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The Captain’s Cocktail Party: Dinner with Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs
It was a bitter cold night on March 1st of 1980 as I headed towards William Burroughs’ headquarters on the Bowery. His section of the building had once been the locker room of a gymnasium, and he had humorously but with a serious subtext named it ‘The Bunker’. It was here in the mid-Seventies that he made a stand against his muse, hammering away at the typewriter for six years writing the novel Cities of the Red Night (1981) which would signal the commencement of a new blitzkrieg in his career.
I was hyper-nervous. The night’s agenda was to record during dinner a conversation between Burroughs, Jagger and Warhol. The event was to me of monumental significance for it was the first and, as it would turn out, only occasion on which the three would be brought together.
The meeting had been arranged in part to fulfill an assignment for Burroughs to write about The Rolling Stones’ twentieth anniversary, for a volume edited by David Dalton. What worried me was whether Jagger would show up, and if so, when. He was notoriously late for appointments, including his concerts; Burroughs, a suit-and-tie gentleman from the old school, aged sixty-three, looked upon late rock stars as uncouth individuals with no respect for their elders.
Within ten minutes of my arrival the doorbell rang. Bounding down the flight of gray stone steps and opening the series of three iron gates that separated The Bunker from the outside world, secured by triple padlocks, I recognized, wrapped in an enormous hooded parka, the skinny, dandyish Andy Warhol. As we entered Bill’s domain, I was injected by Andy’s enthusiastic energy and lightness of being. He instantly switched on his astonished-by-anything-act, running around the huge white-on-white windowless space like an eight-year-old at a birthday party. Apart from William’s battered gray metal detective’s desk with an Olympia typewriter atop it, a dining table and chairs were the sole furniture in The Bunker. He admired the Brion Gysin paintings, the pipes that ran across the ceiling, Bill’s neatly folded pajamas on his bed. The row of urinals in the toilet gave pause for speculation.
As the doorbell pealed again, I raced down the stairs to find the diminutive photographer, Marcia Resnick, behind a mound of equipment. As she proceeded to set it up, I got Bill and Andy drinks. They sat at the conference table, discussing Professor Shockley’s theory on artificially inseminating women of higher than average I.Q.s with men of the same to create a super race.
“Bill, you should sell yours!” I enthused. “Imagine who would want The Sperm of William Burroughs.”
“You could do it right now,” Andy insisted. “All they have to do is put it in the freezer.”
“I’ll do it right away!” Bill exclaimed, musing, “I bet Mick Jagger could name his own price!”
Meanwhile, Marcia had arranged an elaborate series of spotlights with which to fry my subjects. Horrified by how Mick Jagger would react on entering the premises to being assaulted by blinding white heat, I ordered her to dismantle her lights, screaming, “How can you expect people to have intellectual conversation while they’re being grilled like fish on a barbecue?” She screamed back, but when Bill and Andy agreed, she rapidly stashed her gear in Bill’s bedroom.
This disrupted the harmonious scene. In the ensuing silence, Bill’s mouth started twitching, Andy stared blankly at his plate as if it were a great painting, I began to sweat, and Marcia cast withering glances at me. Suddenly, the doorbell chimed yet a third time. I leapt from my seat, glided down the stairs, unflicked the triple locks and came face to face with Mick Jagger. Behind him loomed Jerry Hall and Liz Derringer, jumping up and down in the arctic night. As I followed Jagger up the steep flight of stairs, his dragged-out and flat-footed gait signaled that he was not here because he wanted to be.
As the dinner commenced, Bill was at the head of the table with Mick and Jerry Hall to his right, myself and Andy to his left. Marcia and Liz were at the bottom of the table.
I attempted to negotiate an opening, but Jagger would have none of it.
JAGGER: What are we doing here? What is the purpose of this dinner?
BURROUGHS: The purpose of this dinner is very simple. David Dalton is getting together … What is this about Victor? The twentieth anniversary of The Rolling Stones?
JAGGER: What? What? That’s not been going on for twenty years. They’re making it up!
BOCKRIS: Bill, maybe we’re confusing it with the twentieth anniversary of Rolling Stone magazine.
JAGGER: We’re talking at cross purposes. The magazine wasn’t founded twenty years ago, nor was the group.
BOCKRIS: So this is just a completely mistaken occasion?
BURROUGHS: It seems to be a mistake all round, but I got nothing to do with it. Don’t put it on me, man. David Dalton, who you must know very well …
JAGGER: I’ve met him twice.
WARHOL: He’s one of my best friends.
BURROUGHS: Listen, what is this thing about?
BOCKRIS: Well listen, man, you told me about it.
JAGGER: Couldn’t it be your twentieth anniversary or something Andy? I mean you’ve been doing something for twenty years.
BURROUGHS: The Twentieth Century, I mean Anniversary Issue uuummm … which presumably would be devoted to The Rolling Stones’ music …
BOCKRIS: The point is they asked Bill to write something …
WARHOL: Maybe this is one of those things that’s going to take three or four years to do.
JAGGER: It’s off to a racing start.
BOCKRIS: But The Rolling Stones really did form in 1962, isn’t that correct?
JAGGER: Yeah, but it isn’t 1982.
BOCKRIS: Maybe they’re working on it early.
JAGGER: Maybe there won’t be a group in 1982 so we won’t have to worry about it.
BOCKRIS: There’s a scoop, Bill!
JAGGER: They’ll all die in a plane crash or something.
BOCKRIS: Are you going to tour China?
JAGGER: We might. They asked us if we could put it together, but I don’t think it’s going to work out. Go on over and have a look first.
BOCKRIS: What are the problems?
JAGGER: Money. Someone’s got to pay for it. No audience. We have to create an audience first. They have to sell it first.
JERRY HALL: I thought the audience was picked, isn’t that what you said?
JAGGER: It would be if you did one show in a small place.
BURROUGHS: I think of pop music as being radar, in a sense, that you send it out and something bounces back. It may be good or it may not, but often it is.
JAGGER: It’s a long way to go.
BURROUGHS: I am saying in this essay that the whole cultural revolution – and I’m talking about the Stones as heroes of the revolution deserving citation, you understand – is over and we have won. Then who are the ‘we’ and what have we won exactly?
BOCKRIS: You’re saying the dissemination of new language and important messages has gone further through pop music than any other form?
BURROUGHS: Yes, that it’s one of the most influential things in the cultural revolution because it reached millions. You see, a book can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but pop music is immediately reaching millions of people.
WARHOL: A book’s very hard because the person who translates it can just make it completely different.
JAGGER: I think TV and movies surely must be more effective.
WARHOL: Did you ever hear anybody translate one of your songs into a different language? Does it come out the same?
JAGGER: No, it changes it, doesn’t it?
WARHOL: Really a lot.
BOCKRIS: But if the right brain gets a song playing over and over in your head you can’t expel it, whereas you can dismiss a movie image at will.
JAGGER: Not to my experience. I get rid of the songs playing in my head. I used to be like that when I was a kid, I couldn’t get rid of movie images.
BURROUGHS: Mick, I was saying that the whol
e cultural revolution was concerned with confrontation, and wouldn’t you say this was exactly what pop music was concerned with? Real confrontation between the performer and the audience – never complete of course?
JAGGER: In live music, yes. Listening to the music at home, I don’t think it’s like that.
BURROUGHS: I was simply saying that my feeling is that the whole cultural revolution is really about confrontation between disparate groups.
JAGGER: But that all seems to have gone past and become sort of fragmented.
BURROUGHS: The whole bit about minority recognition is nothing new. I mean, I can remember back in the 1920s two guys ran an antique store. Everybody in town knew that they were gay, but they didn’t want to confront it. It would seem to me that what is happening in an evolutionary way is total confrontation between disparate groups. They got to get together one way or another. That’s the way we’re going to leave the planet in one piece, you see. You’ve got all these groups and it comes to a point where they have to get together in one way or another, maybe at a great disadvantage …
BOCKRIS: It’s quite possible that people could leave the planet during our lifetime, but somehow it’s completely unimaginable to me.
HALL: I think lots of people would like to go.
BURROUGHS: Yes, I’d love to go. I’d go this second. But do you feel, as I do, that the whole cultural revolution, and a lot of pop music, is about the whole idea of confrontation? Aren’t you actually paid to confront your payants? Isn’t that what you’re doing?
JAGGER: No, it’s not like that really. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t say that was always true. Sometimes it’s true.
BOCKRIS: Why do you say that, Bill?
BURROUGHS: Well I just feel that the whole cultural revolution is going in the direction of confrontation.
BOCKRIS: What cultural revolution?
BURROUGHS: My dear, do you realize that thirty or forty years ago a four-letter word could not appear on a printed page. You’re asking about what cultural revolution! Holy shit, man, what’d you think we’ve been doing all these years?
WARHOL: We never think about it, though. He’s young enough that he doesn’t think about it. A lot of people don’t think about it.
BOCKRIS: It happened, and The Rolling Stones were a very big part of it.
BURROUGHS: Pop music was one of the big things in the whole cultural revolution. See, every time they got busted for drugs we were that much closer to decriminalization of pot all over the world because it’s becoming a household word.
JAGGER: But what happened after that?
BOCKRIS: It’s different, Bill, it’s not the same situation now. There was a thing in the paper recently about Ron Wood getting busted. That’s not revolutionary, people don’t think about it as some sort of symbol.
BURROUGHS: No, but the point is that revolutions gain certain objectives or they don’t, and after the objectives are gained, well, that’s …
BOCKRIS: That’s what I’m saying, there is no cultural revolution now. I mean, do you think there’s a cultural revolution, Mick?
JAGGER: Not that’s immediately observable. There’s a slow one.
HALL: I think there’s always cultural change.
JAGGER: There’s no cultural revolution now, I wouldn’t think so.
HALL: It’s too tiring.
BOCKRIS: But the intensity of audiences hasn’t changed that much?
JAGGER: They’re intense about certain cultural ideas. There’s the whole question of their being able to do anything about it. There’s a sense that they just can’t do anything about it, and it’s always been like that. There was a certain point where people thought that they could, but I think that time passed years ago.
BOCKRIS: When you’re playing to audiences now, they’re not looking for some incredibly new thing, right?
JAGGER: I’ve no idea. I never really think about it. There are a lot of people who like to politicize their art with whatever they’re posturing to. Is there a telephone in this joint? [Jagger goes to the phone, and returns a few minutes later.]
BOCKRIS: You haven’t played Italy for a long time, right?
JAGGER: I don’t play at the moment.
BURROUGHS: Don’t blame you there. This whole business happens for months and months and months where I can’t write a word, which is, I think, comparable. It’s something called writer’s block, where you just can’t do it.
JAGGER: I don’t really want to play on the road at the moment.
BURROUGHS: I don’t know whether that happens in other …
BOCKRIS: Are you still inundated with movie scripts?
JAGGER: Yeah, but everything just falls to pieces.
BOCKRIS: Bill’s big future is as an actor. Bill’s getting into acting now.
BURROUGHS: I wouldn’t say that.
WARHOL: He wants to play you in the film The Mick Jagger Story, starring William Burroughs. He’s trying to study you because he’s working on the part!
BURROUGHS: Now wait a minute, I think you’re advancing a slightly false position here. I play CIA doctors. I can’t see my way to playing Mick Jagger.
WARHOL: You know I’ve known Liz since she was eleven years old.
JAGGER: You knew her then?
WARHOL: These girls all told me they were twenty and they were eleven!
BURROUGHS: What? You’ve known her that length of time Andy? I don’t mean to be untactful …
WARHOL: They were pretending they were adults.
LIZ DERRINGER: Some of us went off to the movies, some of us married rock stars.
WARHOL: You hit the big time.
DERRINGER: Some of us jumped out of windows.
WARHOL: Our best friend Andrea Feldman jumped out of a window for the big time.
DERRINGER: She said she was going to make a smash hit on Park Avenue, and she did. She jumped out the window.
WARHOL: She was a confused kid. We cry over Andrea every time.
DERRINGER: She loved Andy so much she used his name. Her name was Andrea but everyone called her Andy and she always called herself Mrs. Andy Warhol.
WARHOL: Warhola.
BOCKRIS: Who was this Julian Burroughs who said he was your son, Bill?
BURROUGHS: Some kind of a fraud, I remember. Who is this guy?
WARHOL: He was a guy who was running away from being in the army who said he was your son, named Julian Burroughs. And we starred him in a movie called Naked Restaurant.
HALL: Is he really your son?
BURROUGHS: No.
HALL: Daddy!
BOCKRIS: But you know Bill was married twice. Ilse Burroughs was his first wife. Like W. H. Auden, he married a woman to get her out of a Nazi-occupied country. W. H. Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter, Elsa Mann, right?
BURROUGHS: Refuting any imputation of anti-Semitism.
WARHOL: And she lived on the Lower East Side.
BOCKRIS: And Ilse Burroughs is still alive.
WARHOL: No, no, but Mrs. Auden lived on the Lower East Side, St. Marks Place. God!
BURROUGHS: Mrs. Burroughs certainly does not live on the Lower East Side! She lives in some fashionable place in Italy.
BOCKRIS: She’s apparently very wealthy.
BURROUGHS: I don’t see how the fuck she could be wealthy. Certainly not from me.
BOCKRIS: Did she marry you to get a green card or something?
BURROUGHS: Yes. To get away from the Nazis. She came to America and her first job was to work for Ernst Toller. He was a big scientist in those times who worked on the atom bomb. It was rather an amusing story, really, because she was working as his secretary and she always kept very regular hours, getting back at exactly one o’clock after she’d gone out to lunch. Well, it so happened that this day some guy passed her on the street, some old refugee asking for alms, and she was delayed for about ten minutes. When she got back she started going through pictures or something and she said, “Oooooohhhh, I left without my hat, it is hanging up somewhere.” So sh
e goes and opens the bathroom door and he’s on the other side. He’d done this several times before, but he’d always arranged it so that someone would come back and rescue him in time.
BOCKRIS: I don’t understand what happened. I lost you in the bathroom. He is hanging on the other side of the bathroom door? Who is?
BURROUGHS: ERNST TOLLER! She was his secretary.
BOCKRIS: And he was hanging?
BURROUGHS: My dear, look. She was his secretary. He had tried this other times before, but usually he arranged it so that someone came back.
BOCKRIS: He always tried to hang himself and he always tried to arrange it so that someone would come back?
WARHOL: But nobody came back.
BURROUGHS: She was ten minutes late this particular day, that’s all.
BOCKRIS: When did you last see The Rolling Stones?
BURROUGHS: Mick’s farewell in England. It was at The Roundhouse, I remember.
JAGGER: And after that we only met twice over the intervening years, but we never spoke to each other.
BURROUGHS: I wouldn’t say that Mick!
JAGGER: We did talk to each other.
BOCKRIS: You met and there was very little conversation, so one can conclude that the influence, if any, has been mostly sartorial.
BURROUGHS: WHAT! SARTORIAL?
BOCKRIS: Look how similarly dressed they are!
HALL: That’s true.
JAGGER: I think Bill’s used to being more formal than I am.
HALL: You do dress kind of alike.
JAGGER: But Andy has that special undervest. What’s that thing you’ve got on?
BOCKRIS: It’s a bullet-proof jacket.
BURROUGHS: What the hell is that thing? I didn’t even get a look at it.
WARHOL: It’s a bullet-proof jacket.
BURROUGHS: Yeah, it really is. Oh well, God knows you need one, Andy!
BOCKRIS: So Mick did you ever shoot anyone, or did anyone ever try to shoot you?
JAGGER: No.
BOCKRIS: Bill shot someone, and Andy got shot, let’s see …
JAGGER: Who did you shoot, Bill? [There was a static pause. Burroughs’ eyes, unbluffed, unreadable, pinned on Jagger’s face, looking a little surprised that Mick was not aware that he had accidentally shot his wife in Mexico in 1948.]
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