The late rock critic Lester Bangs was, like many of his colleagues, a frustrated musician. He even recorded a handful of records: the single “Let It Blurt” and hard-to-find LPs with his New York group Birdland and the Texas-based Delinquents. But his finest hour may have come when he played typewriter at Cobo Hall in Detroit with the J. Geils Band.
Bangs’s work is another matter. Although he began his career like many of his peers, explicating the vinyl texts of the day for post-Altamont knuckleheads in the pages of Rolling Stone (his first review—a devastating, later recanted pan of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams—appeared there on April 5, 1969), he took the form to bizarre new heights in his later work for Detroit’s Creem and England’s New Musical Express, as well as dozens of lesser and more obscure journals. He simultaneously became a figure of legendary proportions and equally legendary excess on the rock scene; in misguided emulation of the beat writers he so admired, his work was fueled by giant infusions of alcohol and street drugs. He was on his way to cleaning himself up when he died suddenly, the victim of a flu virus medicated by Darvon, on April 30, 1982, at the age of 33.
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Beyond these righteously lurid rambles, Bangs’s work often took on an almost confessional first-person tone. He was an unsparing critic, but he didn’t spare himself. Many of his pieces are informed by alternating currents of heavy braggadocio and deep remorse. This ultrapersonal approach is best seen in Bangs’s many pieces about his idol and nemesis Lou Reed, which are collected in Psychotic Reactions under the wisely chosen chapter title “Slaying the Father.” In Reed, former leader of the Velvet Underground and great/hideous proto-punk standard-bearer of 70s rock, Bangs saw everything in himself that was wondrous and appalling; his grapplings with Reed’s legend and with the artist himself (particularly in the vituperative and pathetic interview piece “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or, How I Slugged It Out With Lou Reed and Stayed Awake”) are psychodramas in which Bangs veers from awe to hatred to self-loathing. No other rock writer ever revealed so much about himself while writing about someone else.
