The Life And Times Of Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs was the great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, and romantic visionary of rock-n-roll writing - Hunter S Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one. Exploding out of a stifling upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness in a claustrophobic southern California suburb, he went on to revel in rock's excesses, draw energy from its din, and match its passion in his prose, charting (if not defining) the aesthetics of heavy metal and punk.
More than any other writer, he personified the Noise and was treated as a peer by the artists who made it, including Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Captain Beefheart, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell.