Beat Punks

by Victor Bockris

  HARRY: Oh yeah. I guess I know what you mean. I used to get followed home a lot.

  BOCKRIS: Is that nothing to do with you?

  HARRY: Yeah. That’s that other girl.

  BOCKRIS: Which one is that?

  HARRY: That’s A.

  BOCKRIS: Do you have any memory of a particularly crazy thing that happened to you?

  HARRY: I guess the craziest one was in the middle of July when my girlfriend was about seven months pregnant and she was like huge and we were walking down 1st Avenue and we were crossing 14th Street going south and he was walking north and he passed us by and I looked at him and he was dressed for winter and it was about 95 and he was sweating and I just like looked at him and said Oh My God and then he came around behind us and stuck a knife on my girlfriend’s stomach. He held this marine knife to her stomach and hailed a taxi and forced us into the taxi. By the time we got to 23rd Street the taxi driver got hip and he drove down a one way street weaving and driving like really crazy and then a cop car came past us, pulled us over, and by that time the guy had the knife on my stomach and then all of a sudden this gun came through the window of the taxi. You know “Police! Police!” It was really fast and really scarey. The Naked City. I hopped out the other side really fast. We talked to the cops, but we just got out of the car as fast as possible.

  BOCKRIS: Do you find the situation you’re in now means that you can meet a lot of people and are they more interesting than the people you used to know before you made it?

  HARRY: I don’t know. I think it’s the same. I can’t help it. Maybe I’m fooling myself. I think that I’m just meeting all the same people. They’re all the same. Everybody’s idiots. I’m just meeting the same idiots all over the place. Uptown, downtown, Japan, England. They’re all the same, but it’s like everybody even looks the same that’s the freakiest part of it. There’s people I mean that are living in New York and LA that have their replicas performing the same functions in other places in the world or the country at the same time. You know, there’s more than one Fast Freddie. I don’t know if he likes that … I don’t know if anything you know happens particularly fast. Except natural disasters or explosions.

  BOCKRIS: You think speed is possibly an illusion.

  HARRY: Yeah. Speed. Size also.

  BOCKRIS: Well size is almost definitely an illusion. I mean it’s a totally subjective thing. Do you think America is the most modern country because it’s the richest country?

  HARRY: Definitely. And it’s also extremely what everything is based on. The culture doesn’t have much base other than expansion and production. I don’t think our agricultural period was really very strong. It was kind of more stable.

  BOCKRIS: We push money more than anything else so by our standards its important, but then is it as important to people in Russia?

  HARRY: We went to the airport in Moscow. Did you ever go to Moscow? What was it like?

  BOCKRIS: Moscow? It was great. I really liked it a lot.

  HARRY: I just think everything is the same everywhere. I mean the only place that was anything different for me of any place I ever went was Thailand because I saw things and it was like you know it wasn’t as clean and it wasn’t as modern, but it’s like funky. I never saw that before.

  BOCKRIS: So what are you doing for like the next month or so?

  HARRY: I’m waiting to hear about a script. I’m trying to … get organised. Our home life is never very organised I don’t know if it ever will be. There’s always piles of papers around and it’s just maddening.

  BOCKRIS: Your place always looks like you just moved in.

  HARRY: You should see what happened today. I mean the amount of mail that we got today which is like a sixtieth of what we get because they just sent some of it over from the fan club, they thought we’d like to see some special things, but I mean I just can’t keep up with it. I need a secretary now! I can’t keep up with it. I want to answer these letters, I want to communicate to these people, but I just don’t have the time.

  This interview was done for my book on William Burroughs in which only a few of its lines were included. It was one of the most enjoyable, relaxed taping sessions I’ve ever done largely because of Debbie and Chris Stein’s roots in the Beats. They were and are essentially Beatniks!

  16

  Blondie Meets Burroughs

  In 1980 I invited Chris and Debbie back to my apartment for dinner with William Burroughs. The conversation took some interesting twists and turns.

  If you are too young or too dumb to know who Burroughs is, a brief perusal of your local bookshop’s shelves will tell you that he’s one of America’s greatest modern authors.

  He invented the infamous ‘cut-ups’ writing technique by reshuffling the words of his novel, The Naked Lunch to make three more books, Dead Fingers Talk, Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded and has had several other bestsellers, including Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs was in the vanguard of the Beat Movement, and at the time of the interview Burroughs had just returned from a conference in Italy and completed a new novel, Cities Of The Red Night. For his part, Chris Stein is in the studio producing the Lounge Lizards and Walter Stedding & The Dragon People whilst Debbie reads scripts for a possible movie role and vacuums their apartment.

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: So are you getting lots and lots and lots of invitations these days to go out and stuff?

  CHRIS STEIN: Yeah, we’re pretty busy. It’s nice having a phone machine.

  DEBBIE HARRY: Yeah the phone machine is very nice. We just got it last week and it’s much nicer than an answering service. It’s sort of perfect.

  BOCKRIS: Someone calls and if you want to talk to them you can turn it off and talk to them?

  HARRY: Yeah. Plus the fact that when you play it back it’s so entertaining.

  STEIN: Yeah to hear five of your friends …

  HARRY: Shrieking into the phone and stuff: “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER THE PHONE!”

  WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I used to have several of them that worked in different ways. I have no feel for these sort of things. I dislike telephones anyway. In order to survive I have to talk to certain people on the telephone. I know I have to do it and I do it, but I don’t like it. And something I’ve always deplored is the practice of visiting over the telephone. It just drives me crazy to have someone visiting over the telephone. Say I’m in a room and somebody I want to see about something is busy on the phone for three quarters of an hour. It drives me crazy!

  HARRY: Oh I can’t talk for that long. Just brief hellos and stuff like that.

  BURROUGHS: Well I feel the briefer the better. My feeling about phones is deliver your message and get off as quickly as possible. See, your message may be complicated, you may have to dictate something over the phone. I’ve done that. It’s excruciating, like having to dictate a telegram.

  HARRY: It’s hard, yeah, spelling and everything.

  BOCKRIS: Debbie and Chris just came back from London and they always fly on the Concorde.

  HARRY: Sometimes we do. If the record company pays for it we do. It’s great! It’s the greatest.

  BOCKRIS: What are the other people like on the flight is what I want to know!

  STEIN: We chased Lord Somebody out of his seat. He was smoking a cigar in the No Smoking section so we told the Steward to chase him, and the Steward came back to us and said, “That guy told me ‘Don’t you know who I am!’” and it was Lord So-and-So.

  HARRY: Yeah. Lord and Lady So-and-So.

  BOCKRIS: Nicolas Roeg said all the people look like old businessmen.

  STEIN: Yeah, mostly completely businessmen.

  HARRY: No! We saw Willie Nelson! Wasn’t Willie Nelson on the flight?

  BURROUGHS: Well I don’t know. Who is Willie Nelson?

  HARRY: Country and Western guy. And I saw this blind guy. One big huge blond guy sat there and we didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he was like s
o fucked up he just sat there in the seat and he was like, you know, “GUUUUUYUIIIMUUURRRRGGGHHH!” And they led him off the plane at the end. We didn’t even know he was blind; we just thought he was completely stoned, so stoned that he couldn’t even get around. They drink a lot on that flight too. Free booze. You can drink forever.

  BURROUGHS: I don’t know anything about Concorde. What’s it like?

  HARRY: It shoots up in the air like a rocket ship. It takes three hours from London to New York.

  BURROUGHS: Unless you’re looking for a tax write off, I can’t see why anybody would …

  HARRY: Well, it is an experience because there’s like a club of people that are like fans of the Concorde, and because there are such a small number of planes in the fleet of Concorde planes and they only carry 100 people at a time, it’s a real thrill. And remember when they show those things of the moon launches, how the rockets jettison different parts? The plane sort of does that when it shoots into a higher surge of power. The plane sort of goes thwoom! and approaches space, and everything is sort of nice. It makes you want to be an astronaut.

  BURROUGHS: Well, I would leave the piloting of the plane to someone else, but I sure would like to go on it. I don’t believe any of that stuff about “I won’t go on unless I know how to pilot the plane,” although I used to be a private pilot, a very private pilot. It’s easy as driving a car to fly a simple plane. I’m not talking about a big airplane or anything like that, but one of these jobs that land at 24 miles per hour and cruises at 65 miles per hour.

  HARRY: They have these little two-seater helicopters now for just about the same price as a car. You know those executive helicopters for about $12,000.

  BURROUGHS: Helicopters are difficult and dangerous to fly. They’re much more dangerous than regular planes.

  STEIN: You know what hang-gliding is?

  BURROUGHS: Of course. I know what it is. They used to take off across this plateau. You can be 10,000 feet in about half an hour outside Boulder, so these guys are up there taking off the cliffs. It’s very dangerous. All my pilot friends say no, no, no, it’s like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel. A lot of people have been killed, worse yet injured, terribly injured. You know people say “Oh well, suppose you do get killed.” Well there are a hell of a lot of worse things that could happen to you than get killed. But it must be an absolutely great feeling if you can come down alive, because I have seen them up there and at first I thought they were buzzards.

  STEIN: My friend told us he saw a guy dangling from a hang-glider hanging from the electric wires in California.

  BOCKRIS: Have you ever had a bad electric shock? You’ve had them obviously.

  BURROUGHS: No, I haven’t had any electric shocks.

  BOCKRIS: Not even just touching a toaster with a knife or something?

  BURROUGHS: No, not even that. The most I’ve had is walking around on the rugs. That’s what we used to do as kids, shuffling around on the rugs. But I don’t know about these shock treatments. I know a lot of people who’ve had them and I didn’t see anyone who was permanently improved.

  BOCKRIS: Bill just returned from Italy. He said it’s very calm over there, and there’s no tension at all.

  HARRY: Yeah, they like this new Pope.

  BURROUGHS: Did you read Day of The Jackal? Remember that great scene in The Day of The Jackal where De Gaulle got through because of this time fuck up and the grenade had just shattered the glass and he gets up just brushing glass off himself and says, “Encore une fois.” Really magnificent. “Once again.” He was a completely fearless man.

  BOCKRIS: Everybody hated him in England because he was so …

  HARRY: So French?

  BOCKRIS: Don’t you think the French are the most awful people in the world?

  STEIN: I wouldn’t agree with that.

  HARRY: Yeah, but I like that.

  BURROUGHS: I think in many ways the English top them.

  HARRY: AAAHHHAAA defend yourself!

  BURROUGHS: America will also have … you know we can produce …

  BOCKRIS: A close second.

  BURROUGHS: American monsters, the industrialist and so on.

  BOCKRIS: But the French are so long-winded.

  BURROUGHS: I wouldn’t say long-winded at all. The French are utterly ruthless.

  HARRY: No, but they’re so secure …

  BOCKRIS: In their Frenchness?

  BURROUGHS: I understand people being miserly, but a lot of people, particularly wealthy people, have an absolute complex about anyone asking them for even the smallest loan.

  HARRY: I used to live with somebody like that. Remember Chris! Somebody who really had a lot of money, but was really uptight about lending money. You know what I mean?

  BURROUGHS: Yeah, they get a whole production going as soon as anyone asks them for money. Like suppose somebody I know very well says, “I need $5 for a day Bill to go and do this, that and the other,” I wouldn’t think twice about it, but if you ask a rich person and then he says, “Oooohh, well I don’t happen to have it on me.” I’ve also had them say, “I DON’T LEND MONEY.”

  HARRY: Well, what do you lend?

  BURROUGHS: By the time they’re in the house …

  HARRY: How about your watch? Would you lend me that?

  BURROUGHS:… and closing the door. They don’t want to know about this. “Have you no pride!”

  STEIN: We used to live in this cheap building on the Bowery. We all almost got killed one night. The whole place cost $350 a month ’cos there was no heat at night and there was only one bathroom. I used to have to go down about eight in the morning to get the boiler going, then it would start up and go the whole day until they would close the liquor store at six, then there would be no heat until the next morning. Well, one night the flame in the boiler went out and all the gas just got pumped up through the radiators, and when Debbie and I woke up we had black soot around our nostrils.

  HARRY: The cats woke us up though. That was the most amazing thing. The cats woke us up.

  STEIN: We would have been dead in another half an hour.

  BURROUGHS: I’m lucky, I’m a light sleeper see, the slightest thing wakes me up.

  HARRY: I think I’m a light sleeper.

  STEIN: It’s really not true though, she goes out to sleep, she sleeps good.

  HARRY: Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. But our cycles are completely the opposite, so that when he’s sleeping really well, I’m usually awake.

  BOCKRIS: Bill told me that if you have these strange dreams or sexual visitations at night and you want to break the train of events, the thing to do is get up and have a cup of tea.

  BURROUGHS: If you want to. Yeah. Well, nightmares, for example, I feel you fall right back into. You know the kind of dreams where you’re struggling to move and you do move and you’re awake. Then if you just close your eyes and don’t get up you’re going to have it again, but if you get up …

  BOCKRIS: Most people apparently want to go on with it because most people don’t get up. They stay there.

  BURROUGHS: Well, they’re probably too lazy.

  HARRY: It’s because it’s a physical change, right?

  BURROUGHS: Yeah, you just get up, maybe have a glass of milk, or if you still have that terrible habit, smoke a cigarette, walk around a couple of times, then you may or may not break it, but nightmares will come like that, one after another, the same one of being paralyzed, held down …

  BOCKRIS: It almost suggests that if you feel any kind of physical tension, and you can move into another dimension, it would cure it.

  STEIN: Have you ever witnessed any flying saucers? Do you know any UFO people?

  BURROUGHS: No. I never saw one. I guess I have talked to people who told me directly that they had seen one, but I can’t exactly remember. But there was this bit about the strange animal who tore up the table at a friend’s house in Boulder. It was a strange thing. He had this table out there in this courtyard, and it was made out
of a chicken coop with a piece of plywood on top. They heard this weird howling and then they found that the table had been moved and the top was neatly placed down on the floor with everything on it, which means that no animal could have done it because they couldn’t pull it out without spilling everything on it. And this happened a couple of more nights and then the table was completely destroyed. They rushed out there as quickly as they could and heard this unearthly screeching, but they could never get out there fast enough to see whatever it was. Logically it had to be something that could have taken the top of the table and put it down. There were no eccentrics in this very small town, and this got written up in the Boulder newspaper on cattle mutilation and flying saucers.

  On a 1978 visit to Los Angeles to write about the filming of a Jack Kerouac biopic (based on Heartbeat by Carolyn Cassidy, the wife of his best friend), Burroughs flew up to San Francisco where he was interviewed by Search and Destroy’s Ray Rumor, aka Raymonde Foye.

  17

  Burroughs On Punk Rock

  “Los Angeles is a charming place to visit, but charm is a power that is hard to pinpoint,” I was thinking as I stood on the veranda outside my room one evening when a spectral form glided up, a vodka and tonic (no ice) in its right hand. My eyes travelled to the spectacles of William Burroughs as he looked out over the city and said “I will tell you about it. The sky is thin as paper. The whole place could go up in smoke in ten minutes. That’s the charm of Los Angeles.”

  When I flew back to New York to work with Tom Forcade on some ‘Hollywood deals’, Burroughs flew up to San Francisco where he was interviewed by Ray Rumor in a punk rock newspaper called Search and Destroy. The introduction to that interview begins: “William Seward Burroughs has been mentioned by more bands interviewed in Search and Destroy than any other thinking writer – to punk rock he is something of a major provocateur.”

  RAY RUMOR: What are your feelings about ‘punk rock’, politically, or musically, or visually?

  WILLIAM BURROUGHS: Well, I think it’s an interesting important phenomenon. I am very much a fan of Patti Smith. But it’s always been my feeling that you get much more if you’re there, than you ever can with a record, because I can’t get the real impact of Patti Smith and the vitality that she produces in the audience, and the whole electrical energy that’s in a performance doesn’t always come through on record.