Tbogg, did you read ”Let It Blurt”? Very good book.

I miss the time in my life when Greil Marcus was my hero.

Hey T.

I’d also be interested in his views of today’s music. Already,in the mid seventies, he was announcing Rock and Roll’s death because big business was going to kill the artist. I wonder how he would have reacted to DimeaDozen and file sharing.

Poor Lester. He’s on his own cloud now. I didn’t realize until just recently that he had made up the whole Carburetor Dung thing. Brilliant guy.

I have always wondered, “Lester Bangs whom?”

Hey Tbogg. Is there a way they can put your section on a sepia background? I’m homesick.

I have this book on my bookshelf. Always thought it was one of the greatest titles ever.

I wonder what Lester would say about Madonna being named to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame today.

I wonder what Lester would say about the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame full stop.

I think he’d either be laughing at the lunacy OR settin’ the bait to reel in a few more fish.

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

That adage didn’t apply to Lester Bangs.

ah, Lester…

I was never so jealous as I was in 1973, when my friend Bruce told me that Bangs’d picked him up hitchhiking from Lansing to Fenton (I think)…

his godhood was apparent even/especially then…

His articles “Where Were You When Elvis Died?” and “Peter Laughner Is Dead” are two of the best things written in the past 30 years.

Bangs is to rock writers what Kael is to film critics–their sentences and sense will echo for generations.

“Most of Rock Journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
Frank Zappa

Lester Bangs’ writing managed to transcend that cliche.

He shared a birthday with Ted Nugent? Wow, if we had to lose one of them, we got the wrong end of the deal.

Bangs-Eno

First link posted, this a nice later piece on Eno. Hope it works.

“I realized immediately that I was dreaming, though I had no memory of falling asleep and had in fact passed over into the dream state as if it were an unrippled extension of conscious reality.”

Doesn’t everyone do this now and again?

Please tell me everyone does this now and again…

Please tell me everyone does this now and again…

Happened to me last year, I was at this small concert in Val-David, the concert was Haiku: The Jack Kerouac project. They took a few of Kerouac’s haiku’s, and turned them into a brilliant album of music. During that concert, even if I was still in great pain, I was there and elsewhere, totally concentrated and perfectly relaxed. I had the impression I was floating over my seat. No cough syrup was ingested.

Haiku , This thing is really good.

I drifted away like that on the couch with the news on…it wasn’t Charlie Mingus, it was Miles O’Brien talking to me.

Thanks very much. I’ve been a huge fan of Eno’s since college, for his music and art, as well as his theories on a wide range of topics. And, every so often at work, I’ll open my box of “Oblique Strategies” cards, pull one out at random, and do my best to follow its lead.

Thanks for the Eno link — it’ll give me something to do later on tonight while the snow is falling and I’m listening to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

Lester Bangs was a good writer and he loved interesting things. However, he almost single-handedly made rock criticism unbearable to read. His acolytes tried to employ his patter and the result was fake, self-conscious, big worded bullshit that was a showcase of self-indulgent hipsterism. It’s still there today in the Village Voice, Spin, almost anywhere that people still try and write about rock. Shit, I can’t read Greil Marcus’ writing either.

On a positive musical note, Scott Stapp is a very very happy man tonight.

I gotta go break up my Benzedrex inhaler & dump it in a cuppa coffee, maybe get some cough syrup, but I’ll be back for bassets.

P. S.: Where have I seen this before?

I read PRACD a few years back, it’s a great time capsule of a fascinating time in music. Bangs was a writer whose good work was awesome, but his bad work was nigh on unreadable. The price of experimentation I guess

One of my favourites (in pdf format): The White Noise Supremacists:
http://www.mariabuszek.com/kca…..sWhite.pdf

Not just Lester & The Nuge, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of the Doody Bruz, later a failed libertarian/GOP candidate for Congress, also hits 59 today.

‘Though I searched L. B., & some have his B-Day as tomorrow, the 14th. Whatever.

Everyone knows Steve Simels is the only rock critic worth reading.