Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Lester Bangs, David Merrill, Matty Quick, and Mickey Leigh
I guess I squandered my life.
Where is the love to be found?
Build up my own world of strife,
living for these fists that pound and pound.
I never asked my mother to be here.
She never asked our dad for a son like me.[1]
Lots a good fights on the way I was reared
I've given them both, but I still don't like deceit.
And I know that I'm a killer.
And my suffering sure ain't no filler.
As this blood runs out of circulation,
drop it all out for my very own reaction.
Hey!
So I can't lay it on Mom and Dad,
and I can't blame the girl one bit.
These afternoons I slept so soundly
notice how much has been spent
on shattered nerves, dancing for dawn.
Insomnia's no excuse for this drive [?].[2]
Don't wanna pour that on
those nerds and Gulchers,[3] I'm the type that you like. [?]
'Cause she knows I'm a killer:
"Your self-destruction's no thriller."
It was once out of circulation,
drop it all out for my very own reaction.
Hey! Do you really wanna live this way?
Do you think it's enough just to say,
"He's born some wild fruit [?]." Come what may
I'm scared of the dues I still gotta pay.
I guess I squandered my life.
Where is the love to be found?
Build up my own code of strife,
living for these fists that pound, pound pound pound pound.
I never asked my mother to be here.
She never asked nobody for a sonny boy like me.
Once I heard 'em fight about the way I was reared.
Guess I am appalled [?], but I still don't see it.
But I'm so lucky she's a killer.
And I do not handle no quibbling[?]
As this blood runs out of circulation.
Drop it all out by her reaction.
APPEARS ON
Birdland With Lester Bangs, LP, CD
Track §8
LP: Add On Records, AD#101 (1986); LP, CD reissue: Dionysus Records, Bacchus Archives 1118 (1998)
SOURCES
Transcription by Lester Bangs Archive management, 2013.
ABOUT THE LYRICS:
[1] Lester's father, Conway Bangs, dropped out of school in the seventh grade, and was arrested at age eighteen on charges of burglary, which were later dropped. He served a prison term of ten years, however, for assault with intent to murder and was released in 1945. Lester, himself, was arrested for drunk driving, in Detroit, and later for drunk and disorderly conduct in Austin, Texas; however, Bangs never exhibited any actual homicidal tendencies of his own. He may have seemed brash and aggressive in his writing, but for all his punk catharsis, Lester was, at heart, a pacifist.
[2] Insomnia was a frequent ailment for Lester, and quite often was coupled with recurring nightmares about being stranded again in El Cajon.
[3] Gulchers: the name given to a type of anarcho-capitalist patterned after Galt's Gulch, a fictional libertarian community founded by industrialist Henry Gulch in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Bloomington, Indiana independent record label, Gulcher Records, had also just begun operating during the mid-1970s. The proto-punk band, The Gizmos, which signed to Gulcher Records in 1976, was reviewed favorably by Bangs in Spin and Rolling Stone magazines.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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