{"id":2613,"date":"2010-04-08T11:25:11","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T15:25:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-11-15T14:49:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-15T18:49:52","slug":"the-music-of-lester-bangs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-music-of-lester-bangs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Music of Lester Bangs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/q-dDC-pN5Ro?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nFrom what I&#8217;ve read music critic <strong>Lester Bangs<\/strong> was a frustrated musician. I believe this is not an uncommon phenomenon. For every <strong>Patti Smith<\/strong>, <strong>David Thomas<\/strong>, and <strong>Chrissie Hynde<\/strong> who&#8217;s graduated from writing record reviews to writing records that <em>get<\/em> reviewed there must be a thousand frustrated rock critics. I&#8217;ve been told this even extends to music bloggers.<\/p>\n<p>It had been years since I checked out the music of Lester Bangs. In fact, I&#8217;d forgotten that recordings of his music existed until I read the <strong>Joey Ramone<\/strong> memoir, <em>I Slept With Joey Ramone<\/em>, written by Joey&#8217;s brother, <strong>Mickey Leigh<\/strong>, who is a bit of a frustrated musician himself and who played in Bangs&#8217; band for a while. I believe Leigh is the guitarist on this track. [<em>NOTE:<\/em> I was wrong about this belief.]<\/p>\n<p>I found this track surprisingly strong. I still haven&#8217;t gone back to check out his other recordings, but had this been better recorded it would sit nicely alongside some of the jazz-poetry workouts of Patti Smith and a side 2 track from <strong>Pere Ubu<\/strong>&#8216;s <em>Dub Housing<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think? Yourself excluded, who&#8217;s your favorite critic\/frustrated musician?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From what I&#8217;ve read music critic Lester Bangs was a frustrated musician. I believe this is not an uncommon phenomenon. For every Patti Smith, David Thomas, and Chrissie Hynde who&#8217;s graduated from writing record reviews to writing records that get reviewed there must be a thousand frustrated rock critics. I&#8217;ve been told this even extends <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-music-of-lester-bangs\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[231],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}