Lester Bangs

Leslie Conway Bangs (born 14 December 1948 in Escondido, California, † April 30, 1982 in New York, NY, USA) was an American music journalist, author and musician.

Life

Bangs grew up in a small town near San Diego. His devout mother was a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Being an alcoholic and convicted father perished in a house fire when the boy was nine years old. Even as a child Bangs began to write. As a teenager, he was enthusiastic about the Beat literature, jazz, as well as garage and surf music.

Bangs began his journalistic career in 1969 as a freelance journalist for the music magazine Rolling Stone. A few years later he moved to the magazine Creem, where he spent five years as staff editor. With his lyrics, he became an important protagonists of the New Journalism, but also wrote texts in the gonzo style. The mid-1970s he moved to New York, where he worked as a freelance writer, among other things for the Village Voice, New Musical Express and Rolling Stone wrote back, but also for Penthouse and Playboy. His articles have also been adopted by the German music magazine Sounds and have appeared in some rock session volumes, which were published during the seventies in Random House.

Although Bangs mainly wanted to write books and biographies during his lifetime, he completed only the less ambitious biographies of Blondie and Rod Stewart. Posthumously published two edited by former Rolling Stone Greil Marcus colleagues Reader.

Bangs died of a drug intolerance, as he along with Valium took a flu remedies to be during a cold.

Film

Bangs was immortalized by director Cameron Crowe, a former colleague of his at Rolling Stone, in the movie Almost Famous. He was represented by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Literature (selection )

From Lester Bangs

  • Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic. Collected writings, Greil Marcus ed, Anchor Press, 1988, ISBN 0-679-72045-6
  • Psychotic reactions and hot air. Greatest Hits. Rock and roll as literature and literature as rock and roll. Greil Marcus ( ed.), Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-89320-127-0
  • 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

About Lester Bangs

  • Jim DeRogatis: Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Critic rock. Biography, Broadway Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7679-0509-1
December 14 Beat Generation Gonzo journalism NME Astral Weeks Integrated Authority File
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