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.He published his first article in 1969.It came over the transom at Rolling Stone.It was a frenzied review of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.”Without much meaning to, Lester Bangs slowly changed from a Romilar-guzzling college kid into a “professional rock critic.” There wasn’t much precedent for this job in 1969, so Lester kinda had to make it up as he went along.Kind of smell his way into the role, as it were.But Lester had a fine set of cultural antennae.For instance, Lester invented the tag “punk rock.” This is posterity’s primary debt to the Bangs oeuvre.Lester’s not as famous now as he used to be, because he’s been dead for some time, but in the ’70s Lester wrote a million record reviews, for Creem and the Village Voice and NME and Who Put the Bomp.He liked to crouch over his old manual typewriter, and slam out wild Beat-influenced copy, while the Velvet Underground or the Stooges were on the box.This made life a hideous trial for the neighborhood, but in Lester’s opinion the neighborhood pretty much had it coming.Épater les bourgeois, man!Lester was a party animal.It was a professional obligation, actually.Lester was great fun to hang with, because he usually had a jagged speed-edge, which made him smart and bold and rude and crazy.Lester was a one-man band, until he got drunk.Nutmeg, Romilar, belladonna, crank, those substances Lester could handle.But booze seemed to crack him open, and an unexpected black dreck of rage and pain would come dripping out, like oil from a broken crankcase.Toward the end—but Lester had no notion that the end was nigh.He’d given up the booze, more or less.Even a single beer often triggered frenzies of self-contempt.Lester was thirty-three, and sick of being groovy; he was restless, and the stuff he’d been writing lately no longer meshed with the surroundings that had made him what he was.Lester told his friends that he was gonna leave New York and go to Mexico and work on a deep, serious novel, about deep, serious issues, man.The real thing, this time.He was really gonna pin it down, get into the guts of Western Culture, what it really was, how it really felt.But then, in April ’82, Lester happened to catch the flu.Lester was living alone at the time, his mom, the Jehovah’s Witness, having died recently.He had no one to make him chicken soup, and the flu really took him down.Tricky stuff, flu; it has a way of getting on top of you.Lester ate some Darvon, but instead of giving him that buzzed-out float it usually did, the pills made him feel foggy and dull and desperate.He was too sick to leave his room, or hassle with doctors or ambulances, so instead he just did more Darvon.And his heart stopped.There was nobody there to do anything about it, so he lay there for a while, until eventually a friend showed up, and found him.More true fax, pretty much: Dori Seda was born in 1951.She was a cartoonist, of the “underground” variety.Dori wasn’t ever famous, certainly not in Lester’s league, but then she didn’t beat her chest and bend every ear in the effort to make herself a Living Legend, either.She had a lot of friends in San Francisco, anyway.Dori did a “comic book” once, called Lonely Nights.An unusual “comic book” for those who haven’t followed the “funnies” trade lately, as Lonely Nights was not particularly “funny,” unless you really get a hoot from deeply revealing tales of frustrated personal relationships.Dori also did a lot of work for WEIRDO magazine, which emanated from the artistic circles of R.Crumb, he of “Keep On Truckin’” and “Fritz the Cat” fame.R.Crumb once said: “Comics are words and pictures.You can do anything with words and pictures!” As a manifesto, it was a typically American declaration, and it was a truth that Dori held to be self-evident.Dori wanted to be a True Artist in her own real-gone little ’80s-esque medium.Comix, or “graphic narrative” if you want a snazzier cognomen for it, was a breaking thing, and she had to feel her way into it.You can see the struggle in her “comics”—always relentlessly autobiographical—Dori hanging around the “Cafè La Boheme” trying to trade food stamps for cigs; Dori living in drafty warehouses in the Shabby Hippie Section of San Francisco, sketching under the skylight and squabbling with her roommate’s boyfriend; Dori trying to scrape up money to have her dog treated for mange.Dori’s comics are littered with dead cig-butts and toppled wine-bottles.She was, in a classic nutshell, Wild, Zany and Self-Destructive.In 1988 Dori was in a carwreck which cracked her pelvis and collarbone.She was laid-up, bored, and in pain.To kill time, she drank and smoked and took painkillers.She caught the flu.She had friends who loved her, but nobody realized how badly off she was; probably she didn’t know herself.She just went down hard, and couldn’t get up alone.On February 26 her heart stopped.She was thirty-six.So enough “true facts.” Now for some comforting lies.As it happens, even while a malignant cloud of flu virus was lying in wait for the warm hospitable lungs of Lester Bangs, the Fate, Atropos, she who weaves the things that are to be, accidentally dropped a stitch.Knit one? Purl two? What the hell does it matter, anyway? It’s just human lives, right?So, Lester, instead of inhaling a cloud of invisible contagion from the exhalations of a passing junkie, is almost hit by a Yellow Cab.This mishap on the way back from the deli shocks Lester out of his dogmatic slumbers.High time, Lester concludes, to get out of this burg and down to sunny old Mexico.He’s gonna tackle his great American novel: All My Friends Are Hermits.So true.None of Lester’s groovy friends go out much anymore.Always ahead of their time, Lester’s Bohemian cadre are no longer rock and roll animals.They still wear black leather jackets, they still stay up all night, they still hate Ronald Reagan with fantastic virulence; but they never leave home.They pursue an unnamed lifestyle that sociologist Faith Popcorn (and how can you doubt anyone with a name like Faith Popcorn) will describe years later as “cocooning.”Lester has eight zillion rock, blues and jazz albums, crammed into his grubby NYC apartment.Books are piled feet deep on every available surface: Wm.Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Celine, Kerouac, Huysmans, Foucault, and dozens of unsold copies of Blondie, Lester’s book-length band-bio.More albums and singles come in the mail every day.People used to send Lester records in the forlorn hope that he would review them.But now it’s simply a tradition.Lester has transformed himself into a counter-cultural info-sump.People send him vinyl just because he’s Lester Bangs, man!Still jittery from his thrilling brush with death, Lester looks over this lifetime of loot with a surge of Sartrean nausea.He resists the urge to raid the fridge for his last desperate can of Blatz Beer.Instead, Lester snorts some speed, and calls an airline to plan his Mexican wanderjahr.After screaming in confusion at the hopeless stupid bitch of a receptionist, he gets a ticket to San Francisco, best he can do on short notice.He packs in a frenzy and splits.Next morning finds Lester exhausted and wired and on the wrong side of the continent
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