by Simon Warner
William Burroughs’ work has been the fertile source of band names – the Mugwumps, Soft Machine, Steely Dan and the Nova Mob among them – not to mention one of rock’s most enduring and prolific genres – heavy metal – a phrase that first appeared in The Soft Machine in 1962, the reference linked to the character Uranian Willy dubbed ‘the Heavy Metal Kid’. The phrase ‘heavy metal thunder’ would later appear in one of the decade’s climactic rock anthems, Steppenwolf ’s ‘Born to Be Wild’, a song that would feature most famously in the soundtrack to the movie Easy Rider (1969). In addition, Burroughs’ creative techniques based on the cut-up, an approach developed from the end of the 1950s with Brion Gysin, has had its own impact on rock music. He has also collaborated with a number of key artists. Yet his interest in the 1960s counterculture was severely restricted and he found no affection for the peace and love messages of the hippies. Nonetheless, by the early 1970s, he had made a connection with David Bowie, a novel and outrageous musical icon whose ambiguous gender play and theatrical showmanship had caught headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Bowie had passed through several incarnations over the previous few years – London mod and electric folkie included – before shaping an act that combined kitsch glamour, indeterminate sexuality and abrasively energetic rock ’n’ roll, an Anglicised take on the Manhattan posturings of Warhol’s Factory and the Velvet Underground.
In 1973, Burroughs met Bowie in London for a conversation that would form the core of a feature article in Rolling Stone in February 1974.90 The singer’s career was at its acclaimed height as the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and its stage incarnation caused a major stir. Furthermore, as he shared in this exchange with Burroughs, the rock singer had forthcoming projects in mind including an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the latter production did not eventually proceed under that name, Diamond Dogs (1974) would present some of the novel’s themes but place them in a post-apocalyptic, glam rock-illuminated world. More significant here though was Bowie’s move towards a cut-up approach to his lyric construction, a clear nod to Burroughs. Bowie acknowledges in Buckley that he was ‘heavily into the whole idea of Brion Gysin/William Burroughs “cut-ups”’,91 and the same biographer states: ‘Burroughs would provide a resonant paradigm for Bowie. His books were nightmarish visions of a society populated by desensitised mental and physical cripples – his was the world of drug addicts, criminals and sexual “deviants” […] What Burroughs did was to try and incorporate a different realm of experience, the experience of low-life culture, into the mainstream.’92
As for Burroughs’ own creativity of this period, the decade would see him working on a series of dystopian stories that may have been the antithesis of the hippies’ peace and love programme but nonetheless chimed much more closely with the more menacing and pessimistic mood of the punk, post-punk and new wave eras and he has been dubbed, in some circles, the Godfather of Punk. His return to New York City from London in 1974 coincided with the emergence of new, energetic and frequently transgressive musical styles which would soon hatch the much-hailed punk sounds of CBGBs. In fact, Burroughs’ science fiction that followed in the early 1980s, including a trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night (1981) and continues with The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987), is credited as one of the inspirations of a new sci-fi form called cyberpunk which blended futuristic tale-telling, hi-tech components and elements of punk, pulp and noir, with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling among the style’s prime creators.
The novelist’s re-location to his once familiar New York City, after years of movement between Europe and North Africa, was greeted with particular joy by Patti Smith and she shared her pleasure directly from the stage of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project during a performance. Smith was a prime mover in the nascent punk and rock poetry scene and she would befriend Burroughs. Although he appeared to have little genuine interest in rock music, he was taken by its cultural power and as a social phenomenon. His New York return had seen him engaged as a monthly columnist with the noted popular music magazine of the day Crawdaddy and one of his 1975 contributions was a celebrated interview with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
In 1978, the Nova Convention, presented at various locations in New York, would place Burroughs in the context of the cutting-edge art of the day and its growing relation to rock culture. The event was a celebration over several days, from 30 November to 2 December, of the novelist, his work and ideas and an impressive gallery of serious musical artists would participate in the venture. Poet John Giorno and Burroughs’ assistant James Grauerholz played a part in conceiving the homage. Ted Morgan says that they saw the occasion as ‘a gathering of the counterculture tribe which would enshrine Burroughs as its leader’.93 Among those who attended and contributed were Patti Smith and Frank Zappa – who had replaced the legally entangled Keith Richards – Ed Sanders of the Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Brion Gysin, composers Philip Glass and John Cage, poets Anne Waldman and Giorno himself, novelist and new journalist Terry Southern, LSD guru Timothy Leary and performance artist Laurie Anderson.94
A British rock musician and radical artist called Genesis P-Orridge, whose background combined agit-prop theatre, installation art and Situationist happenings, not to mention the explosion of punk, would develop his connection with Burroughs in the 1980s, although the pair had been in conversation in the past through mailart, a network of communication that had originally been engineered by the New York art collective Fluxus in the late 1960s. P-Orridge’s interest in the cut-up as a principle of art-making had made Burroughs a natural mentor and ally. In 1980, the death of the writer’s associate Antony Balch led to strong likelihood that important Burroughs films in his care would be removed from his London office and simply thrown away. Brion Gysin, in Paris at the time, urgently contacted P-Orridge asked him to physically salvage the rare archive and thus he became, at Gysin and Burroughs’ request, its custodian.95 P-Orridge had made his reputation with the two rock bands he founded and led – Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV – although his UK notoriety rested on a 1976 exhibition at the ICA (the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) when he and his then partner Cosey Fanni Tutti had presented a multi-media event called Prostitution. In 1982, P-Orridge brought Burroughs to the UK on a reading tour called the Final Academy. This event would underpin their friendship and bands linked to the P-Orridge circle, like Ministry and Coil, would collaborate with Burroughs during this period. The 1990s would see Burroughs further engaged with the rock world and with artists and bands who were regarded as some of the most significant of the day. Kurt Cobain, whose band Nirvana had become the leaders of the Seattle-centred grunge movement, would join forces with the novelist on a recording. Released in 1992, ‘The “Priest” They Called Him’ married a reading by Burroughs of a short story and an excoriating guitar response by Cobain. To Burroughs’ low key rendition of a section of his novel Exterminator!, in which the ‘priest’ of the title, an un-named addict seeks to score heroin on Christmas Eve, the Nirvana frontman shaped a dissonant feedback-drenched riposte based on ‘Silent Night’ and ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’. Although the spoken and musical tracks were laid down separately, Burroughs and Cobain did meet later. In 1993 Cobain would invite Burroughs to feature in a video the band were making as a tie-in to ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ but the writer resisted the guitarist’s request to join the cast. Says Charles R. Cross: ‘[E]xactly what Kurt hoped to achieve by casting the writer was never clear: In his attempt to convince Burroughs to participate, he had offered to obscure the writer’s face, so that no one other than Kurt would know of his cameo. Burroughs declined the invitation.’96 Cobain’s heroin-scarred life was ended when he shot himself in 1994.
In 1991, U2 began their Zoo TV tour, a highly ambitious, multi-media production that would promote their new album Achtung Baby and continue on its global trek until 1993. The project was about more than merely s
howcasing new, recorded product. Zoo TV was a deconstruction, a satire, of the mass media in its many forms. Burroughs was invited to contribute, and his reading, on film, of his acerbic lampoon of ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’, formed an integral part of a televised version of the in-concert presentation in 1992, screened at Thanksgiving time that year. He would later make a fleeting appearance in another U2 concept, the video which accompanied their ‘Last Night on Earth’ single in 1997, shortly before his death.
In his obituary in New Musical Express, Stephen Dalton said that Burroughs was ‘one of the most revolutionary writers of the century, whose influence spread through rock ’n’ roll from Lou Reed to Joy Division to Kurt Cobain’.97 Lewis MacAdams believed he ‘came to embody a Luciferian spirit to generations of musicians from Lou Reed to David Bowie to Patti Smith to Trent Reznor’.98 Bono, lead singer of U2, dubbed him ‘the sting in the tale of WASP’.99 Writing in a fiftieth anniversary collection commemorating Naked Lunch, DJ Spooky remarked: ‘In Burroughs’ world, like the realm of the DJ, the acoustic imagination is a place we can all think of as a liberated zone – a place where the mix can absorb any pattern, any sequence, and any text.’100
If we consider the patterns of engagement between Beat and rock from a periodic point of view, the mid- to later 1960s saw a number of acts beyond Dylan and the Beatles make connections with this literary terrain. The Fugs, named subversively in honour of the sanitised term Norman Mailer was forced to euphemistically employ in his celebrated novel of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead (1948), as the soldiers’ realistic use of the word ‘fuck’ was deemed inadmissible at the time, were an early example of the Beat spirit being re-formulated in a popular music context. In his 1971 account, Cook asks, ‘Did the Beats influence rock?’ and answers the question in this way: ‘Yes. A direct link of sorts can be established through the Fugs, that notorious trio of scato-porno-rockers who have a large following in and outside New York, even though their record cannot be played on air.’101 The band continued in a different form well into the new century, some 40 years after Cook wrote that but when the band emerged, around 1965, they were built on a triple core of Ed Sanders, a poet, publisher and political activist whose Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts ran in New York for 13 issues from 1962–65, its mimeographed format, certainly, and its provocative title, also, alluding to the approaches – both tactically and linguistically – that the Beats had pursued in the previous decade; Tuli Kupferberg, who had already made a mark as a minor Beat writer and publisher in his own right in the 1950s and had been memorialised in Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ as the man who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived; and a younger drummer from Texas named Ken Weaver.
Sanders not only edited a journal which attracted a stellar line-up of contributors – Ginsberg, Burroughs, Orlovsky, Mailer, Warhol, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima and Frank O’Hara among them102 – but also, eventually, controversy. The intervention of the police, at his Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village in early 1966, saw the force seize an edition of the publication on grounds of obscenity. The police action would close both the magazine and the bookshop but, by now, Sanders and Kupferberg had devised a new outlet for their ideas with the creation of the Fugs whose first album, The Village Fugs,103 appeared in 1965 to be followed by a rush of LP releases, including re-packaged variations, over the next two years.
Sanders recalls the genesis of the group, who were formed at the venue called the Dom in New York’s St. Mark’s Place owned by legendary proprietor Stanley Tolkin:
We’d go there after poetry readings. I remember I think it was after a Robert Creeley reading at the St. Mark’s, we all went over there. There was Joel Oppenheimer and Leroi Jones and I think Creeley was there, all kinds of people were there, Ted Berrigan. The place was packed and there was this strange music, you know, by the Beatles, this was late ’64, so the Beatles had hit, there was Wilson Pickett, and all those black dance groups […] We used to go there dancing after the readings […] So Kupferberg was there one time and I said, ‘Hey, you know. This is it. We’ll set it to poetry and see what happens.’104
Cook said the band ‘in a peculiar way […] are a most literary kind of group: the words do count with them. Their melodies, such as they are, serve only to support their crudely witty poem-lyrics.’105 Sanders remarked: ‘We came to music through literature, through being well read and literate. A lot of poetry was written with regard to music and meter. Most of the ancient poetry was sung. We’ve put a lot of good poetry into rock – Ginsberg’s, Matthew Arnold’s, Ezra Pound’s, Sappho’s and so forth.’106 They also paid tribute to a hero of the Beats and a particular inspiration to Ginsberg, William Blake, and produced their own setting of ‘Howl’.
Miles described the Fugs as ‘a natural product of the downtown music scene’107 and quotes Sanders’ aims for the group: ‘This is an era of civil rights, sexual & consciousness expansion revolutions, & those are the banners under which the Fugs are going to present themselves to America.’108 In autumn 1968, there was a famed encounter between Kerouac and Sanders on William F. Buckley’s television show Firing Line when the subject of the hippies was debated. Kerouac was drunk and Sanders’ friendly attempts to engage with his hero on camera and off were met by the novelist’s surly rejection. The Fugs would dissolve by the end of the decade but then re-form in 1984 when Ginsberg’s guitar player Steven Taylor joined the expanded band. They would then continue working into the next century, although Kupferberg would die, aged 86, in 2010.
Sanders’ activities would continue alongside the band’s schedules. In 2002, he published a narrative poem, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, as Edward Sanders, commenting in the ‘Afterword’: ‘I did not plan to write a book on Allen Ginsberg, but rather an extended elegy, which I began at the time of his death in April 1997 when for a while grief seemed to course without limit. I would be walking down the street and suddenly weep thinking about him […] I loved him and he is in mind almost as if he were alive even as I type on this warm spring day …’109
Emerging at a similar time to the Fugs, and also in New York City, were the Velvet Underground, a band’s whose history would take impetus from the broader Beat nexus. Formed in 1965 and fronted by two songwriters, Brooklyn-born singer Lou Reed and British viola player and composer John Cale, with guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Mo Tucker, they would become the in-house rock group at Andy Warhol’s Factory, the artist’s headquarters and studio where an entourage of film-makers and photographers, artists and dancers, models and musicians, freaks and hangers-on would gather from early 1964. The Velvet Underground’s first regular engagement was at the end of the following year at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village. Although in their short sets they were making little impression – Tucker was relegated to tambourine as the club owners wanted to restrict noise levels110 – the coming months would see their fortunes change. Warhol had become involved in a new discothèque and light show project which he intended to use as material for a filmed venture. Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s principal lieutenant in respect of movie creation, made a different proposal. Says Watson: ‘Paul Morrissey suggested a bigger plan: Warhol should emulate Brian Epstein and sponsor a band. Showing Warhol movies behind the band would give them a chance to re-cycle movies that had had very limited distribution …’111
Film-maker and Ginsberg associate Barbara Rubin, who had also played a key part in sparking the International Poetry Incarnation in London the previous June where Beat poets had filled one of the capital’s most prestigious venues, would now perform an important role in connecting the Velvet Underground and the Warhol community. Rubin had heard the band in rehearsal and, explains Watson, ‘believed they could be cultural heroes of a new age. In her mind, that select group included Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and [film-maker] Jack Smith. She directed her energy in exposing all of them to one another.’112 Ginsberg said of this: ‘She saw us as spiritual men, heroes of a cultural revolution involving at first main
ly sex and drugs and art. Her genius was sympathising with everybody’s desire to get together in work with their fellow geniuses.’113
The Velvet Underground, a four-piece until a new Warhol-recommended singer called Nico joined the act, would participate in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia extravaganza that debuted in New York on 8 April 1966, travelled also to a number of cities in the US and Canada and was filmed in Chicago. They released their debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico in spring 1967, just weeks before the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, including material on the debut album that would both excite and surprise – a signal to the countercultural underground that taboo lyrical topics, in an often dishevelled and stark rock setting, could challenge the more conventional tropes of mainstream popular music, particularly with a hallucinogen-fuelled Summer of Love imminent. But the release was out of sync with that sunny and optimistic mood and arguably some way ahead of its time. Its controversial and dissonant devices would prove a turn-off in terms of its commercial reception.
The album, with its memorable Warhol banana cover, would sell poorly but still become enormously influential, particularly to the post-1960s bands who shaped the punk and new wave movements of the next decade and beyond. Yet it is hard to see how songs like ‘Heroin’,114 ‘Waiting for the Man’, ‘Venus in Furs’ and ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ – with their themes of narcotics, sado-masochism and death – could have been created without the new and liberated climate that the Beats had helped to construct with their own candid expressions, particularly Ginsberg in ground-breaking works like ‘Howl’, where homosexuality had been dealt with in an honest and uncompromising manner, and Burroughs’ writings on drugs and perverse sexual practices in Naked Lunch, for example. The work of the Velvet Underground had been influenced by other forces that may be loosely grouped under a newly fermenting trash aesthetic and Warhol’s effect in shaping this revolutionary style – in his visual art, in his movies – cannot be under-stated. But the lyric texts that Reed utilised on the debut record, and on later songs, had a definite Beat taint based, we may assume, on degrees of personal experience – life as art – and often transgressive in subject – conventional codes broken and standard moralities unheeded.