‘Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste’ is the second collection of record reviews and music essays from the late, irreverent music critic Lester Bangs and an excellent companion volume to the first collection.

Bangs wasn’t as much a record reviewer as he was a moralist who probed the depths of the human condition through music as it winded, twisted and effected its way through our society. He believed in music as one of the great expressive art forms, and, like art, he thrived on contradiction. It was common for Bangs to wake up and discover that an album he had trashed took on a whole new meaning in the light of a new day. And it was just as common for him to wake up and discover that in fact music meant nothing – a thought that would thankfully disappear with the first spin of the day.

While Griel Marcus’s original collection, 1987’s ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,’ was an overview of all facets of Bangs’s writing, this new collection, edited by John Morthland, is like a greatest hits package that reads more accessibly to the casual fan of music. It includes passages from Bangs’s rejected autobiographical book, ‘Drug Punk,’ which he wrote at 19, and serves to showcase both his faults and his budding genius.

The book includes the first piece he ever wrote, a review of The MC5’s Kick Out the Jams for Rolling Stone, a total pan that later became one of his favorite albums. There is also his review of Canned Heat’s album, The New Age, which caused him to be banned from the magazine for being overly demeaning to artists. (The repercussions of this editorial thought can be seen in almost everything published in Rolling Stone today.) ‘Mainlines’ also features Lester calling Bob Dylan a phony for capitalizing on the civil rights movement, his denunciation of the mythic proportions of The Beatles and his plea to the Rolling Stones in 1973: ‘I challenge those lazy, sniveling, winded mothermissers to PRODUCE.’ Bangs was always a drill boring to the truth.

Much of his criticism was built on the use of irony to reveal the serious truths in ways that boring academic criticism could not. In his patronizing interview with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, he writes that ‘trained fingers might as well be trained seals unless there’s a mind flexing behind them.’ He couldn’t have cared less what something sounded like – instead he focused on the summation of thought producing the noise.

The bombastic, self-indulgent languor of Led Zeppelin never appealed to him. He spent his time listening to the infernal, muddy racket of The Stooges, The Velvet Underground and his hero, Lou Reed. Lester was always at his best when writing about his favorite artists. He vividly described Reed, who ‘plopped in his chair like a sack of spuds, sucking on his eternal scotch with his head hanging off into shadow, looking like a deaf-mute in a telephone booth.’

One of the best pieces in the book is ‘Bring Your Mother To The Gas Chamber,’ an essay on Black Sabbath that paints them as the ‘first truly Catholic band [who] reflect chaos in a positive way.’

Bangs was sweet, funny and also often abrasive and wildly egotistical. But what always shined through was his respect for the reader and his desire to revolutionize musical thought. Any page in this book offers almost instant inspiration, and Bangs has spawned thousands of imitators who use the internet as their playground.

In his words, ‘great art has always confirmed human values.’ Bangs made a career out of doing just that.

David Wheeler is a senior film major. E-mail him at [email protected]

Published on September 9, 2003 at 12:00 pm