Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic

Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic
by Jim Derogatis

"If writing about music is like dancing about architecture - a sentiment attributed to various disgruntled musicians and smartasses - then rock critic Lester Bangs was James Brown doing Frank Lloyd Wright. While even the brightest lights of his profession were awkwardly grafting intellectual, sociopolitical and stylistic frames onto rock 'n' roll, sometimes brilliantly if never wholly convincingly, Bangs' pieces burned with a palpable obsession to delve beneath the surface noise and dredge up something both primal and exalted in the music he loved."

Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic by: Jim Derogatis has been added to The Eclectic Lounge

"Let It Blurt is the raucous and righteous biography of Lester Bangs (1949-82)--the gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock criticism. No writer on rock 'n' roll ever lived harder or wrote better--more passionately, more compellingly, more penetratingly. He lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, guzzling booze and Romilar like water, matching its energy in prose that erupted from the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, and The Village Voice. Bangs agitated in the seventies for sounds that were harsher, louder, more electric, and more alive, in the course of which he charted and defined the aesthetics of heavy metal and punk. He was treated as a peer by such brash visionaries as Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Captain Beefheart, The Clash, Debbie Harry, and other luminaries."