![]() Seminal? Lester practically invented punk rock – or at least more or less coined the term way back in ’72 when he applied it to the crude, direct simplicity of ’60s garage bands like the Kingsmen and ? & the Mysterians, the minimalist experimentation of the Velvet Underground, and the raw power of Iggy & the Stooges, back when “musicians” and “rock critics” looked down on such low life forms as inherently “unmusical.”īut “seminal” isn’t the half of it. It’s just a bunch of junk and shit, but it’s our junk and shit.” Maybe he didn’t respect rock’n’roll- why should he?-but Lester Bangs loved it and lived it, and what he left behind on the printed page was, sure as shit, as much rock’n’roll as any record you could care to name. His doctrine was simple: “Rock’n’roll is by definition a deviant artform,” he wrote, “a bastard child, designed or destined to be completely unrespectable. Lester Bangs died on Apof complications brought on by an overdose of Darvon (a potent flu medicine), ending a short and tumultuous life much of which was spent writing some of the most intense, funny, provocative, frustrating, enlightening and enlightened shit ever written about rock’n’roll. It was just a period where we looked at each other and said, “Lester will be dead in two years.” Instead he was dead in… maybe it wasn’t even two years. Nick isn’t paying any attention at all, he’s just kinda giggling. So he’s like both sedated and speeded up at the same time for like hours and hours and hours, and he’s playing the tapes of what I guess was the Jook Savages LP. So he washes down 36 Ornicals with scotch. You got any whiskey?” So Nick gives him some scotch or something. So he took 36 Ornicals and says, “Well, I guess I gotta wash it down with something. Two pills was a dose and a package contained 36. He says, “I don’t drink anymore.” He didn’t like the idea of ‘beverages,’ even cough syrup, so he was taking Ornical, which is an alternative to Romilar, it came out with a pill version. ![]() MELTZER: The last time I saw him in New York, he was at Nick’s house for a long time-a night leading into a day leading into an afternoon. It’s early 1981 in New York City and Lester Bangs -writer, rock critic, ex-shoe salesman, and, for now at least, musician -is blasted out of his mind and far from pleased with the way his writer friends Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches are responding to the advance tape of his new musical work, Jook Savages on the Brazos. “WELL, I GUESS I’LL JUST GO BACK AND SELL SHOES IN SAN DIEGO!!!” Much of it though appears here for the first time. When Jim DeRogatis began work on his Lester Bangs biography, Let It Blurt (published in 2000), I gave him permission to use the unpublished manuscript for his research. The story was originally intended for publication in the San Diego Reader, but when that didn’t pan out, I shelved it. I also spoke to Richard Meltzer, who gave me his perspective on Lester and his work. My friend Gary Rachac had been close to Lester back then, and through him I was able to contact many of Lester’s other San Diego area friends and associates like Roger Anderson, Milton Wyatt, Jack Butler, and Jerry Raney. ![]() I’ve found plenty of reference to him in census data online, but I wanted to know more detail. ![]() At the time there had been very little written about the life of Lester Bangs, and, being a San Diego native, I was particularly intrigued by his early years growing up in El Cajon (in San Diego’s East County) so began digging up what I could on the period of Lester’s life. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story was written back in 1996.
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