This was the funniest book I've ever read. I suppose you have to be able to remember something of the late 60's and early 70's to think so, but there you have it. If you get a huge kick out of Lester Bangs, you'll love this book. It's not all about music, tho, in case that's an issue.

After it was reissued in '91, "Gulcher" was the main spark that sent me down the wayward path of becoming a rock critic--a horribly self-destructive vocation that I am proud to have all but escaped from since. Foisted my copy of the book upon some so-called friend a couple years later...still waiting for its return. Memories of the book remain fond, though.

This book is by far the best photo resource when hankerin' for a fantastic shot of the Debster. Buy it for the photos alone!

If you're a fan of rock'n'roll, you've got to read this. Although some of his pieces are quite absurd (and quite funny), Bangs has the ability to make every single word sound true and believable. After reading the piece on the Count Five, I searched all over the internet to find out about all these crazy records that they supposedly recorded. Of course, they only recorded one album, Psychotic Reactions, and records such as Cartesian Jetstream and Carburetor Dung don't exist, however much we wish they did. His piece on the Godz is entirely true however. Yes, there exists a song called "White Cat Heat" in which the band members are "yowling like a pack of alley cats in a fur-flying brawl." Bangs also have the ability to create highly moving pieces of work, such as his review of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and the piece titled John Contrane Lives. Add to that his great pieces on the Stooges and Lou Reed, and you've got one of the best books about music. Bangs was truly a gifted writer, and his early death was a great loss to all of us who love rock'n'roll.

What amazed me about this book was the skill with which Lester Bangs articulates how it feels to love rock and roll. His writing is funny and moving and personal. He writes about the 70's punk scene in a way that makes me wish I had been there. Every time he writes about a record or song, whether he likes it or not, I want to run out, find the record, and listen to it. High points for me were his accounts of interviewing Lou Reed and his reviews of a Barry White concert, Bowie's "Station to Station" and Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks".

I love Lester Bangs' unrestrained style: the passionate torrents of words, the extravagant metaphors and the unique insight. Above all, his contagious enthusiasm serves to drive one back to the music - to listen, enjoy and appreciate again and again.

Apparently this book does not contain all of his best work but I intensely enjoyed the tales of his various encounters with Lou Reed, the pieces on No Wave (Reasonable Guide To Horrible Noise), Peter Laughner, David Bowie, Kraftwerk, as well as his hilarious warnings against James Taylor and Barry White.

Just sometimes, he loses me when the writing becomes impenetrable and he goes off on too many tangents, as in pieces like "Fragments 1976 - 1982" and "Ten Post-Lib Role Models for the 80s" from the chapter titled Unpublishable. Where I do not agree with him, as in his (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?) endorsement of Reed's "Metal Machine Music," he still makes me laugh. Bangs would also have made a great novelist as is evident from the excerpt from Maggie May (1981).

To understand Lester and the background to this compilation, I recommend reading Jim DeRogatis' excellent biography "Let It Blurt" at the same time, as it also contains an impressive bibliography of his work and articles about him.

I look forward to more Big Bangs - more of his remarkable writings being made available in compilations.

This is a fan's book though it is not a hagiography of St Lester. DeRogatis had met Lester shortly before his death and met his friends, relatives, acquaintances, fellow rock-critics. The first surprise is that Lester had a sad life from his very youth, struggling against his mother dedication to the Jehovas witnesses and the symbolic death of his father.
We see Lester trying to become an artist, failing to write the novel he was dreaming of, achieving nevertheless to turn rock criticism in modern litterature. The author manages to recreate quite vividly the atmosphere of the legendary Creem mag offices, then when Lester moves to NYC the CBGB attitude is all there. And Lester through the years loved by women and not able to decipher true love, trying to become a rock musician when he was a star on his own is wasting his life in front of us thanks to booze and substances... This book is like some modern version of an antique greek tragedy and this suits well Lester Bangs, who was a true modern writer.

Like many martyrs, Lester Bangs did not die for his cause, he WAS his cause and he died. This book does his life justice, because it lets Lester's writing, actions and body odor tell the good and bad of his story. I didn't finish this book feeling Lester was a God. I finished it feeling like I'd met someone who reveled in his humanity to the point where everyone who knew him either loved or hated him for doing so. Never before have I been so inspired by a writer -- not from reading his work, appendix one is the first of his writings I've ever read in its entirety -- but from simply reading about how he lived his life. The freedom and zeal with which he so naturally lived and wrote was truly a gift to me though it may have been a curse for him.

Turning to the author, I think DeRogatis' strong point is definitely his exhaustive, perfectly detailed research. His prose -- nothing special beyond its dutiful journalistic clarity -- serves his years of investigation well. I guess when you're reading a book about a literary stylist like Lester, the biographer's writing style can pale in comparison to even the few short examples of Lester's writing included in the book. But perhaps that's just another instance of Lester's expansive personality overshadowing everything around him -- even the pages of his own biography.

This book tells the story of one of the greatest characters in rock and roll AND American culture. Lester belongs in the same league as Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac and Andy Kaufman (who, in certain pictures, I thought he eerily resembled) -- artists cursed with a singular voice who lived in a society that refused to let it blurt loud enough.

I give the book 5 stars because it's well done, but the book's subject is another matter.

I was a big fan of Lester Bangs in 1971-1974, when he was at Creem. One of his articles regarding his interview with Lou Reed (the one in which he refers to the interview as an attempt to bullfight a handball wall, or something like that - 1974?) was at that time one of the funniest things I'd read. He seemed to have great humor then.

I sent a couple of "unsolicited reviews" to Creem in the early 70's. They weren't published, but I still have Bangs' rejection letters. The only character in "Almost Famous" I sort of enjoyed was the Bangs character. I was a fan.

I didn't read anything Bangs wrote during the last several years of his life (I didn't read The Village Voice, NME, etc.), until "Carburetor Dung" was released in the late 80's. I still haven't read much of his stuff from that period because it's generally whiny and dull (at least the stuff I made it through in "Carburetor Dung"). Not knowing what became of him after about 1975, until his death, I remember when I heard he died in 1982 I was kind of surprised he was still a rock critic. Still? Why? I was also surprised his death appeared to be "drug related." I figured Lester was a smart enough guy that drugs were probably in the past for him by the early 1970's. But as is clear from "Please Kill Me" by McNeil and McCain, drugs were the predominant desire and influence in the lives of most of the people described in that book (the punk intelligentsia, including Bangs), most of whom were trash (to be generous), who bought into the tired old "artist as tormented substance abuser" myth. To their own pitiful and tedious destruction (Bangs, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Stiv Bators, etc.). You wouldn't want to eat lunch with any of these people. You wouldn't want them as your neighbors. If the baby sitting agency sent one over to watch your kid, you'd stay home.

"Let it Blurt" confirms all or most of those views, whether or not that was the writer's intent.

Rock music as an expression of passion or political beliefs (MC5, Stooges, etc.) was generally dead by the early 70's (as the Bangs character in "Almost Famous" said to the Crowe character - something like, "You're here just in time for the funeral..."), and was generally replaced by commercial enterprises (geldings) such as the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, etc. The enjoyable part of the reaction to it (punk) lasted a year or two before it also degenerated into harmless commerce (new wave). Bangs apparently never got over any of this. Instead of moving on, he seemed to deteriorate into the Holden Caulfield of Rock Critics, lambasting the "phonies" (their name is Legion, for they are many), and others who made his life miserable with their insincerity and lack of imagination. He seemed to lose much of his sense of humor. The years (15-20) of drug abuse took their toll.

And so he died at 33. I used to feel a twinge of sadness when I considered that. Now...I'm much more ambivalent, particularly after reading this book. If this book is correct, and I suspect it is, this guy was a real self-absorbed pain during the last several years of his life. The 75-year old uncle who keeps complaining about his gall bladder. He became too precious to live.

The best epitaph I've read for this type of personality is found in Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed":

"Let me begin by saying that Stepan Verkhovensky had always cut a rather special figure among us - in the civic sense, that is. He passionately loved his role - so much so, in fact, that I don't think he could have lived without it. But don't think that I mean to compare him with an actor - God forbid - I respect him too much for that. It may have been largely a matter of habit, or rather a constant and even praiseworthy tendency, ever since his childhood, to slip into a pleasant daydream about his taking a gallant civic stand. Thus, he greatly relished his idea of himself as a persecuted man - in fact, an exile. There is about these two words a certain traditional glamour that seduced him once and for all. As the years went by, by exalting this glamour he placed himself, in his own estimation, on a pedestal that greatly gratified his vanity."

And so Bangs OD'd in his hovel in New York, and was put to bed with a shovel.

The pictures in this book are great. A must-see for any Elvis fan. It includes a timeline of the King's life, and a discography and filmography from "the rebel years." I enjoyed the photographs very much; they give a lot of insight into the King's early performances, although Mr. Bangs' introductary essay is so crude that I cannot imagine his reason (other than for a financial profit) for compiling these photos. The captions for the pictures are informative and overall, this book is good, if you don't mind the author's disrespect toward his subject.