(hereafter referred to simply as Lester) was born in 1948 and raised a Jehovah's Witness in California. At the age of eight he was already a voracious reader and had started becoming a writer. His early years were difficult. His father was a binge drinker and an ex-convict who died in a fire of his own making when Lester was a boy. He was an outcast at school. He allowed himself to be sexually abused by a middle-aged man in exchange for comic books. At approximately the age of 11 his interests turned to jazz and away from his religious upbringing.He became interested in the beat writers, and then as a teenager he fell for rock and roll. In high school he skipped gym class for a week and was assigned a 10-page paper for every day he missed; he turned in a 50-page story called "Hector the Homosexual Monkey," which led to his lifetime ban from gym class. He tried college but didn't like it, especially since his roommates played Cream all day long but wouldn't listen to his Velvet Underground records - Lester later wrote that this rejection was what gave him an affection for distortion and other less popular sounds.

Peter Gorman on the immortal Lester Bangs