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Beat Punks
New York’s Underground Culture from the Beat Generation to the Punk Explosion
Victor Bockris
For Peter Orlovsky and Lydia Lunch
and, in particular, the third mind
Brion Gysin
Contents
Introduction
1 The Patti Smith Interview
2 King of the Underground: The Magic World of William Burroughs
3 The Death Of Allen Ginsberg, By Rosebud Feliu-Pettet
4 National Arts Club Literary Award Dinner For Allen Ginsberg
5 Muhammad Ali On The Art Of Personality
6 Allen Ginsberg On Heroes
7 An Interview With Debbie Harry
8 An Interview With Marianne Faithfull
9 Susan Sontag: The Dark Lady Of Pop Philosophy
10 The Captain’s Cocktail Party: Dinner With Jagger, Warhol and Burroughs
11 An Interview With Keith Richards
12 An Interview With Our Greatest Satirist: Terry Southern
13 I Would Have Been A Soldier: An Interview With Nicolas Roeg
14 Blondie On The Bowery By Debbie Harry, Chris Stein And Victor Bockris
15 An Interview With Debbie Harry
16 Blondie Meets Burroughs
17 Burroughs On Punk Rock
18 Susan Sontag Meets Richard Hell
19 Notes Of A Punk Rock Groupie
20 Joey Ramone: A Literary Relationship
21 Andy Warhol The Writer
22 An Interview With Martin Amis
23 Berlin Rocks
24 Christopher Isherwood Meets William Burroughs
25 Robert Mapplethorpe Takes Off
Image Gallery
About the Author
Introduction
1972 was a great time to be a poet. A new generation of poets was just beginning to emerge. There were Patti Smith and Richard Meyers, later Hell; and his friend Tom Miller, later Verlaine; among many others like Lou Reed. At the same time, rock writing was coming of age. Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent, and Nick Tosches were writing with the passion and talent of poets. Meanwhile other punk poets like Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Debbie Harry, and David Byrne were writing poems that would become songs. These cutting edge writers would find a home of sorts at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on the corner of Second Avenue and 10th street.
The poetry scene in New York at this time was the first nurturing counterculture group I became involved with. I was running an underground poetry press called Telegraph Books in collaboration with another punk poet, Andrew Wylie, and the king of minimalism, Aram Saroyan, who had made a big splash in 1968 when Random House published his self-titled collection. It was so minimal that the entire book was read on the six o’clock news in one and a half minutes. We were in the process of publishing Patti Smith’s first book, Seventh Heaven, and nine other titles, including Warhol superstar Brigid Polk’s Scars, two books by Saroyan and Wylie, Gerard Malanga’s Poetry on Film, Tom Weatherly’s Thumbprint, and Back in Boston Again, a classic New York School collaboration from Ted Berrigan, Tom Clark, and Ron Padgett. It was about a weekend the three spent at Saroyan’s apartment before he and Berrigan went to interview Jack Kerouac for the Paris Review.
The best thing about the St. Mark’s Project, and the entire poetry world of this era, was that it was international and, unlike other movements like the Beat Generation and Pop Art, it did not have the impulse to kill the fathers to make way for the sons. Rather the community celebrated its fathers and incorporated them into the new scene. One of the most important of these predecessors was Ezra Pound, who died in November 1972. Pound had been the most creative and collaborative figure in poetry since the First World War. The influence of his work, ranging from the ABC of Reading to The Cantos, was felt strongly in Donald Allen’s famous Grove Press anthology, New American Poetry 1945–1960. The anthology contained three generations of poets, with stars like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso from the Beats, Robert Creeley and John Wieners of the Black Mountain School, and Frank O’Hara from the New York School, whose second generation ran St. Marks and enthusiastically welcomed the new up-and-coming poets. Patti Smith gave her first reading there in ’71.
As a sign of things to come, in January I had taken Telegraph authors Malanga, Smith, and Wylie to London where we gave a reading at London’s poetry central, publisher John Calder’s Better Books. We all gave sensational readings, but Patti captured the night when she did a spontaneous performance, the first ever, of what would become the song “Piss Factory.” In the bar following the reading the organizer told me with apparent glee that we had changed the London poetry scene over night. I have no idea if that was true, but this kind of openness was the hallmark of that poetry world, which was very much an expression of the counterculture.
But in the United States in the years leading up to 1972, that same culture was in flux and disarray. After the watershed year of 1968, when the whole world watched the Chicago police beat up peaceful demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, and the arch-conservative Richard Nixon won the presidency, American counterculture came under the brutal attack of his corrupt and criminal administration. Between ’68 and ’72 our leaders had been shot, jailed, and, if not driven out of the country, smeared by the FBI or attacked by the IRS. While we were reeling from these shock tactics, squabbles broke out between factions of the Hippies and Yippies. Thus the politically based movement of the 1960s began to rapidly crumble. Meanwhile the break up of the Beatles, the withdrawal of Bob Dylan, and the wavering of other sixties super groups blurred the effect rock music had had on the social and sexual revolution. This left an empty space in our hearts and minds.
1972 proved to be both the nadir of this crisis and the launching point for a new movement. At this juncture, punk poets and writers began to create a new consciousness. It would flower throughout the 1970s into a completely unexpected series of developments. For those of us who saw the counterculture as a vehicle to subverting the whole rotten structure of the West, the seventies would become a far more powerful decade than the sixties. In reality our ultimate aim was to replace the (hilariously titled) “nuclear family,” with a new way to live in the Magic Universe of the arts.
Of course, without Nixon’s Waterloo at Watergate much of the second half of this creative decade would not have happened, or it would have happened in a very different way. But thanks to his hubris, Richard Nixon was forced to resign from the presidency in 1974.
The manner in which the counterculture responded to this second chance at turning the country into a more humane environment was quite astonishing. That same year the King of the Beats, William Burroughs, returned to New York from Europe like some exiled king in Shakespeare to seize his rightful throne. Muhammad Ali, who had repeatedly been written off as finished by ancient scribes infuriated by his refusal to be drafted, won back his crown as the people’s Heavyweight Champion of the World; Allen Ginsberg won the National Book Award; Andy Warhol finally moved out of the Factory, in which he had almost been assassinated in ’68; and High Times became the most successful new national magazine. Meanwhile punk rock was just beginning to be heard on the Lower East Side. The gay population, which had been gathering its forces under the banner of the Gay Liberation Movement, broke into the mainstream as the single most powerful new group in the city. And, although not immediately detectable, a whole new generation of women emboldened by the impact of Women’s Liberation found themselves making career stri
des that were previously unthinkable and became much more confident and empowered in all aspects of their lives. The sum of these last three developments created a whole new sexual dynamic in New York that would play perhaps the strongest underlying role in the rapid development of a cultural movement that would emerge in 1978 as the age of the Beat-Punk Generation.
I have often been asked what the subjects of my books have in common and invariably reply, they were all great talkers. This book celebrates the best of those great talkers. Its theme is the relationship between the Beat Generation and the Punk Rock movement.
The Punks, led by Patti Smith and Richard Hell, adored the Beats and the Beats in turn were grateful to the Punks for drawing fresh, renewed attention to their work. The relationship between the two groups was from the start symbiotic, full of fun and, as Allen Ginsberg once said to me walking down the street with Peter Orlovsky late one night after dinner with Isherwood and Burroughs on his way to CBGB, ‘chic’.
This collection of twenty-four pieces represents my favorite and most enduring journalism. It includes as well the best voices of their times from Muhammad Ali through Warhol and Burroughs, Southern, Roeg and Richards, to Hell, Harry and Ramone. Reading it now I can smell and taste the aromas of New York City when it was not only the cultural capitol of the world but the maddest, baddest and most fun place to be. I hope it makes you laugh.
Rosebud Feliu-Pettet, who knew Allen through four decades, was among the twenty people with him when he died; her distinction here is that she was the only one who witnessed in their entirety these final minutes of a great life.
When Ted Berrigan, who published one of Burroughs’ scrapbooks (Time, C Press 1965), took copies of the book to Burroughs in his suite in the Chelsea, he also took a plastic machine gun because he couldn’t afford to pay any royalties. ‘You looked through the sights of the gun and saw images. “It’s an image machine gun,” I told him,’ Berrigan remembers. ‘But he didn’t seem impressed, and I got out of there pretty quickly.’
From ‘Information about the Operation’
by Victor Bockris
In Australia, you ask about sharks and they glance into their tea: “No mate, no. No worries mate. They only come in January when the water’s warm see, otherwise it’s perfectly safe to swim, mate.”
Excerpt from a news bulletin released March 4 1977: “Next thing I felt it go under our feet again and I said, ‘For God’s sake Vic, pull your feet up – I think it’s a ray or a shark!’ I kicked at it, I punched it – it had no effect. I tried to hold Vic with me as he was pulled off the edge of the box. Vic just said: ‘It’s got me again. Goodbye mates, this is it’.”
From ‘People of the Dream Time’ by “Vic” Bockris. Traveller’s Digest, 1977.
1
The Patti Smith Interview
This interview was conducted in the loft Patti Smith shared with Robert Mapplethorpe just down the street from the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd street in Manhattan. Mapplethorpe’s art, though sparse, was prominent on the walls. It was early August 1972. Patti had seen the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden a week earlier. My press, Telegraph Books, had published her first book of poems, Seventh Heaven, earlier that year. I had just returned from an extensive visit to England. Patti’s pretty little sister, Linda, was also present. The interview is significant because this was the first occasion on which I realized I had some talent as an interviewer. And I imagine Patti must have realized she was an outstanding interviewee. It was published that September in one hundred copies by Jeff Goldberg by his Philadelphia based Red Room Books series.
August 1972
VICTOR BOCKRIS: Would you consider yourself to be the greatest poet in New York City?
PATTI SMITH: Um, the greatest poet in New York City? Um, Shit. I can’t think of what to say. I don’t think I’m a great poet at all. I don’t even think I’m a good poet. I just think I write neat stuff.
BOCKRIS: Why does it sell well?
SMITH: ’Cause I sell. ’Cause you know I got a good personality and people really like me. When people buy my book you know they’re really buying a piece of Patti Smith. That book is autobiographical. It sheds the light of my heroes on it. No good poet thinks they’re good. Blaise Cendrars said he was a bad poet.
BOCKRIS: How does it work in relation to people who don’t know you? People in Omaha?
SMITH: Because I think I’m a good writer. I’m a good writer in the same way Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain is a good writer. There’s a lot of American rhythms. I mean I can seduce people. I got good punchlines, you know. I got all the stuff that Americans like. Some of it’s dirt. There’s a lot of good jokes. I mean I write to entertain. I write to make people laugh. I write to give a double take. I write to seduce a chick. I wrote “Girl Trouble” about Anita Pallenberg. Anita Pallenberg would read it and think twice and maybe she’d invite me over to the south of France and have a little nookie or something. Everything I write has a motive behind it. I write to have somebody. I write the same way I perform. I mean you only perform because you want people to fall in love with you. You want them to react to you.
BOCKRIS: John Wieners said to me yesterday that he figured he’d only just become a poet. He’s thirty-eight and he figured this latest book of his [Selected Poems] was his first book. And it took him seventeen years to get there. What do you feel about that?
SMITH: The other day I reread my book and figured I had written my last book. I don’t think that has anything to do with anything. Rimbaud wrote his last book when he was twenty-two and sometimes I figure I did my best work as an artist from post-adolescent energy.
BOCKRIS: Do you think you’re a genius?
SMITH: I’m not very intelligent.
BOCKRIS: But genius is something else. So you agree, right?
SMITH: Yeah, yeah. It’s like when I was a little kid I always knew that I had some special kind of thing inside me. I mean I wasn’t very attractive. I wasn’t very verbal. I wasn’t very smart in school. I wasn’t anything that showed physically to the world that I was something special but I had this tremendous hope all the time, you know, I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going no matter how fucked up I was. Just had this kind of light inside me that kept spurring me on.
BOCKRIS: Why don’t you take us back there to New Jersey in those days when you were a teenager beginning the great trail out? I mean, tell us when you first started to write and everything. How it happened.
SMITH: Well, I always wrote. After I was seven when I read Little Women I wanted to be like Louisa May Alcott. The whole thing to me was in Little Women. Jo was the big move. It seems silly but Jo in Little Women with all those fairy tales and plays introduced me to the writer as performer. She would write those plays and perform them and get her sisters laughing even in the face of death so I wanted to be a chick like her, you know, who wrote and performed what I wrote and so I used to write these dumb little plays and then I wrote these banal little short stories but I wasn’t good. I showed no promise and then when I went to high school I used to write these really dramatic poems just like any other kid writes. About everything I didn’t know about. I was a virgin. I had never faced death. I had never faced war and pestilence and of course I read about sex, pestilence, disease, malaria, I read about everything but I never …
BOCKRIS: What year is this?
SMITH: ’62–’63. Then in ’64 you know I started really getting involved in the lives of people. You know, it was like around ’63–’64 I got seduced by people’s lifestyles, like Modigliani, Soutine, Rimbaud.
BOCKRIS: How did you get in touch with Rimbaud?
SMITH: Well, I was working in a factory and I was inspecting baby-buggy bumper beepers and it was my lunch break and there was this genius sausage sandwich that the guy in the little cart would bring and I really wanted one. They were like $1.45 but the thing is the guy only brought two a day and the two ladies who ruled the factory, named Stella Dragon and Dotty Hook, took the
se sausage sandwiches. They were really wrecks, they had no teeth and everything.
So there was nothing else I wanted. You get obsessed with certain tastes. My mouth was really dying for this hot sausage sandwich so I was real depressed. I went across the railroad tracks to this little bookstore. I was roaming around there and I was looking for something to read and I saw Illuminations, you know, the cheap paperback of Illuminations. I mean, every kid had it. Rimbaud looks so genius. There’s that grainy picture of Rimbaud and I thought he was so neat looking and I instantly snatched it up and I didn’t even know what it was about, I just thought Rimbaud was a neat name. I probably called him Rimbald and I thought he was so cool. So I went back to the factory. And I was reading it. It was in French on one side and English on the other and this almost cost me my job ’cause Dotty Hook saw that I was reading something that had foreign language and she said, “What are you reading that foreign stuff for?” and I said “It’s not foreign,” and she said, “It’s foreign—it’s communist—anything foreign is communist.” So then she said it so loud hat everybody thought I was reading The Communist Manifesto or something and they all ran up and, of course, complete chaos, and I just left the factory in a big huff and I went home. So of course I attached a lot of importance to that book before I had even read it and I just really fell in love with it. It was gracious son of Pan that I fell in love with it ’cause it was so sexy.
BOCKRIS: At what point in this stage did you figure out and begin to understand what you were doing?
SMITH: Not until a few months ago.
BOCKRIS: Why then?
SMITH: Well, see, what happened is I didn’t really fall in love with writing as writing. I fell in love with writers’ lifestyles: Rimbaud’s lifestyle—I was in love with Rimbaud for being a mad angel and all that shit. And then I became friends with Janet [Hamill] and she was a writer, there was all these writers in New Jersey. There was just like this little scene. I was secretly writing. I was doing a lot of art. People knew me as an artist and so, like, I was secretly ashamed of my writing because all my best friends were great writers. So I didn’t have no confidence in myself. I used to write stuff mostly about girls getting rid of their virginity and I used to write like Lorca. I wrote this one thing about this brother raping his cold sister under the white moon. It was called, “The Almond Tree.” While his father raped the young stepmother and she died and he was … He looked at her cadaver and he said, “You are cold in death even colder to me than you were in life.”
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