Lester Bangs

The Great Lig in the Sky: The Legendary Rock Writers Convention of May 1973

Retrospective and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, June 2006

ON MEMORIAL DAY weekend in May 1973, over a hundred of the leading rock writers of the day flew into Memphis, Tennessee, for 72 hours ...

Exile in Detroit City: A Imaginary Conversation with Lester Bangs

Comment by Metal Mike Saunders, Brain Damage, June 1974

SO WE FINALLY decided it was time to come to terms with Lester Bangs... ...

Epistle to a Young Critic: A Letter from Lester Bangs, February 1975

Letters by Lester Bangs, unpublished, February 1975

Thirty years ago, RBP contributor Susan (then Suzan) Compo was an apprentice punkette and aspiring rock scribe living in Tustin, California. An avid reader of ...

The Clash: Clash City Rockers On Tour

Report by Kris Needs, ZigZag, December 1977

DERBY KING'S HALL. The thickset geezer with the appearance of a frustrated rugby player – too short to make the scrum but just as tough ...

Lester Bangs: Ballad of a Loudhearted Man

Obituary by Nick Kent, NME, May 1982

"Lester Bangs is the rock critic's rock critic, a man gifted verbally in much the same way that James Brown is gifted as a dancer. ...

Lester Bangs: Rock 'n' roll as literature, literature as rock 'n' roll.

Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, MOJO, March 1994

Whither Rock Gomorrah, the great gonzo hack's unpublished swansong? ...

Lester Bangs: Jook Savages

Memoir by Nick Tosches, The Nick Tosches Reader, 1995

LESTER BANGS, with whom I had drunk but whose writing I had never read, had died not long after Hellfire came out, in the spring ...

Did Lester Bangs Die In Vain?

Book Review by Ira Robbins, salon.com, April 2000

Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic By Jim DeRogatis, Broadway, 256 Pages ...

Lester Bangs: Rock 'n' Roll was the Big Bang

Retrospective by David Dalton, Gadfly, July 2000

For a long time, its shockwaves obliterated thought altogether. That was the great thing about it: it was anti-matter, it vaporized everything that wasn’t immediate, ...

Jim DeRogatis: Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs (Broadway Books/Bloomsbury)

Book Review by Charles Shaar Murray, Revolver, Spring 2000

WHO WAS Lester Bangs? He was a rock critic. To be more precise, he was a rock critic like Muhammad Ali was a boxer or ...

Dear Charlie... Love, Lester

Letters by Lester Bangs, unpublished, 2001

Excerpts from letters supplied by Charlie Gillett to Rock's Backspages* ...

Remembering Lester

Book Excerpt by Paul Gorman, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press, November 2001

"Everybody's a rock critic." – Lester Bangs ...

Lester Bangs: Pills And Thrills

Retrospective by Nick Kent, Guardian, The, April 2002

ALTHOUGH HIS NAME is already starting to be listed among the ranks of the elite late 20th-century literary trailblazers, Lester Bangs – the fragile-hearted, drunken ...

My Black Pages: Lester Bangs' Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste

Book Review by Don Waller, LA CityBeat, August 2003

BACK FROM THE dead and bigger than ever! As a writer – hell, more importantly, as a reader – the Editorial We wuz turnin' cataleptic ...

Lester Bangs: Joy And Rage Of A Dishevelled Rock Critic

Book Review by Charles Shaar Murray, Independent, The, September 2003

Mainlines, Blood Feasts And Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader Lester Bangs; ed. John Morthland (Serpent's Tail; £9.99) ...

Lester Bangs at Home

Memoir by Richard Riegel, unpublished, May 2009

NOTE: I wrote this mini-memoir for one of the neo-Creem projects of recent years, but it wasn't used. ...