Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #737868 in Books
• Published on: 1988-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From the Back Cover
Collected work of Lester Bangs, the passionate, brilliant, and inspirational writer, who was immortalised in the film Almost Famous.

Psychotic Reactions collects Lester Bangs' most wired, passionate writing on legendary figures in music history, including Barry White, Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, and Lou Reed: 'I always wanted to emulate the most self-destructive bastard I could see, as long as he moved with some sense of style. Thus Lou Reed.'

To his writing he brought the talents of a great novelist and became one of the most celebrated writers in the history of music journalism. Immersed in the rock 'n' roll lifestyle about which he wrote, Bangs died tragically young in 1982 at the age of 33.

'Pure Bangs in full effect ... [He] wasn't the greatest ever rock critic because he split away, way beyond rock criticism. These are the places he went.' Uncut

'A superb collection ... Wild and funny and unpredictable. Lester Bangs was a great American writer who happened to write about rock 'n' roll.' Rolling Stone

'Bangs was one of the best writers ever to appear on newsprint ... When he died American culture lost one of its most astute, ornery, funniest and most soulful observers.' New York Times

'One of the most significant books ever written about music. 10/10.' Loaded

'A swaggering, scary, defiant, superhuman piece of writing.' Q

'A marvellous collection ... It will unquestionably teach you more about rock music and the appreciation thereof than a two-year subscription to all of the current British rock papers and mags.' Time Out

'Bangs created a grand philosophical gesture from the dynamics of fandom.' Wire

'One of life's great gurus.' Julian Cope

Lester Bangs started his career in music journalism as a record reviewer for Rolling Stone. He went on to write for and then edit the magazine Creem, before moving to New York and covering the burgeoning punk scene, writing in daily newspapers and the Village Voice.

Customer Reviews

The Master of Rock Writing in full swing!
I love Lester Bangs' unrestrained style: the passionate torrents of words, the extravagant metaphors and the keen 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.

All hail the king of rock journalism
If you like your rock journalists to be more out-there than the so-called stars that they write about, then read Lester Bangs. By turns abusive, reverent, irreverent, witty, humane and incisive, this man was the greatest rock hack of them all. This collection is a must-read, and the arrangement of the articles gives the reader the sense that Bangs was growing up, but was not losing the plot by any means. It's a sad loss that he is not still with us. Read this book, feel your enthusiasm for music be rekindled and then go and tell all your friends about it. Brilliant.

Lester Bangs is funny, and most of the time interesting.
After many nights of heated discussion about music and the place of critics, I was given this book to read. As was intended, this selection of Lester Bangs' writings, taken from both published and unpublished material, opened a new vista of Critique as Art for me.

Bangs' writing is straight from the stream-of-thought school of Beat. Although he specialises in tangentially searing past his original point of any piece, or indeed sometimes coming nowhere near it in the first place (to the degree that it takes a few pages to work out what he is actually reviewing), he does it in style with imagination and wit. Although I quite like the breathless un-punctuated page-long ranting-past-the-point sentences, on the infrequent occasion Bangs' writing does get too thought-disordered for me to stomach; and he himself displays some insight into this, in one of his comments that he was "trying to be Bukowski".

However in short, Lester Bangs is funny, and most of the time interesting.

Although some of Bangs' writing might open up new perspectives on previously dismissed music, a cautionary word is that one mustn't take his opinion as anything to base your selection of music on. This is entertainment and as someone once said, "the critics have their audience too".