Influential words from a late, great rock music critic

Anyone disheartened by the generally mediocre state of today’s rock criticism won’t feel much better after reading “Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste,” a collection of writings by the influential critic Lester Bangs. The book is a reminder that, unfortunately, he is no longer around to tell us what music to listen to, love or hate, in his inimitable cranky voice.

Bangs -- who died of an overdose in 1982, at 33 -- was a critic for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Creem, among other publications, for more than a decade. At the time of his death, he was a somewhat obscure writer, but his reputation has grown over the years -- even more so after Philip Seymour Hoffman played him in the 2000 film “Almost Famous.”

Bangs’ prose, always passionate and provocative, could make you run out to buy an album, or regret you’d purchased one without first getting his opinion. Unfortunately, far too many music reviews these days come across as free publicity for mainstream record companies with products to sell. John Morthland, co-executor of the Bangs literary estate and editor of this anthology, notes in his introduction, “Rock critics today routinely cite Lester as their greatest influence, though it’s usually hard to detect said influence in their work.”

Bangs was an obsessive music fan, to say the least, and a musician himself. “I’ve become something of a musicologist with around 4,000 albums covering everything from Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” he writes. “I may have bad taste ... but at least I know the territory pretty well.”

Just as Bangs either loved or hated the bands he reviewed, his writings must have provoked similarly bipolar responses. As this anthology makes clear, he was never boring to read, and always charismatic, smart and funny. Here is Bangs reviewing a 1979 Talking Heads album, on lead singer David Byrne: “[He] has mental institution eyes, but ... they don’t broadcast danger: he just looks like some nice nut holidayed from the ward with a fresh pocket of Thorazine.”

This is a disappointed, cranky Bangs on Bob Dylan’s 1975 album “Desire”: “So if it seems like I’m hard on him now, if I seem unduly vitriolic, it’s only because (a) everything I say is the truth, and (b) I myself was such a sucker I still looked to him to tell me something and now must suffer the embarrassment which is my just deserts ... Because ‘Desire’ is a sham and a fakeout.” (Bangs, ever tough on Dylan, had written with certainty a year earlier that “Blonde on Blonde” was not an album that would endure.)

Bangs cared so much about music, in such unrelenting terms, that bad music was offensive to him. Also irksome were musicians deemed by Bangs as long past their prime who refused to relinquish the spotlight. “Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker, Steve Stills ... they’re all washed-up, moribund, self-pitying, self-parodying has-beens,” he wrote. The post-Beatles Paul McCartney was especially grating to Bangs, who judged him “about as committed to the notion of subject matter as Hanna-Barbera, and his cuteness can be incredibly annoying at times. If he was just a little more gutsy, he might almost be Elton John.”

This anthology does reveal some puzzling examples of critical judgment, as in Bangs’ rave review of a 1973 Anne Murray album. He seemed to consider her a kind of 1970s J. Lo, declaring Murray “the real thing when it comes to popular music of quality and enduring significance ... a hypnotically compelling [interpreter] with a voice like molten high school rings and a heavy erotic vibe. What Anne Murray is about, make no mistake, is S-E-X with a capital X.”

Bangs always went his own way in terms of musical taste, and admitted being deliberately ignorant of the latest trends in pop music. “You are reading the words of a music critic who at this exact moment or any given time has absolutely no idea what the Top Ten albums and singles in this country are,” he wrote in a 1982 article, shortly before his death. “I don’t know what REO Speedwagon sounds like, or rather I wouldn’t recognize them if I heard them but do know what they sound like and say no thanks.”

Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Bangs had a special loathing for anyone he considered a phony, and was uncompromising in deciding who deserved his respect and praise.

In one essay, written as liner notes to an album, Bangs writes, “What I’m interested in is people with musical obsessions they’re driven to work out.” This aim is the mark of any true artist, and it defines every piece in this collection.

A self-described perennial misfit, Bangs fit into no category (he even disliked being labeled a rock critic) and was drawn to music that could not be readily classified, and was obsessive in theme. Although there are some lesser pieces in this collection -- Bangs’ Bukowski-like prose occasionally takes a meandering, ranting path to make a point -- the reading journey always proves worthwhile. And Bangs seemed well aware of that, as he indicated in a 1980 piece: “These notes may seem discursive but bear with me, we’re going somewhere, and you’re going to like it.”