The Lester Bangs Issue
If you know who Lester Bangs is, you’re gonna need this issue. If you don’t know who Lester Bangs is, you’re also gonna need this issue.
Lester Bangs At 75
Lester Bangs is more than a genius, a savant, a beautiful soul, and the north CREEM star in the nighttime CREEM sky: he is also the rock critic that people, gun to their head, can name. In tribute to both his unfettered brilliance, and his name recognition, CREEM is celebrating Bangs in the way that he would appreciate most: hyperbolic praise, borderline slanderous revisionism, and by attempting to sell enough t-shirts riffing on our dead friend to fund a statue of Lou Reed made entirely out of ketamine.
Do we come to praise Lester Bangs? Bury Lester Bangs? Or did we just run out of money for the year and needed to bring in our December issue for under ten grand, and some Lester Bangs hoo-ha seemed the smartest way to do it? (The dead don’t do much, but they do work cheap.) And if it’s the latter, how did Lester Bangs know to plan his 75th birthday at the same time to save our asses yet again?????
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What’s Inside
Editor-at-large Zachary Lipez on the everlasting yet ever fluctuating influence of Lester Bangs
Never-before published writing
Selections from the CREEM archive
“How NOT to Be A Rock Critic” with Jeff Tweedy, a reverse take on the classic Bangs essay
We call upon the ghost of Lester Bangs to review some current bands
Jaan Uhelszki, Sue Whitall, and Connie Kramer tell us what it was really like having Bangs as your editor
Cover art by Gary Ciccarelli, illustrator of classic CREEM covers
And more....
the CREEM Archive
Subscribers get access to all of Bangs’ original CREEM writing in our archive.
“If anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a RECORD”
--Lester Bangs, CREEM, 1971
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