"It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that, then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics." -- Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs (December 13, 1948 – April 30, 1982) was an American music journalist, author and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and has been called one of the "most influential" voices in rock criticism.
"And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.""As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.""Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to wear a Chairman Mao button, or do a lot of these things with out knowing what's behind it, and what it really means.""Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.""Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.""Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.""I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.""I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.""I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that.""I mean it's easier to be in a demonstration if it's a trip that's one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn't a trip any longer.""I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.""I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.""In fact I think now we've reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don't know what's going on, and we don't care.""Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.""No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.""No, I see it as meaning very little at the moment because none of the groups are about anything.""Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.""Or like in the early 70's when we had the reaction against acid rock and all the fuzz tone, and feedback, and the noise. And you had James Taylor and everyone went acoustic and that.""That's one reason why it's pretty worthless, I can't totally buy it, if you think about it, it's things like the Phil Spector records. On one level they were rebellion, on another level they were keeping the teenager in his place.""The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.""The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.""The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don't find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.""The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.""When kids can't afford to see it anymore maybe we'll have a whole resurgence of garage bands all over America and this New Wave thing will start to mean something on a grass roots level."
Bangs was born in Escondido, California, USA. His mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness. His father died when Bangs was young. In 1969, Bangs began writing freelance after reading an ad in Rolling Stone soliciting readers' reviews. His first piece was a negative review of the MC5 album Kick Out The Jams, which he sent to Rolling Stone with a note detailing that should the magazine decide not to publish the review, then they would have to contact Lester and tell him why. Instead, they published it.
He wrote about Janis Joplin's death by drug overdose, "It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that has become disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly". In 1973, Jann Wenner fired Bangs from Rolling Stone, a negative review of Canned Heat being the final event. He moved to Detroit to edit and write for Creem. After leaving Creem, he wrote for The Village Voice, Penthouse, Playboy, New Musical Express, and many other publications.
Bangs idolized the noise music of Lou Reed. Bangs wrote the essay/interview "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves" about Reed in 1975.
Bangs was also a musician in his own right. He teamed up with Joey Ramone's brother, Mickey Leigh to put together a New York group named Birdland. In 1980 he traveled to Austin, Texas and met a punk rock group named the Delinquents. During his stay in Austin he recorded an album as Lester Bangs and the Delinquents entitled Jook Savages on the Brazos.
Excerpts from an interview with Lester Bangs appear in the last two episodes of Tony Palmer's The Story of Popular Music.
He was portrayed in the movie Almost Famous by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Bangs died in New York on April 30, 1982, of an overdose of Darvon, Valium and Nyquil. He is reported to have been listening to The Human League's album Dare at the time of his death.
"The Greatest Album Ever Made", on 1975 Lou Reed album Metal Machine Music Matt Carmichael
Stranded (1979) on Astral Weeks, album by Van Morrison, released in 1968.
Blondie (Fireside Book, 1980)
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic, collected writings, Greil Marcus, ed. Anchor Press, 1988. (ISBN 0-679-72045-6)
Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, collected writings, John Morthland, ed. Anchor Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-375-71367-0)
The first piece for Rolling Stone MC5: Kick Out The Jams : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone-A Review of The MC5's debut album Kick Out The Jams.
About Lester Bangs
Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic, biography, Jim Derogatis. Broadway Books, 2000. (ISBN 0-7679-0509-1).
Works citing Lester Bangs
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, biography, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Penguin Books, 1997. (ISBN 0-14-026690-9).
Bangs is mentioned in the R.E.M. Song: It's the End of the World as We Know It , along with Lenny Bruce, Leonid Brezhnev, and Leonard Bernstein, all of whom share the initials 'LB'.
