rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

Interview with the Barbed Wire: The Search For Lester Bangs (Again)

      A little history for new readers of punk rock blues: Every so often I try, through means both mechanical and mystical, to attain a beyond-the-grave interview with the late, great Lester Bangs - that word wizard/drug punk who walked among men from 1949 to 1982. Arguably the best American writer of the late 20th Century disguised as a rock critic and basically the reason I type these feeble thoughts again and again into the ether of cyberspace (that and the fact that, as the song goes, ‘I want to be loved by you, by you and nobody else but you’, dear reader).
    Now I know that the pickings on this page have been pretty slim as of late. Regular readers will know that I recently moved from a very small town in Colorado to Denver after a bout with near-suicidal depression. So the last 3 ½ weeks have been spent getting settled in. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve found both a band (Funk Schway - a 6 piece funk band where I’m surrounded by jazz cats who still don’t know I’m a rock guy who’s passing) and a job (at a local Blockbuster Video store, hey one has to start somewhere!). This last weekend, though, I had an opportunity to yet again indulge in my spiritual quest vis-à-vis Lester Bangs when I accidentally knocked myself out with a sticky bathroom door.
     I was running to take a shower and the door stuck, so idiot me tugged real hard and it popped open, hitting me squarely in the face and dropping me like 8th grade French. As I lie semi-conscious on the floor I got the tell tale color swirls and harp ostanati  that accompany that greatest of literary contrivance: the dream sequence. When the special effects faded I found myself in the classic all-white, windowless room of cinematic heaven facing a hunched figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in a tatty afghan with his back to me. Before I could speak, the man in the chair wheeled to face me and said what they always say to me on these trips.
     “Lester doesn’t want to speak with you.”
     “No kidding,” I answered, having been through this before, “So who are you and what pearls of wisdom do you have for me? Hurry up, I’ve got a blog post to write.”
     “You don’t recognize me, do you.?” he said. I looked harder into his red rimmed eyes, all 3-D green with yellow rings around the pupils. I thought for a moment it was my Grandfather again (he’d come through on a previous Lester search). I knew that nose, hawkish and thin. The man’s hair was snow white, thin and flyaway, cropped like a serial killer artist’s sketch. He sneered at me and it was then that I knew I was face to face with myself and I must have been 100 years old.
     “103,” he/I stated, “Only the good die young. Judging by yr clothes and the fact that yr eyes are still wide and yr still looking for Bangs I’m guessing first month in Denver, makes you almost, what, 50?”
      “Yeah,” I said with more calm than I felt, “Staring down the barrel. 103, huh? Wow. Not dead yet?”
     “No not exactly.“
     “Then what’s with the white room, ain’t this heaven”
     My 103 yr old self laughed so hard his false uppers came flying out his mouth. He caught them and returned them with a fluid motion into the grin of a rabid jack o’ lantern.
     “Heaven, no. Heaven’s no!” he chortled like he’d been saving that line for years. “I don’t know what’s up with the white room. Only shows the limits of yr imagination, I guess. I’m figuring I’m still at the nursing home, in the coma. Going along all dreamily and fine until I hear this crappy harp music -  and actually, I don’t think ‘ostanati’ is a word. It triggered yr spell check, didn’t it? I know. “Poetic License“. Yrs should have been revoked years ago. This is yr dream sequence, junior, you tell me about white rooms and heaven.”
     “Christ, yr more depressing than Cobain (see “Interview with a Flawed Desire” elsewhere on this page) was when he stood in for Lester. What happened to you? Me, us? I mean …… coma? Did you, I mean did I….. Uh,…. Us ? Well, I‘m dancing around this but did we try to, like commit anything?””
     “No”, he laughed less nasty now, “We gave up on suicide as a way of life after the spring of ‘04. I think our brain just said enough, but in the words of Richard Pryor ‘Our legs was in great shape, why should they fall down?’ The last thing I remember -and I think yr gonna like this - was sitting in a hover  lounge, April 2055 watching a hologram replay of the Ramones and Patti at cbgb. We have that kinda stuff in yr future, my past. Guess we’ve always lived in the past, especially when it came to rock and roll.”
     “Hologram replays of Ramones? Patti? Cbgb?! So, I’m guessing nothing new came along that we liked after ‘97? Is that about when we got old?”
     “Kinda,” he said not unkindly, “The post-Coldplay years were a little dry. There was a 4 piece from Austin hit around 2012 called the Dykebusters we dug a lot. Post-feminist, post no wave. Kinda like Mercury Rev with firmament and a radical feminist agenda. Produced by Courtney Love, if ya hadn’t guessed. Then there was Elvis Costello’s kid. Called himself Jesus O’Leary, played electric cello and rapped over tape loops of wild animal sounds played backwards. Had a big hit in 2015 with, what was it now? Oh yeah “There’s a Dustbowl in my Corn Flakes…..”
     “Now you’re just making that up!” I said, but I was smiling.
     “Yeah, I am,” he snorted, “but wouldn’t that be something?”
     “Hey, what ever happened with…..”
     “No can do, Byrnes, my boy, no can do. Can’t tell ya about yr future, that’s a dark ride you gotta take alone.”
     He got out of the wheelchair and stood, looking stable, if not strong. He took some kind of remote control device from an unseen pocket and aimed it at the chair, which disappeared. He walked towards me, slow but steady and gave me a surprisingly warm (and substantial) hug.
     “Keep doing what you been doing,” his voice a little lower now, his face forming that ‘serious’ look I’ve used on girlfriends and prospective employers for years, “It’ll get weird now and again but I can tell you that you’ve made it through the worst part already. Yr gonna have loss, yr gonna hurt. But yr gonna find people and places and things greater than you’ve ever imagined, too. Yr gonna play music and get paid. Not a lot but more than enough. Yr gonna fall in love again and you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you with who and how, so just ……. Just keep doing what you been doing.”
     I saw that he was getting teary. Good to know I didn’t lose that. He started walking away and I heard the wash of helicopter sounds that signals the end of these things. I felt a profound warmth in my soul. He looked happy. That was something. I was just starting to de-materialize when I heard his voice again, draped in Cocteau Twins echo and shouting to me….
     “AND DON’T EVER STOP LOOKING FOR LESTER BANGS…….”

Posted by: timbyrnes at 18:25 | link | comments (1)

Comments:

#1  18 February 2005 - 21:53

 

well done, tim. good trip.

howard

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