RANCH TRIANGLE — Renowned rock critic Lester Bangs returns to life this summer as part of Steppenwolf Theatre's LookOut series.
Bangs is the subject of "How to Be a Rock Critic," a one-man play starring Erik Jensen, who wrote it with Jessica Blank. It will run in weekend performances July 6-22 in Steppenwolf's 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted St.
The work is drawn from the gleefully acerbic writings of Bangs, one of the best of the early rock critics, who was also an editor at Creem magazine and wrote for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice before his death in 1982 at the age of 33 from a drug overdose.
Bangs was nothing if not opinionated, and wrote in a lively, direct vernacular. He was applying the phrase "punk rock" to retro garage-band music as early as 1972, and was an early champion of what became recognized as punk in the form of the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash and later the Undertones.
But he was also self-destructive. The New Yorker once did a profile labeling him "a wreck of a man," even as it granted that "he also had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation."
He lives large in pop culture, having inspired the critic played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Almost Famous," written and directed by his former Rolling Stone colleague Cameron Crowe. R.E.M. drops his name in "It's the End of the World as We Know It."
Greil Marcus collected some of his best writing in "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung." Bangs can be experienced himself in a YouTube video culled from his days at Creem.
Each evening performance of the three-week run will conclude with local musicians playing some of Bangs' favorite songs, including Bethany Thomas, David Singer & the Sweet Science and the Lester Bangs Memorial Tribute Band with Jim Derogatis, who has also written a Bangs appreciation, "Let It Blurt," that calls him "America's greatest rock critic."
Additional summer performances set for Steppenwolf's LookOut series include Strawdog Theatre's production of "Barbecue," the Neo-Futurists doing "The Infinite Wrench," the Dilettantes in "Science Night" and a reading of "La Ruta" by Isaac Gomez as part of the SCOUT play-development series.
