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
WRITING CREDITS:
Lester Bangs and The Delinquents
Well, I want my time to be sweet and long.
You can tell that muse, honey, to hold the phone.
We can poke it right but it just went wrong.
Now it all comes down.
I'll meet you, baby, on that killin' ground.
Well, let all come down.
Whoever's lost shall now be found,
and we'll trod off to a happy home.
You know that ostrich, he just stands on stilts.
I like my songs with a special lilt.
I wanna smash everything you built,
then it all comes down.
I'll meet you, baby, on that killin' ground.
Well, let all come down.
Whoever's lost shall now be found,
and we'll trod off to a happy home.
Well, I want my time to be sweet and long.
You can tell that muse to hold the phone.
We could poke it right, but it just went wrong.
Well, let all come down.
I'll meet you, baby, on that killin' ground.
Well, it all comes down.
Whoever's lost shall now be found,
and we'll trod off to a happy home.
APPEARS ON
Birdland With Lester Bangs, LP, CD
Track §7
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:
Patti Smith's 1975 debut album, Horses, featured a track about a young, country boy suffering feelings of abandonment after his father dies. The lyrics bear an uncanny resemblance to Lester Bangs's childhood circumstances, including his ambivalent feelings about his ex-convict father's death in a fire, and his mother's religious stranglehold on Lester's life that led him, as an adult, to distance himself from her.
Bangs worshipped Smith and the Horses album; in his February 1976 Creem review of the album, he writes, "Patti’s music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching." Inspired by Smith's passion to create, Lester made the decision to front his first band. The name of Smith's song paralleling his own childhood, a track Bangs describes as "breathtaking" in his review, was "Birdland."
"Let All Come Down" epitomizes the goal of Lester's first and only album released while he was alive: to collate the experimental sound of free jazz and bubblegum rock. While nothing in the song overtly references his childhood, the lyrics trumpet with a distinctly apocalyptic tone, and traces of his JW upbringing can be gleaned from lines like "Whoever's lost shall now be found" and "we'll trod off to a happy home"—both of these being key features of the Second Coming celebrated in the visions of the church elders and the iconography of Watchtower tracts.
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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