“As far as I'm concerned, there are only two valid reasons to venture down­town. One of them is the second-hand bookstores, undeniably the best in the city. The other is the obligatory trek down to The Village Voice to hand in one's copy under the duress of a deadline”

“One of my supreme ambitions is to live to be 120 years old and be able to say I never set foot inside Bloomingdale's”

"In a way, in their decline, they mattered more than ever, especially since ev­erything else seemed to be declining with them"

“I suggested the ‘Joey’ song to Bob,” says Jacques Levy. “You know, Bob has always had a thing about outlaws.”

“Debbie Blondie herself has the Shangri-Las/Crys­tals girl group sound down to a perfect snotty whine, but unlike Patti Smith, she never comes across as snotty or pretentious.”

“You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized.”

"Maybe if we all get drunk enough we'll all have blackouts so trackless and remarkably sustained that we'll never remember all the reprehensible things we said and did to each other, hence no guilt"

"Lester ennobled the ludicrous inner life of pop fans by telling the truth about it — by discerning that inner lives, and not music, were what pop music was about"

When Robert Christgau, Edward Sorel, and Lester Bangs took on the rock icon

In 1977 the multi-instrumentalist came to conquer — not to pander to Monkees nostalgia