ...

Lester Bangs, R.I.P.

Obituary by Ira Robbins, Trouser Press, August 1982

LESTER BANGS, whose writings probably influenced the style and outlook of countless rock critics, died in his New York apartment on April 30 at the ...

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. By Lester Bangs. Introduction by Greil Marcus. (Random House; 392 pages; $19.95 hardcover.)

Book Review by Mark Dery, L.A. Weekly, 24 December 1987

Bang's Big Theory ...

Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs, edited by Greil Marcus (Heinemann £9.95)

Book Review by Jon Savage, The Observer, 10 July 1988

Inside outsider ...

Lester Bangs: Liberation Critic

Essay by Richard Riegel, Throat Culture, 1990

JAMMED INTO that soft-sided suitcase of guilts I've carried with me into my forties is the dull-but-persistent ache that I "owed" Lester Bangs a letter ...

Lester Bangs: Rock 'n' roll as literature, literature as rock 'n' roll.

Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, MOJO, March 1994

Whither Rock Gomorrah, the great gonzo hack's unpublished swansong? ...

Lester Bangs: Jook Savages

Memoir by Nick Tosches, The Nick Tosches Reader, 1995

LESTER BANGS, with whom I had drunk but whose writing I had never read, had died not long after Hellfire came out, in the spring ...

What ever happened to rock critic Paul Nelson? An Interview

Interview by Steven Ward, rockcritics.com, March 2000

ROCK WRITING WAS not the first choice of Paul Nelson. A pioneer of rock criticism, and one of its most talented practitioners, Nelson (who cites ...

Did Lester Bangs Die In Vain?

Book Review by Ira Robbins, salon.com, 4 April 2000

Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic By Jim DeRogatis, Broadway, 256 Pages ...

Lester Bangs: Rock 'n' Roll was the Big Bang

Retrospective by David Dalton, Gadfly, July 2000

FOR A LONG time, its shockwaves obliterated thought altogether. That was the great thing about it: it was anti-matter, it vaporized everything that wasn’t immediate, ...

Jim DeRogatis: Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs (Broadway Books/Bloomsbury)

Book Review by Charles Shaar Murray, Revolver, Spring 2000

WHO WAS Lester Bangs? He was a rock critic. To be more precise, he was a rock critic like Muhammad Ali was a boxer or ...

Loud Bangs and Bestial Noises

Essay by Mark Sinker, The Wire, September 2001

In the 20 years since Lester Bangs wrote his 'Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise', the multi-mediated world has largely assimilated the hostile sounds he espoused. ...

Cum on Read The Noise: An Interview with former Creem writer Robert Duncan

Interview by Steven Ward, rockcritics.com, October 2001

ROCK CRITIC Robert Duncan, a second generation Creem writer — he joined the magazine in the mid-'70s — is also the author of The Noise: Notes From a ...

Remembering Lester

Book Excerpt by Paul Gorman, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press, November 2001

"Everybody's a rock critic." – Lester Bangs ...

Lester Bangs: Pills And Thrills

Retrospective by Nick Kent, The Guardian, 12 April 2002

ALTHOUGH HIS NAME is already starting to be listed among the ranks of the elite late 20th-century literary trailblazers, Lester Bangs – the fragile-hearted, drunken ...

My Black Pages: Lester Bangs' Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste

Book Review by Don Waller, LA CityBeat, 21 August 2003

BACK FROM THE dead and bigger than ever! As a writer – hell, more importantly, as a reader – the Editorial We wuz turnin' cataleptic ...

Lester Bangs: Joy And Rage Of A Dishevelled Rock Critic

Book Review by Charles Shaar Murray, The Independent, 23 September 2003

Mainlines, Blood Feasts And Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader Lester Bangs; ed. John Morthland (Serpent's Tail; £9.99) ...

Great Lig in the Sky: The 1973 Rock Writers Convention

Retrospective and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, June 2006

ON MEMORIAL DAY weekend in May 1973, over a hundred of the leading rock writers of the day flew into Memphis, Tennessee, for 72 hours ...

Lester Bangs at Home

Memoir by Richard Riegel, unpublished, May 2009

NOTE: I wrote this mini-memoir for one of the neo-Creem projects of recent years, but it wasn't used. ...

Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lester Bangs and Almost Famous

Retrospective by Jaan Uhelszki, Spin, 3 February 2014

WHEN PHILIP Seymour Hoffman died Sunday of an apparent overdose in his Greenwich Village apartment, it was like losing Lester Bangs all over again. ...

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