“Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo … at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street…. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion…”
That was how William S Burroughs introduced the global to the ‘Interzone’ in his heroin-and-hashish-soaked 1959 novel ‘Naked Lunch’. Those few bars of Duke Ellington were just the beginning. Rarely has a writer had as much of an impact on rock’n’roll as Burroughs, who was born 100 years ago today on 5 February 1914.
Kurt Cobain was such a big fan that he played discordant guitar on a spoken-word performance called ‘The “Priest” They Called Him’. The Beatles put him on the Sgt. Pepper’s sleeve. Jagger and Richards used his ‘cut-up’ technique of rearranging words from their notes to help them write lyrics for ‘Exile On Main St.’s ‘Casino Boogie’.
While Burroughs lived all over the world, including in London and in Tangier, in north Morocco, the city that inspired ‘Interzone’, he is perhaps most associated with the New York scene that he inhabited with fellow poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In later life, these writers became icons to the city’s burgeoning punk rock scene, particularly songwriters like Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Richard Hell.
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore moved to New York as a teenager to become a part of this scene. I spoke to him about his memories of the author as an old man:
What was your first impression of Burroughs?
I used to live near him in New York City. I first moved to New York in ’77 and he was living in ‘The Bunker’ in the Bowery, which was a sort of mythological place that John Giorno, the poet, resided in. Burroughs lived downstairs from him, underneath the street. I would see Burroughs walking around sometimes in the Bowery. You saw all those cats walking around at that time: Allen Ginsberg lived down the street from me with Peter Orlovsky. I would see them holding hands on the subway, which was fascinating. It was more of a small town in New York City in those days. Everybody knew each other. You would see all the people who were celebrated in that scene, such as those guys, and then the punk rock people like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and Patti Smith. Everybody lived in sort of the same area. There was this little village, and the tempat was starting to draw attention to itself because of CBGB.
Was he going to the shows?
pattismithwsbWhen I first saw William Burroughs he was sitting in the audience at CBGB when Patti Smith was playing. It was really interesting, because usually that club was just crammed full of kids my age, 19 or 20 years old. I remember going to see Patti Smith there, late 76 or early 77, and she was pretty much at her apex at that point. I remember the place being really crowded, and in the day CBGB had tables and chairs and they served hamburgers and there were dogs walking around. I don’t think it was really set up to deal with the capacity crowds that started coming in there. They got rid of the tables and chairs after a while, but they still had them then. I remember it being jam-packed and sitting tightly up against this little round wooden table, and all of a sudden people who worked there came into the middle of the room and just started yelling, pulling people out of the chairs and pushing people away. They slammed down a table right in the middle of the room and threw some chairs around it. Everybody was really upset while this was going on. Then they escorted William Burroughs and a couple of his friends in and sat them down very diplomatically at this table. I remember sitting there thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s like William Burroughs’. He was this old, grey eminence in a tie and a fedora. He sat there and looked around at us. He didn’t seem to feel very guilty about taking up all this space. Then Patti came out in leather trousers and absolutely decimated the place. I remember that was probably the most fabulous Patti Smith performance I ever saw. She was on fire, knowing that William Burroughs was sat right in the middle of the room watching this concert.
There was another club downtown called The Mudd Club. I started going there and you’d never know what was going to happen. There were no flyers or anything. Sometimes it would be a band or some performance art or a poet or whatever. One of the first times I walked in there they set up a folding card table onstage and William Burroughs did a reading. He did it a few times during those first few years of The Mudd Club, 78-79. That was fabulous. It was a very neighbourhood thing, and he was really acerbic. Cutting and biting.
Around that time they had the Nova Convention, which was one of the first celebrations of William S Burroughs. John Giorno instigated it. There were things that happened all over the city but there was a main concert which I got tickets for. There was a cavalcade of people announced for it: Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Keith Richards, Brion Gysin and all the literary people. Everybody was there, except Keith Richards never showed up. Much to the audience’s dismay, because I think he sold a lot of tickets! We were all excited to see what that was all about because it was purported that Keith Richards wrote the lyrics to ‘Satisfaction’ after reading William Burroughs. It was a great event, and that was the first real gracing of William Burroughs as a cultural icon. That was a wonderful thing.