Lester Bangs and the Delinquents
Jook Savages on the Brazos

What has always struck me about Lester Bangs, besides his irony and his brilliance in his own way and in a distinctly unique, even eccentric manner, is that despite appearing through his writings as a confident person, so much so as to issue judgments and give ratings to records or people, he was in truth a person full of human contradictions. A characteristic that made him necessarily curious and simultaneously extremely critical. In the sense that he always tried to delve deeply into each of his examinations and analyses. He didn't just tell you about a record by limiting himself to reviewing it, nor did he get swept away by emotional considerations. He wanted to understand. And what he wrote were all his thoughts and his entire mental process, sometimes convoluted and sometimes linear, but nothing other than his mental process of elaboration and re-elaboration.

The result, fortunately, there are written testimonies and even translated into Italian, is a personal style of writing and analysis, and it couldn't be otherwise. Because it is inevitable that every process of critical analysis ultimately had to go through his considerations.

His quarrels with Lou Reed have gone down in history. He loved and hated Lou at the same time, just as the quintessential rock star had to love and hate himself, and Lester had understood this and probably also felt it emotionally and then tried to tell us about it in writing, and maybe he succeeded, or maybe not. But he definitely made us understand what he was thinking in that cascade of words and interconnected thoughts in a way that I would define as obsessive and even maniacal rather than logical. All things that then went on to constitute his ideal imagination. A world where everything was connected to each other. His interest in magazines more than literature, therefore the desire and necessity to always be on the ball, to always want to know everything that happened; his visceral passion for jazz and especially rock and roll and garage music, the dawn of punk, and that fatal attraction towards noise. Jad Fair and his Half Japanese, Yoko Ono, Metal Machine Music, Blue Cheer, DNA. Obviously, and how could it be otherwise, Iggy Pop and The Stooges.

Lester Bangs wrote music reviews and articles because given the speed of his mental processes, he couldn't write about anything else. Everything he thought or did, he had to get it out immediately and preferably in writing, as if this process were the only way somehow to recognize and find himself. Or rather, find himself. Define himself.

He had been working for years on a novel that he never completed, and in all likelihood, he never even started. This was partly because he died very young and probably in a manner as unexpected as dramatically excessive and frenetic, like his own urge to do and express himself, which he almost couldn't keep in check. He was only 33 years old, which is practically the same age I am now (give or take a year), and everything he did during his lifetime might have been an attempt to understand himself. Maybe thinking he never succeeded, and perhaps this is also because he didn’t even reread the very things he wrote or, in any case, without managing to be somehow so analytical yet at the same time

'Jook Savages On the Brazos' was born in a casual manner or perhaps not. The story goes that Lester met this Texas punk band, the Delinquents precisely, and showed them some of the lyrics he had written. But we don’t know if or how much he worked on them. On one hand, I tend to think he would never have recorded something he wasn't fully convinced of. On the other hand, I wonder if he ever managed to write at some point something that could fully convince him. So who knows how things exactly went. Surely there was what one might call a particular alchemy, something unrepeatable and it’s not surprising, given all the premises, that the record was recorded in just sixteen hours.

We are at the beginning of the eighties. Lester had also been to England and was impressed by what he heard but especially by what he saw. Clearly, this record could not for this reason have been conceived just to be something to listen to. Not according to Lester, at least, who in those sixteen hours with the Delinquents tries or at least attempts to do the same as with the content of his articles and reviews.

The record can be defined as an episode as lightning as it is necessarily minor in the history of rock'n'roll. A compendium of Lester Bangs’ thought balanced between reasoning and expressive will. Released on Live Wire, the record is clearly influenced by what could be the punk sounds of the big British wave, but more than these influences, evident are the references to a certain Richard Hell and Stooges-brand psycho-blues and the garage spirit of bands he considered fundamental such as the Troggs or the Seeds. Pervaded by an underlying nihilism ('Life Is Not Worth Living, But Suicide's a Waste of Time') and the typical irony of the character, and how could it be otherwise, the album alternates lightning tracks like 'Nuclear War' or 'I'm In Love With My Walls', 'Give Up The Ghost' with paranoid and electric blues like 'Kill Him Again', 'Day of the Dead' and references to Neil Young and typically Made in USA sounds like 'Legless Bird' and 'Grandma's House'.

The song that probably constitutes a symbol and manifesto of Lester's thought more than any other is undoubtedly, 'I Just Want to Be a Movie Star'. The lyrics of this song, accompanied by a guitar that screeches like the wheels of a tram on the old and worn tracks of the street, are the words of a person who has ridden the myth. Inside there is the myth of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady dying from exposure while walking all alone without a destination across the United States of America, there is Hunter Thompson and his visionary and revolutionary writing, inside there is rock and roll and the fumes of alcohol and drugs, as if these could somehow give relief and solve our sorrows and problems, inside there are the dreams and ambitions of the common man. The man in the bar, the one who sits there and can connect and commune more easily with strangers than with his own family members. Inside are all our miseries and failures and what are our unattainable dreams.

Lester Bangs wasn't just a music enthusiast and had no encyclopedic or didactic purposes. He sought to understand something about himself through others and in the miseries of others as in the contradictions of the lives of rockstars, he saw himself and tried to find himself, maybe sometimes he succeeded, maybe sometimes he didn't. Maybe sometimes, simply, what he saw didn't please him and made him frown. But his curiosity and desire to know were too much and too great.

It wasn’t true, after all, that Ulysses died trying to pass beyond the pillars of Hercules instead of returning to Ithaca. This was Lester Bangs, who shone with his own light and whether he knew it or not, he certainly never wrote about this himself. So, without any pretense of grandeur, I tried to do it for him.