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duparker's review against another edition
4.0
So I was aware of Bangs, and his influence. Read a bio of him earlier this year, but wasn't really familiar with his direct work. The introduction notes that this is a collection of second tier writings, which is surprising, because absent a few duds, these are interesting, well written and capture the times really well.
colinhdempsey's review against another edition
5.0
This man can go from horny to sincere to biting to oftentimes all-encompassing like a tsunami of imagery and mood and he is the greatest of all time but I wish he’d come clean about how he felt about Springsteen so this five star rating wouldn’t torture me so much.
seashelly's review against another edition
3.0
I was just beginning to realize that I was coming up in the dawning days of a new era when literature would turn to toilet paper, daily news would become surrealistic, and artists of all stripes everywhere would feel blissfully free to cut themselves loose from their heritage, or even not learn that heritage, because there was more relevance to be found in the splashy trash of the popular press, in the open-throated yawps and mechanical twangs of rock ‘n’ roll, in the chaotic inner jungles which all of us hurled ourselves into with every type of drug imaginable; and engaging in all this willful and apparently self-destructive abuse to the sensibilities for the purpose of finding each of us for ourselves the raw endlessly disguised essence which had to be sought outside all schools, methods, social mechanisms, and popular self-help devices. In other words, we had to fuck up before we could stand up, and nothing was more relevant than the apparently irrelevant[.]
Finally, a man who uses the freedom men have to say things to actually Say Things. Did I agree with everything said? Absolutely not. Did I find everything funny? Absolutely not. But yay, someone who isn't afraid to get a little mean without adding the veneer of "oh, I am being OBJECTIVE!" on top of it. Get real.
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