Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Run here, my towhead grandchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee..." (more)
Key Phrases: astral weeks, machine music, psychotic reaction, Lou Reed, New York, Metal Machine Music (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Until his death in 1982 at age 34, Bangs wrote freewheeling rock 'n' roll pieces for Creem, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and London's NME (New Musical Express. As a rock critic, he was adept at distinguishing the commercially packaged product from the real thing. Written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his impudent reviews and essays explore the connections between rock and the body politic, the way rock stars cow their audiences and how the pursuit of success and artistic vision destroys or makes rock performers as human beings. This collection (which includes no Rolling Stone pieces) covers "fake moneybags revolutionary" Mick Jagger, John Lennon ("I can't mourn him"), David Bowie "in Afro-Anglican drag," Iggy Pop, the Troggs, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Chicago, the Clash, many more. Marcus, a music critic, is the author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

For rockers whose tastes demand more than Madonna and who remember back before Bruce, this is a gem. By turns insightful and hilarious, these collected essays by the late, legendary Banks (mostly accumulated from hard-to-come-by journals like Creem ) constantly astound. If your mind can embrace a shrewdly perceptive essay on the Troggs with the title "James Taylor Marked for Death," you also deserve to read the title essay on the Count Five's first album, some amazingly antagonistic love/hate interviews with Lou Reed, and so on. Add to all this a whacked-out sprung prose style (and vocabulary) that would make Gerard Manley Hopkins gasp for air, and you havewellwhat you have. For larger music collections, this is, like, highly recommended. Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty . P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (September 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679720456
• ISBN-13: 978-0679720454
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,232 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning work by the best writer in Rock, April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This book is the chronicle of a great writer who never wrote a great book. Instead, Lester Bangs spent his unfortunately short life writing about rock music for magazines like Rolling Stone and Creem. He wasn't your average record reviewer, nor even your rarer thoughtful, analytical critic. He was a genius; he invented a new style of criticism, or at least brought it to its highest, most inimitable form. Casual, even sloppy; ragged, full of weird slang and weird mood swings, some obviously drug-inspired rambling, and some of the sharpest commentary any music critic has ever written. This book collects some of his work - a very small part of it - into something that may, perhaps, give us an idea of what kind of writer Bangs was, and why he mattered so much. He was one of the first rock critics to really delve into noise-rock, the art of not playing your instrument well. Bangs followed the underground (velvet) movement all through the Seventies, listening to old garage bands, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, free jazz, the New York Dolls, and everything else noisy and free and wonderful, while everyone else was snoozing to James Taylor and wondering when the next Beatles would come along. In 1977 the Sex Pistols tore apart the rock scene and Bangs was vindicated; but they left it in ruins and heading, inexorably, for the emptiness of New Wave and the decade-long winter of the Eighties. Lester Bangs, dead in 1982, is alive and well in this book, which opens with the title essay and his 'Stranded' review of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, two of the greatest pieces ever written about rock. It goes on through such memorable landmarks as "James Taylor Marked For Death" and that infamous, endless 'interview' with Lou Reed - actually, a whole section on Reed, including cryptically rambling notes and the hilarious 'The Greatest Album Ever Made', Bangs' review of Reed's Metal Machine Music - a double album of feedback noise - before getting to the really unforgettable, emotional stuff: a long, brilliant piece on the Clash, "Where Were You When Elvis Died?" and "Thinking The Unthinkable About John Lennon" for the two most famous deaths in rock history; "The White Noise Supremacists", a stunning attack on racism in rock; and finally the Unpublishable stuff: Lester has this bizarre fantasy about becoming the dead Elvis and rotting away in his Vegas hotel room, and then there's a fine short story based on Rod Stewart's "Maggie May." All in all, it's essential reading for anyone at all interested in rock as something beyond elevator music, something that reaches out and grabs you. Once it catches you, Lester Bangs knew all too well, it never lets go.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A dodgy selection of a great writer's work, November 12, 2000

By	"lexo-2" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

Some people discover Charles Bukowski when they're 18. With others it's Richard Bach, or Carlos Castaneda, or Scott Fitzgerald, or George Eliot. With me, thank God, it was Lester Bangs.

This, however, was in 1988, when this book first appeared and Lester's kind of music was about as unpopular as you can imagine. The late eighties were not really a time for howling guitars and yowling screech, unless you were buying import copies of Sonic Youth LPs for fifteen quid a time at the new Virgin Megastore on Aston Quay in Dublin, so reading that someone had charted this territory before, and had described it so well and preached it so fervently, was like discovering a cool older brother I hadn't known I'd had. (Not that my existing older brother wasn't cool in his own way.)

The main thing was not the music, however, so much as Lester's prose. He was, and is, one of the funniest writers I have ever come across. His fantasy about Lou Reed doing a version of "Rigoletto" set in a leather bar for Puerto Rican amputees made me cry with laughter, only a bit guiltily, and his surgical demolitions of an overblown Chicago album or a preposterous Bowie gig manage to combine great wit with a genuine, if subterranean, moral fervour. His Bowie piece, "Johnny Ray's Better Whirlpool", is for me up there with some of Swift's shorter works, as a bitterly amazed study of human folly.

He could do other things, too, of course; his hushed, radiantly attentive late essay about "Astral Weeks" almost (but not quite) persuades me that I like that album.

While I agree with Greil Marcus that Bangs was, on balance, better about writing about things he had a problem with than about things he flat-out adored, I quibble with the selection of pieces. Although I wouldn't wish for anything here to be omitted, I assume that it was only Marcus' pompous dread of trash that prompted him to reject something as hilariously sarcastic as "How To Be A Rock Critic" (reprinted in Jim DeRogatis' fine biography of Bangs) or reviews of heavy metal albums. Bangs was one of the very few rock writers to find anything in heavy metal, and I would have liked to read him on Deep Purple or Black Sabbath, both of which he admired but which Marcus, we can confidently assume, finds repugnant.

This is still a book I would give as a Christmas gift to any bright-eyed nephew of mine with a musical ear and a fondness for language. Bangs may have led a shambles of a life, but he wrote like an angel, and if I no longer share much with him in the way of musical taste, I'll always admire the passionate intelligence with which he wrestled his likes and dislikes onto the page. He's a model to all critics, not just rock writers.

Now can we have some more?

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No surprise, June 14, 2002

By	Ronald Battista (Colorado Springs, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

that this tome gets five stars from everyone. Lester Bangs turned rock writing into a respectable craft. Critic, philosopher and party animal Bangs praises his heroes to the skies-The Velvet Underground, Iggy and The Stooges, The Troggs(!)- in gargantuan essays with the glee of Kerouac, and vilifies the artists who he feels are wrecking rock and roll with incisive precision, slaughtering sacred cows like Elvis, Elton John, James Taylor and John Lennon. Bangs clamors for the reckless spirit of rock to save humanity, who is sinking in a muck of pretentious hucksters and egotistical carnies masquerading as rockers. Lovingly compiled by Greil Marcus, we get to see some of Lester's more personal essays where he reveals much about his own troubled psyche and his attitude towrds what he did. The guy got banned from Rolling Stone for "disrespect to musicians"-how cool is that, to expose a so-called rock/revolution magazine for the establishment pig it truly is? All fans of noise and fire and unpredictablity in music need to read this onomatopoeia of the sound of rock and roll.