[7][8][9] His early interests and influences ranged from the Beat Generation (particularly William S. Burroughs) and jazz musicians John Coltrane and Miles Davis, to comic books and science fiction.

[10] He met Cameron Crowe while they were both contributing music pieces to The San Diego Door, an underground newspaper of the late 1960s.

Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master's tiredest Cream days.

"[13] In 1973, Jann Wenner fired Bangs from Rolling Stone for "disrespecting musicians" after a particularly harsh review of the group Canned Heat.

Named Creem's editor in 1971,[14] Bangs fell in love with Detroit, calling it "rock's only hope", and remained there for five years.

[15] During the early 1970s, Bangs and some other writers at Creem began using the term punk rock to designate the genre of 1960s garage bands and more contemporary acts, such as MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges.

[21] Creem was also among the earliest publications to give sizable coverage to hard rock and metal artists such as Motörhead, Kiss, Judas Priest, and Van Halen.

Bangs died in New York City on April 30, 1982, at the age of 33; he was self-medicating a bad case of the flu and accidentally overdosed on dextropropoxyphene (an opioid analgesic), diazepam (a benzodiazepine), and NyQuil.

"Dare was spinning on the turntable, and the needle was stuck on the end groove," Jim DeRogatis wrote in Let It Blurt, his biography of Bangs.

[25] In 1979, writing for The Village Voice, Bangs wrote a piece about racism in the punk music scene, called "The White Noise Supremacists", wherein he re-examined his own actions and words, and those of his peers, in light of some bands using Nazi symbolism, and other racist speech and imagery, "for shock value".

He came to the conclusion that generating outrage for attention was not worth the harm it was causing fellow members of the community, and expressed his personal shame and embarrassment about having engaged in these racist behaviors himself.

In 1977, at the New York City nightclub CBGB, Bangs and guitarist Mickey Leigh, Joey Ramone's brother, decided to form a band named "Birdland".