Lester Bangs - America's greatest rock journalist.
America's greatest rock journalist. Died way too young:
December 14, 1948 – April 30, 1982.
Lester Bangs is the folk hero of every freelance writer. In
the early 1970s I was inspired to write as much stuff as I could and send it in
to as many magazines and newspapers as possible dreaming of getting a break
like Mr. Bangs did in 1969.
Alas, all I did was collect an extremely impressive
collection of wonderfully worded rejection letters. His writing was awesome and
back in the day I tried to read everything he wrote... For years I saved a box
of his stuff from Rolling Stone and later, Creem.
His death on April 30, 1982 was a harsh lesson in reality
for all of us with a typewriter and a dream. For a classic adventure in
reading, try: "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a
Legendary Critic: Rock 'n' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'n'
Roll," published posthumously in 1987...
Lester Bangs Comes to Life Onstage in 'How to Be a Rock
Critic'
Inside the Los Angeles play based on the writings of the
cantankerous journalism icon
By Gavin Edwards June
16, 2015 Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/lester-bangs-comes-to-life-onstage-in-how-to-be-a-rock-critic-20150616
"A hero is a
goddamn stupid thing to have," legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said two
weeks ago. Actually, it was actor Erik Jensen, impersonating Bangs — his hero.
The setting was a rehearsal room at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in the Culver City
neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Jensen and director Jessica Blank were
working on the one-man play they wrote about Bangs (who died in 1982, at age
33), How to Be a Rock Critic. On a set depicting Bangs' living room, cluttered
with stacks of vinyl records and empty bottles of beer and cough syrup, Jensen
brought Bangs back to life, right down to the mustache and the DETROIT SUCKS
T-shirt: hectoring, joking, lecturing, fumbling towards a state of grace… http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/lester-bangs-comes-to-life-onstage-in-how-to-be-a-rock-critic-20150616
http://kevindayhoffart.blogspot.com/2015/06/lester-bangs-americas-greatest-rock.html
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