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Clocking in at a lean and mean 75 minutes, the CREEM: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine doc is an overstuffed sausage of self-congratulatory goodness. It’s got that Goodfellas quality of, whenever it’s on, you just gotta drop what you’re doing and tune in. (AMC, give us a call unless you hate money!) Thing is, because we wanted it to be a tight little number, we had to leave some gold on the cutting-room floor.

Lucky for you, we don’t sweep up after ourselves! In fact, here are some choice unused nuggets about this issue’s man of the hour, Lester Bangs, from some smart and famous people. Also, Chad Smith. (JK luv ya, Chad.)

CAMERON CROWE (FILMMAKER, FORMER CREEM CONTRIBUTOR)
Lester said, “I’m coming to town”...and to meet him at this old radio station KPRI, ’cause he was gonna visit his friend Larry Yurdin and he was gonna do a radio show and a radio interview. This was the greatest thing in the world because KPRI was an open radio station and the DJ had a glass window right on the street, so you could walk down the street and see the guy playing “Stairway to Heaven” and smoking a joint.... So already this corner was like a window where you could look behind the curtain.... I would go there and watch DJs long before I knew Lester was coming....

So I showed up early. I had the same orange bag that Patrick Fugit has in Almost Famous, and Lester is dressed the same way as Philip Seymour Hoffman was dressed, and I encountered him playing Iggy, with Larry Yurdin, live on the streets of San Diego. And you don’t forget that real soon. It’s like he was doing an Iggy dance, he was playing records, trashing Jim Croce and Yes records.... It’s like I wrote it. He gave me the best material. And when he was done he was like, “Yeah, you’re the guy that sends me those tear sheets, right? I’m a little busy, I gotta get going.”

And I remember thinking, “I’m not gonna leave. I’m gonna stand here until a bus comes and something takes him away.” And it didn’t come very fast...so we got a chance to talk. And I felt like Lester Bangs is the guy that I read about in CREEM, but he’s also an incredibly human, empathetic, fun, sort of heartbroken guy, talking about the ex-girlfriend, and so kind to me and said, “What are you, like, the smartest guy in your school?”

“They hate me. I’m young. I’m younger than everybody else. I have a problem with pubic hair. Lester, it’s a real issue. My mom has skipped me all these grades.” And he’s like, “Yeah, you’ll meet them again on their long journey to the fucking middle.” I’m like, I’m never going back. This is the job, this is the life I want.

[So] we filmed that scene, meeting Lester, on the very first day of filming Almost Famous. And you never know if it’s gonna go right; you never know if the actor that you hire is gonna show up and say, “Nah, I decided to be in a Steven Spielberg movie, they called last night. I’m sorry, I have to go.” You never know what’s gonna happen. But here it was happening, on day one, and I remember looking out onto the street and feeling like I was watching something from an out-of-body experience, something that had happened to me years earlier—and I was.

DAVE MARSH (AUTHOR, FORMER CREEM EDITOR IN CHIEF)
Lou [Reed] was not difficult to get along with. He was difficult for Lester to get along with because Lester came in with two things in mind. One of which was whatever was at the top of his mind. Which generally wasn’t Lou, which would piss me off, too. The other of which was that it was always about Lester. That was the problem and the drawback of Lester’s work, particularly towards the late CREEM period.

I don’t know the Lester-and-Lou dynamic, but Lester did try to drag me into it. I never knew Lou very well, but I loved being around him when I was around him. And he was always extremely cordial to me when he didn’t have to be.

And I can remember a very important night in my life—and this comes into the Lester part of it— when a bunch of us were sitting on the floor at Lisa Robinson’s apartment, which was sort of a salon in those days, I suppose. And I said, “So, you know, I stopped taking acid.” And [Lester] said, “Really?” And I said, “Well, yeah, because you just get to the point where it’s like if one out of three is bad, it’s not worth it.” And Lou says, “Yeah, except it’s one out of 10 by the time you figure that out.” Which is still the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of him saying.

So Lester brings this up in an interview. What in the world was the purpose in doing that? And Lou said, “Listen, I don’t go around giving drug advice to Dave Marsh,” or something like that. And I thought for a long time, is [Lou Reed] mad at me? And I just realized, no, he’s mad at the question....

That’s the real meaning of that story and Lester’s famous jousting matches with Lou—I think Lester was never aware that he enjoyed them but Lou didn’t.... Lester’s interviews were about Lester, which is a way of approaching it....

Lester just did it differently than other people do it—different than me, that’s for damn sure. And I never felt like I was missing out by not doing it Lester's style, and I’m quite sure that Lester never thought about those kinds of things anyway. Lester was one of your more noncompetitive people.

GREIL MARCUS (AUTHOR, FORMER CREEM CONTRIBUTOR)
Editing Lester was easy—we just talked. We got on the phone and talked about stuff. But I was a fascist editor, I didn’t know any better. I was working with all kinds of people who had no experience writing, let alone publishing anything. I thought I knew how to write and they didn’t. And I would just sit down and rewrite them in a way that I would never tolerate if somebody tried to do that to me, but I was just stomping all over them.

I didn’t do that with Lester because he had his own style, he had his own argument, his own point of view. This was all a cosmology to him. When he listened to one record, he was also hearing every other record he’d ever heard in his life, and they all fed into whatever he was focused on at that moment—nothing existed in isolation. He had the broadest mind and the broadest, biggest frame of reference. All of that he could exercise in CREEM, and he was inspiring all the other writers around him.

ROBERT CHRISTGAU (AUTHOR, FORMER CREEM COLUMNIST)
He had a lot of integrity, Lester. People think that he was just a person who hung out with Deep Purple and was a wild man, but he was far from that, really. I was playing Randy Newman before because Lester reviewed Randy Newman in the magazine, an example of someone who wasn’t really a CREEM guy, but he was smart, and he wrote wonderful music.

BEBE BUELL (MUSICIAN, AUTHOR, FORMER CREEM T-SHIRT GIRL)
Lester Bangs, good old Lester Bangs, my secret friendship with Lester Bangs. Whenever I would see him in public, he would always say, “Hi, Bebe,” and act like I didn’t exist. But sometimes if I would run into him on the street, like if he was going out for coffee or something—or “speed,” as he called it—we’d hang and talk in the street or go in and have coffee somewhere down around St. Mark’s.

And then I began to think that Lester didn’t have a crush on me, he had more of a crush on my mind.... He was going, “You have to be careful—those rock stars, they’re gonna suck you dry. They’re gonna get in your head and take all that brilliance you’ve got up in there.” He would lecture me to pieces. And I would say, “Don’t worry, I know, Lester, I know.” “How do you know?”

We would talk about old souls. He was an interesting man. I thought he didn’t like me at all very much and then I would hear back from other people that he actually did, but he would always act very boyish.

CHAD SMITH (RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS DRUMMER)
Lester Bangs, who’s been celebrated in many different ways in the journalism world, to me was the epitome of “I don’t give a fuck.” He was very opinionated. Now, you didn’t always agree with him, especially if it was a band that you liked and he shit on them, which he often did. I think he kind of liked going against the grain. “What’s popular? You guys suck. You’re bloated, you’re over.”

THURSTON MOORE (AUTHOR, SONIC YOUTH FRONTMAN)
I met Lester once. It was the early ’80s. I was curating a nine-day noise festival in New York. I called it Noise Lest and it was in reaction to the local bigtime club in New York called Hurrah. And the new owner said, “I don’t want to keep booking these bands that are giving me all these demo cassettes from around the city because it all just sounds like a bunch of noise.”

So he was wanting to make it more conservative or something, and so for us, it was a real affront; it was like being shut down locally. So I decided, like, I'll put on a festival of this gallery called White Columns that we had a bit of an association with—call it Noise Pest. So people started talking about it. Everybody started calling in, saying, “Can I play? Can I play? Can I play?” All these marginalized bands were like, “Yeah, we want to play too.”

So it became this sort of watermark event in the early ’80s for bands like us and Swans and Live Skull. And then some of the hardcore bands that were just starting played there, you know, like Reagan Youth and the Young and the Useless; the Beastie Boys played....

I got a phone call and it was Lester Banks. He was like, “Hey, this is Lester. You’re the guy putting on Noise Pest?” And I was like, “Yes, I am.” In those days, he called people on the phone; he was calling me from a phone booth that was near where he lived. He said, “Well, I know everything there is about noise, so give me the scoop here.” So I sort of told him what I just told you. And I said, “Why don’t you come down and play? I’ll book your band or whatever you want to do, just come

down and make some noise.” He said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” I said, “Well, how about this such and such a night? I’m just going to put you down and you show up and play.” He was like, “Okay, man, I’ll be there.”

The night that he was going to play, I wrote on the sandwich board that stood outside of the gallery: The Lester Bangs Explosion, half expecting that he would show up, but he never showed up. Then we did all the noise stuff, everybody played, whatever—Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and whoever. End of the night, we’re out walking east on Spring Street and here comes Lester walking down the street with a record album under his arm. And he’s walking to the gig. And we’re like, “It’s over. The night’s over.” He said, “Oh man, yeah, I was going to get up there and make some noise, man!” And he was kind of like, he was a little lit up. And I said, “What’s this record you got?” He’s like, “It’s the DNA album, A Taste of DNA. They’re the best noise band.”

DNA is Arto Lindsay, Tim Wright, Ikue Mori—No Wave, you know. It must have just come out because I hadn’t seen it. That was a really significant record for us, or came to be. So there he was with this DNA record, extolling the virtues of this No Wave masterpiece: “This is the noise.” I don’t know what he was planning on doing. Was he going to go there and talk about DNA? Which would’ve been fine, you know. And so we kind of walked for a while and he was really kind of jolly, possibly inebriated, but I don’t know. He was just in a good mood. Then we kind of, “Okay, see you later,” like we expected him to come back to some of the other shows, and he didn’t. We never saw him.

So that was my only mildly Lester Bangs run-in, [and it] was this sort of like, booking him, he was a no-show, then he was a late show, and we took a little walk together and he went off into the night. You know, for me, he was so important to me as a rock writer that, in retrospect, having met Lester Bangs, I count that as one of the greatest things that happened while being in a band.