A TALK WITH JOE FERNBACHER


In January 1998 I was midway through four years of work on Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs when I caught up with Joe Fernbacher for an oft-delayed telephone interview. Joe admitted that he’d been dodging me in part because he didn’t think there was much that he could add: Lester Bangs was his friend, he still felt bad about Lester’s death, and how could he really sum that up? I assured him I was interested in his impressions as well as in his own contributions to this whole gonzo rock-crit biz, and here he scoffed even louder: He really didn’t consider himself much of a writer at all, he said. If you’ve read any of the pieces posted on this site, you know there is plenty of reason indeed to disagree with him.

— Jim DeRogatis



Joe Fernbacher: You really oughta talk to Billy [Altman]. Billy remembers everything; I don’t. Billy is one of my oldest and best friends. Him and I go back a long time, to ’64, when I was supposedly editing the music magazine up at U.B. My first review was I just copied all the liner notes from the first Cream album. He came up and said, “What’s this shit?!” And from that point we were friends.

Billy has more memories of Buffalo than I do. I think it might be just because I was a hometown boy. It was like these [rock critics] came in, and it was never something I thought I could do, and all of the sudden I’m out there and I’m writing stuff for Rolling Stone.

The one line I thought up to describe Lester was that when he was sober, he was the Stephen King of rock ’n’ roll. When he was drunk, he was Stephen Hawking of rock ’n’ roll.


J.D.: I gather you were really on Lester’s wavelength back in the day.

Well... yes! You had some trouble at Stone, didn’t you?


Yeah, I was fired for complaining about how they pulled my Hootie review. But Lester got there first: He was banned for panning Canned Heat. And what is Hootie if not the Canned Heat of the ’90s?

Canned Heat was better!


How did you meet Lester?

That’s an interesting story. Me and Altman had put out Punk magazine, the original, before Legs McNeil. Legs called Altman because we had it on record, wherever they put the copyrights here in Erie County, but that’s another story. Lester called me up when he was on tour with Deep Purple; I don’t remember what year it was. He called me up and I bought him a copy of Raw Power with a check from our Punk magazine treasury, check number 505. He was staying here in Buffalo here at the Statler Hilton. He called me up: “Hey Joe!” I went up and I met him at the hotel there, I walked in and he said, “I thought you were one of these skinny, junkie guys!” I’m a hefty man; I’m about 300 pounds. He goes, “I thought you were like a cross between Hubert Selby and William Burroughs.” I walked in and he orders up from room service: “Bring us a couple of fifths of vodka!” We sat there in the Statler Hilton in Buffalo and drank four fifths of vodka watching cartoons. Then he goes, “Joe, the limo’s here!” This is my first time with Lester. I was just writing for The Spectrum.


Then you wound up writing for Creem.

It cost me money, but I did. I remember when he left me off from the limo, I called him up from the university on the Watts line. Remember when they used to have Watts lines? I talked to him for about four hours, really drunk. I don’t remember what we said. But I sent him a thing and he published me, which I thought was kinda cool, just coming from a university paper. He was a nice guy. I’ve been kind of dodging you a little bit on this because Lester was just one of these kind of guys you hang out at the corner bar with. He was a nice guy. He had his problems but he was a great writer. What I always thought with him was that he wasn’t really a critic. He was the one who invented the difference between a rock writer and a rock critic. Like Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh and Robert Christgau, they were rock critics. Lester was a rock writer. He was older than me, and he was really into jazz. Him and Meltzer. Meltzer’s a real curmudgeon; I love him.


He’s actually a sweet guy underneath all that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The first time I met Richard was at Billy’s first wedding. He goes, “I got 82 alternate titles for John Coltrane albums in my wallet!” I’m just trying to give you a little of that spirit. Lester influenced me because he was older. He was what I call the first generation, him, Richard, and Nick Tosches. These guys were out there, but they were doing it with an attitude. And the attitude was just like, “I can’t play an instrument, I’m not musical, but I can document this stuff because I’m a fan.” When I wrote a review, it was like what I thought Lester did: I’m taking my 32 bars. You know what I’m saying?


Absolutely. From what I’ve heard, as far as the people who admired him, he was always encouraging them not to imitate him. Did he ever say, “Hey, Joe, you’re sounding too much like Lester Bangs. Do your own thing.”

No, actually he was trying to calm me down. The thing with these people they were always saying, “Get your own voice.” My first review in Creem was Magma. What I did was I read the dictionary and put a lot of big words in and overwrote. I always overwrote; that’s why I got published. He encouraged me to do that. He said, “Yeah, man, keep using these words that nobody knows.” He wrote under my first review, “If you can define 10 of these words we’ll give you a free Magma album.” He wasn’t purging as far as that.


Did you work on this semi-legendary 1974 Buffalo Rock Critics Panel?

I was the one that did that—the first one with Patti Smith. Me and this guy at Buffalo State College, Gary Sperrazza. It was my idea. I said, “Why don’t we just get everybody together and have some fun?” We convinced the college to do it and they came up with a coupla grand. I remember sitting in the back of a van going to get booze for Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, and Nick Tosches. They were all sitting in the back of this van, and I said, “Well, we’ve got $400. What do you want?” Billy and I were living here in town, in Buffalo, and we were playing music here in town at this bar, Mr. Goodbar. Lester was so drunk they wouldn’t even let him in. All I remember from that weekend was Lester, we bought him a bottle of bourbon, and we bought a bottle of brandy for Patti. Patti was walking around the dorms coveting her brandy and talking about Rimbaud. We gave Lester his bourbon and he spilled it and smashed it. He was trying to pick up girls.


There was a panel with all of these critics on stage, right?

Oh yeah. And everybody got paid in quarters. We had Lester, Meltzer Patti, Lenny Kaye, two guys from Zoo World, Arthur Levy and Alan somebody. Somebody has that on tape someplace. I don’t have it, but I have a bunch of rejection letters from Lester. They were always great letters.


Are you writing much anymore?

I kinda fell out of it. About 1990, I went into a thing where I had the cancer, and they took a kidney out and all that shit. I kinda fell out of it, but I’m looking to go back into it. I do a few things for the local paper, The Buffalo Evening News, once in a while. I’d like to write again because I hate everything. [laughs] The one thing that Lester taught me was the difference between being a rock critic and a rock writer. You look at Patti Smith, her reviews—she can criticize, but she’s a rock writer, and a poet. She was a fan. Like you—you got fired because of a dumb band with a dumb name, it’s just like canned music. Supposedly these guys are saving the industry, but for Christ’s sake, that doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s like the Spice Girls: How many people do you know who will actually acknowledge that they own a Spice Girls album?


Just because millions of people like something, it doesn’t mean it’s good. This country voted Ronald Reagan into office twice.

And Bill Clinton! Did you ever notice with the scandal that they’re all ugly? If this guy is trying to fuck all these girls, this guy does not deserve to be president. John Kennedy had sexual affairs, but it was with Marilyn Monroe! Think about it.


It must be an Arkansas white-trash thing.

Like Deliverance. And if they impeach, which I hope they do, we’re gonna get Al Gore and the Gore-Gore Girls. He has cute daughters.

Anyway, with me and Lester, he was more of a friend. When friends die, it’s tough. I knew he was having trouble with his girlfriends and shit like that at the end. Lester was never really one to do a lot of hard drugs. He was a really smart man, but I really think he did a Chris Farley or a John Belushi. He hit the wrong combination at the wrong time. I was really depressed by that, because he was a nice guy. He should be alive now. He’s the one who should be reviewing like Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Courtney Love and the Spice Girls. Lester could make a living doing the Spice Girls.

It would be nice to get a magazine like Creem again where people could just go out and say it and not be worried about their jobs. Give ya like fifty bucks and review the Hootie and the Blowfish and say whatever you want with impunity.


Many people have said that Lester Bangs or Richard Meltzer couldn’t get published today.

They couldn’t. But Nick does. To tell you the truth, one of the reasons I stopped writing was because Nick did everything I wanted to do. I never thought I was a good writer. His essay “The Punk Muse”—that kind of inspired everything I did. When I sat down at the typewriter, I said, “That’s who I want to write like, and I can’t.”


Did you stay in touch with Lester through the years when he was in New York?

Not too much. I saw him a few times, hung out with him. He called me a few times when he was writing for that magazine in Texas [Contempo Culture]. He called me a few times and stayed over at my house, but that was just like me and my brother. We were just drunk and hanging out. The only thing I can say that I did with Lester was I turned him on to the Electric Prunes, “You’ve Never Had It Better.” I know this is very disjointed. Me and my brother used to sit there and get drunk and sing the songs and one night Lester was there and he was just gawking. When I was with Lester, we were both drunk, and I don’t remember much of it.

I just remember Lester as a good guy, the guy who encouraged me to go along and write. The one thing he told me was, “You got to get your own voice.” And my own voice was I used big words. I read dictionaries and I used big words and had certain strange ideas. The one review I did for Creem that was totally inspired by Lester, I interview Karen Carpenter’s shoulders after she died. Lester always said, “Just go for it.” It’s rock ’n’ roll. The more people take it seriously they shouldn’t.



Jim DeRogatis is the author of Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, which will be published by Broadway/Doubleday in the U.S. and Bloomsbury in the U.K. in the spring of 2000.

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