by JUAN RODRIGUEZ

It happened only twice but it was pure pleasure speaking with Lester Bangs, the almost-famous rock critic of the 1970s who died of an accidental overdose of Darvon at 33 in 1982. He phoned out of the blue, blasted and on a roll, spewing non-stop music shit in which minutes seemed like hours. He was an ego-less crazed rock 'n' roll bug who infected you instantaneously. A so-called critic who was actually America's Number One Fan: snarly but a softie at heart (like his hero Kerouac), often obnoxious but sorely missed.

Today the term "rock criticism" is an oxymoron. It's Tiger Beat and 16 magazine with self-justifying terminology that never developed into actual criticism beyond Who's Hot and Who's Not. And although Bangs was the out-of-control antithesis of today's tepid by-the-rules pack, he bore some responsibility for their juvenile scorecard-keeping. A year before his death, he was kvetching that "every band in the world is not the Stooges - every band in the world is the Dead Kennedys." A Village Voice piece dated three days before his OD ends: "Hardcore is the womb."

Mainlines, Bloodfeasts, and Bad Taste, the second collection of Bangs' work, has an aroma of death and exploitation that Bangs seemed presciently attuned to. (Ironically his only books were quickie knockoffs, on Blondie and Rod Stewart, before Greil Marcus edited the first posthumous collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, in 1987.) It capitalizes on Let It Blurt, the gossipy 2000 biography by Jim DeRogatis (an alleged disciple), and his portrayal in Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's autobiographical valentine to youth as Rolling Stone's teenage rock-reporter prodigy. The movie Disney-fied rock-tour life - much keg-party-type boozing, but no hard drugs or hard hype. Bangs was depicted (by Philip Seymour Hoffman) as Crowe's patient, selfless kindly coach, not the obsessed fan finding it harder to get kicks every day, let alone write about them in fresh ways.

The trouble with Lester was that rock 'n' roll was his entire universe. All of his hopes for life were invested in it. No matter how "great" (or, if you prefer, "degraded") a culture rock is, it's got severe dead-ends. The biggest is that you (and it) don't stay young forever; fantasies wither, values change, vistas open and close, etc. All that ranting over whether the Stones still represent the spirit of rock (31 pages worth) - pick any rock "topic" - comes up empty after a while.

Some pieces here hold up well. An essay branding Black Sabbath as the quintessential Catholic band is especially fun these days. His whiteboy dissection of Miles Davis's dark, much-maligned mid-'70s jazz-rock is first-rate. He could be bracingly dense but more often he was just longwinded, as only a fan can be.

Reading this book was as depressing as reading the diaries of Kurt Cobain, an obsessive product of rock mythology purveyed by Bangs. "God, I'm so sick of rock trivia," Cobain wrote, "big deal, it's like what am I gonna do when I'm old if I already know everything about rock 'n' roll by the time I'm 19." Like Bangs, he was so plugged-in to the ways of pop that it became his only frame of reference. The love-hate blind obsession with the nexus of stardom, excitement and authenticity killed them both.

"I'll probably never produce a masterpiece," Bangs wrote in 1968, in a previously unpublished autobiography deathlessly derivative of Kerouac and Burroughs. "But so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning which is my own and that Sound - if erratic - is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer than write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere re-reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows towards one last raving feedback pirouette."

Long live electric feedback - and Aeschylus. Bangs never got that part.

Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader edited by John Morthland, Anchor Books, hc, 409pp, $23