Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader

by Lester Bangs, edited by John Morthland

Anchor Books, 415 pp., $15 (paper) Where Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is the essential collection of Lester Bangs’ peripatetic rock writing for those who go for the gonzo, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste is the collection for those who get off on witnessing a writer’s love of words, seeing him writhe around in the beautiful excesses of logorrhea, throwing ideas and word combos against the wall and seeing what sticks. This hefty 54-essay tome offers a bleating bounty of Bangsian goodness. It features not only Bangs’ usual energetic ramblings about music, but also more poignant autobiographical works in which he turns his life into beat homage, transporting the reader into the pages of a Burroughs-esque nightmare womb of drugs, booze, and violent sex. Local writer and Bangs’ literary executor, John Morthland, exhibits a keen eye for Bangs’ love affair with words, providing us with a top-notch collection that lovingly captures the highs and lows of the charismatic, cough syrup-swilling wordmonger. For every weirdly excessive descriptive paragraph, such as the closing lines of “Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra,” which doesn’t feel very authentic, Morthland counters with examples of Bangs’ stunningly imaginative images (“Vestine still knows how to play so’s to make you feel like ringworms are St. Vitusing in your heartburn,” from “Canned Heat: The New Age”). Morthland’s intuition and empathy is just what a Bangs collection needs. He even throws a bone to the Austin contingent with the inclusion of “Notes on Austin,” Bangs’ 1980 reflection on time spent in the River City. He opens with the line, “Austin, laid-back and somewhat indulgent … [is] an undeniably great place to start a band.” Hee. Really? Thanks to Morthland’s efforts, this collection should form a positive ripple in the nascent field of Lester Bangs studies, in that the concept of him as a real writer, instead of a tweaked-out, chubby spazz with a typewriter, is a lot easier pill to swallow.

This article appears in August 8 • 2003.

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