Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader

Edited and with an introduction by John Morthland
Anchor Books, $15


It’s intriguing to wonder what the late Lester Bangs would make of his current high profile. He would undoubtedly be proud that his influence on journalism recalls that of his favorite band, the Velvet Underground, on music: His echoes are everywhere, but nobody really writes like him. (What he would make of his depiction in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous is another story: Philip Seymour Hoffman played him as a cuddly, avuncular type, an image at odds with the B.O.-plagued, alcoholic drug addict depicted in Jim DeRogatis’s superb 2000 Bangs biography, Let It Blurt.)

Most ’70s music criticism was flabby, self-indulgent blather that has aged dreadfully. Bangs was flabby and occasionally a little self-indulgent himself, but his writing was more often sharp, witty, acute and astute. In 2003, when a lot of his subjects are forgotten — did someone really name his band Wet Willie? — his prose leaps off the page.

Part of the pleasure is Bangs’s refusal to be awed by stardom; this is a writer who was fired by Rolling Stone for “consistently disrespecting musicians.” He quickly saw through Bob Marley’s fire-and-brimstone schtick, declaring him a “hippy.” Marley had it easy compared to George Harrison (“His position seems to be I’m Pathetic, But I Believe In Krishna”) and Lou Reed (“Hey Lou, why doncha start shooting speed again? Then you might come up with something good!”).

But Bangs’s writing was more than insults flying fast. It crackles with an infectious enthusiasm that can still send you scurrying to the record store. Occasionally, that’s when disappointment sets in: What Bangs had to say was often more interesting than the record he was saying it about.
—Alexis Petridis