Until his death aged thirty-three in 1982 Lester Bangs wrote wired rock 'n' roll pieces on
Iggy Pop The Clash John Lennon Kraftwerk Lou Reed. As a rock critic he had an eagle-eye
for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing written in a conversational
wisecracking erotically charged style his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating
take-downs reveal an iconoclast unafraid to tell it like it is. To his journalism he brought
the talent of a great a renegade Beat poet and his essays reviews and scattered notes convey
the electric thrill of a music junky indulging the habit of a lifetime. As Greil Marcus writes
in his introduction 'What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the
best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.'
