Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader

For fans of one of the most vocal and irreverent critical voices in rock and roll, this newly issued Bangs reader will be a boon. Serving as a companion to the 1987 collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, this volume is a selection of 54 pieces, some of which have been recently uncovered. In his introduction, Morthland, a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, offers a paean to Bangs, who died in 1982 of a drug overdose, describing him as the""best-known bull-in-a-china-shop... who was always dangerously loaded, who could be so insulting and malicious as well as self-destructive... who had an expansive lust for life and a sense of humor and (sometimes even, and for no apparent reason) cheerfulness to match it."" Within these pages, the acerbic Bangs takes on Dylan (""Dylan merely used Civil Rights and the rest of the Movement to advance himself in the first place"") and encourages the Stones in a 1973 Creem article (""I challenge those lazy, sniveling, winded mothermissers to PRODUCE""). There's plenty here to entertain music fans and inspire today's critics of rock and roll.