Book Review

Lester Bangs truly lived every day as if it was his last. Unfortunately, but not coincidentally, his last day came at the young age of thirty-three. In Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic, Jim DeRogatis paints those thirty-three years with the brightest pastels, but also with the dullest grays. This is certainly no sugarcoated celebration of a man whose habits and emotional inhibitions became his downfall in the end. The story is told straight and includes all of the highs, all of the lows and the few calms between the two.

Let It Blurt oozes with juicy stories of the days when being a rock critic meant something, when rock publications outside of Rolling Stone thrived. Publications like Spin, NME, Creem (for which Bangs did the majority and arguably best of his work) and many others offered pages of extreme creativity which occupied numerous hours for numerous music-thirsty kids. Their stories, interviews and album reviews infiltrated the imaginations of millions around the world before the days of MTV and VH1, when the only place to learn about the new music on the scene was to read about it in your favorite rock mag.

This was also a time when even Rolling Stone was considered underground media. So the articles were edgy, the stories were drug-influenced and the record reviews could be anything but gracious. The critics had free reign to slam highly anticipated new albums into the ground, something that you rarely see today, with all of the corporate money exchanging hands between the record companies and the rock press in the highly calculated world of pop rock music. Likewise, rock critics also had free reign to praise albums that today would never even have a chance of selling in local markets, and here they were being reviewed favorably right next to the new release by the Eagles or Bob Dylan in national and international publications.

Within this community of rock magazines, there existed a sub-community of rock writers and critics, perhaps brotherhood would be a more appropriate description, where writers lived like, and in some cases lived with the rock stars they were covering. Sex, Drugs and Rock &Roll… and they still had to find time for writing about it all. As the sub-title of this book points out, many people in the know consider Lester Bangs to be the best there ever was, which is a bold statement considering how many great ones there were in the golden age of the music press. It would be safe though to call Lester Bangs one of the most intriguing of all the great rock writers.

Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous”) lived like a maniac: lots of drinks, lots of drugs (Romilar was his poison of choice), lots of days in a row without showering and terrible eating habits, yet he was the king of his domain. Kids looked up to him, his peers envied him and girls (the ones who could stand his lifestyle, at least) would do anything to meet him, even if sometimes it was just to get closer to the musicians they were really after. Not to be lost in the hazy shuffle and fast times of Bangs is the fact that he was a passionate, incredibly talented writer with fresh concepts and a knack for saying what you’ve always known but never thought of. He had a weird, yet convincing taste for punk music at a time when it wasn’t embraced by many outside the club scene in a few select cities. In fact, many credit him with defining the parameters of what is and what isn’t punk music. He’s also commonly given credit for coining the term heavy metal, although it depends who you talk to as these things usually go.

DeRogatis has done an exceptional job accumulating interviews of the ones who knew Bangs best and scultpting them into the life story of a man who was always searching for something “harsher, louder, more electric and more alive.” The life and times of a rock critic might not strike you as must read material, but if you’ve listened to music in the past, are listening to music right now or plan on listening to music sometime in the future, read this book and find out why Lester Bangs said so eloquently, "the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed."