Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  13Warner, 2003.

  14V. Vale and Andrea Juno (eds), RE/Search #4/5, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle, A Special Book Issue (San Francisco, CA: V/Search Publications, 1984).

  15Genesis P-Orridge, interview with the author, Brooklyn, New York City, 20 July 2004.

  16GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  17The term beatnik was coined by a writer on the San Francisco Chronicle in 1958. Herb Caen attempted to denigrate Beat Generation members or followers, often abbreviated to Beats, by adding the Russian suffix ‘nik’. In a climate of Cold War when the Russians were seen as the Communist enemy and at a time when the space race had witnessed the USSR’s launch of their Earth-orbiting satellite Sputnik, Caen’s device was a way of marking the Beats as a dangerous and subversive force, infiltrating American society. In our July 2004 interview, P-Orridge interestingly only used the more pejorative term beatnik, rather than Beat.

  18GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  19Ibid.

  20Ibid.

  21Ibid.

  22Ibid.

  23Ibid.

  24GP-O, ‘Full-length bio’.

  25Ford, 1999, p. 2.4.

  26GP-O, ‘Full-length bio’.

  27Note that Cosey Fanni Tutti’s real name is Christine Newby.

  28Ford, 1999, p. 6.22.

  29Bengala, ‘The intuitive lure of flesh: Genesis P-Orridge’s erotic mailart’, Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge, edited by Genesis P-Orridge (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002), p. 111.

  30Bengala, ibid., pp. 111–12.

  31Note that these book titles have also appeared as Junky, The Naked Lunch and Soft Machine.

  32GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  33Ibid.

  34William S. Burroughs, ‘The cut-up method of Brion Gysin’, RE/Search #4/5, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle, A Special Book Issue, edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco, CA: V/Search Publications, 1984), pp. 35–6 (p. 35).

  35Ibid.

  36Gysin quoted in RE/Search, 1984, p. 55.

  37Throbbing Gristle were dissolved in 1981 but they would take to the stage once again, more than two decades later, in December 2004 when a farewell performance saw them second on the bill to Mercury Rev at ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, a festival held at a UK holiday camp in Rye, Sussex, and curated by the controversial Britart brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman.

  38Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 257–75.

  39Ibid., p. 92.

  40Ibid., pp. 201–2.

  41Jack Sargeant (ed.), Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (London: Creation, 1997), p. 184. Note: Hassan I Sabbah was an influential Middle East leader of the Ismalis from the eleventh-century. His followers, the Assassins, derived from hachachin (smokers of hashish), played a significant political role in the region for around 200 years. See ‘The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah’ by William S. Burroughs, http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/Derniersmots.html [accessed 19 February 2012].

  42Savage, 1991, pp. 23–36.

  43Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), p. 19.

  44The nickname of Peter Christopherson, called thus because ‘he was interested in the “sex” side of us’, see Ford, 1999, p. 4.9.

  45GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  46Parsons cited in Ford, 1999, pp. 6.29–6.30.

  47Ibid., p. 0.3.

  48Ibid.

  49Ibid., p. 6.29.

  50Quoted in Savage, 1991, p. 423.

  51The Arts Council of Great Britain, founded in 1946, was the UK’s public funding body for the arts (see Hewison, 1997, p. 29). It has been re-constituted since 1994 with the various member nations – England, Scotland, etc. – granted their own funding authority.

  52P-Orridge, 1997, pp. 184–96 (p. 184).

  53Ibid.

  54P-Orridge, 1997, p. 184.

  55Ibid., p. 185.

  56Ibid., p. 188.

  57Ibid., p. 188.

  58GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  59BBC2 was the second channel of the UK’s principal public broadcaster. Launched in 1964, it became the outlet for more specialised programmes and documentaries, complementing BBC1’s more mainstream broadcasts.

  60GP-O, 2002, p. 40.

  61V. Vale and Andrea Juno, RE/Search #12, Modern Primitives (San Francisco, CA: V/Search Publications, 1989).

  62Vale and Juno, 1989, p. 4.

  63Victoria Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 133.

  64Ibid.

  65Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 105.

  66Ford, 1999, p. 2.21.

  67Ford, 1999, p. 4.5–4.8.

  68GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  69See Orlan’s website http://www.orlan.net/ [accessed 26 February 2009].

  70See Stelarc’s website http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ [accessed 26 February 2009].

  71Mike Featherstone (ed.), Body Modification (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 129–207.

  72Vale and Juno,, 1989, p. 165.

  73See Vale and Juno, 1989, p. 4, and GP-O, 2002, p. 22.

  74Vale and Juno, 1989, p. 171.

  75Sheila Whiteley, ‘Little Red Rooster v the Honky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger, sexuality, style, image’, Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 67.

  76P-Orridge, 2004, p. 11.

  77Bob Bert, ‘This is a story (a very special story) it’s about … Breyer P-Orridge’, BB Gun magazine, Issue #7, 2004.

  78Comment by Genesis P-Orridge, filmed interview with writer/researcher Jayne Sheridan, Columbia Hotel, London, 8 December 2004.

  79Ibid.

  80GP-O, telephone conversation with the author, 20 July 2004.

  81See Mark Kramer, ‘1998: The year in body modification’, Body Modification Ezine, 1 January 1999, http://www.bmezine.com/news/softtoy/008/ [accessed 29 March 2005], and Deborah Mitchell and Beth Landman, ‘All’s fair in Love and Rockets’, New York Magazine, 29 June 1998 (Add. reporting by Kate Coyne), http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/2902/ [accessed 29 March 2005].

  82Comment by Genesis P-Orridge, filmed interview with writer/researcher Jayne Sheridan, Columbia Hotel, London, 8 December 2004.

  83GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  84Ibid.

  85GP-O, interview with the author, 2004.

  INTERVIEW 7

  Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and member of the Fugs

  Steven Taylor was born in Manchester, England in 1955. His family emigrated to the US in the mid-1960s. After meeting Allen Ginsberg when he visited his teacher training college in 1976, he became a regular guitar accompanist to the poet for the next 20 years. In 1984 he became a member of the re-formed Fugs, a role he continues to play to this day. In the later 1980s he also fronted a punk band called the False Prophets. The detailed diary record he kept of that group and their US and European tours became a cornerstone of his successful, ethnomusicological doctoral thesis at Brown which was published in book form as False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (2004). Now based in New York City, he has also taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where I interviewed him in July 2004.

  SW I think one of the first things that I would like to raise with you is that there is this interesting feature within recent popular music history, that the hippies and many of the rock musicians who formed part of that subcultural constituency, latched onto some of the Beat ideals. There seemed to be a kind of continuum between what happened in the 1950s, with the poets, and what happened in the 1960s, with the rockers.

  Then, when punk came along in the early to mid-1970s, the punks tended to reject the hippy philosophies, the hippy manifestos. Yet, at the same time, punks and new wav
ers were still able to make some sense of, see some appeal in, the Beat manifesto.

  This seems to me paradoxical. How were the hippies and the punks, who are in some kind of binary opposition – we might see a hippy set against a punk – both able to see something in Beat that made sense to them?

  ST Huge misunderstanding! Gosh, I don’t know if I can answer that question – I think the punks were misunderstood. Not misunderstood; I think it was a class issue in one way. The hippies were seen as middle-class kids who were kind of over-realistic, over-romantic, on one level politicised, but on another level a kind of cultural narcissism, of middle-class self-congratulation, and relative economic prosperity, which the punks didn’t have.

  You know, you had Margaret Thatcher and the worst economic conditions in Britain since the war and, similarly, under Reagan, the same thing happened in the United States. And so there was disillusionment and also the punks, that I talked to, thought that the hippies had sold out and just became lawyers rather than following through.

  But I think that a lot of the ideals were the same – a kind of anarchist ideal. But I think a lot of the material conditions were different. I think that the Beats, to over-simplify it if I say this, that the Beats, the hippies and the punks basically called their older generations on their hypocrisy and they have that in common. They said, what is this thing you were all talking about, about freedom: you get a bunch of control freaks talking about freedom. That is the paradox in the heart of America.

  You have this sort of control impulse that is going on and on and on about freedom, particularly now, and the more controlling and the more world dominating it becomes and the more narrowly ideological it becomes, the more they talk about freedom, there is a kind of inverse relationship between the ideal and the actual ideological base. I think that some of the punk people, as they got older, started to see some of the connections with the older generation, or the hippy generation.

  Like the guys I played with in the False Prophets, because they knew about the Beats, starting to see that the hippies had had those ideals. And also when one has more experience and one is political and one goes out into the world as a young person, a young punk, and becomes political, one educates oneself at a certain level, and learns that this is all coming out of the Civil Rights movement and we can all share that, as leftists, we can all share that base.

  SW Just to get a sense of your own personal history – by the mid-1970s you must have been about 20 years of age.

  ST I was 20 in 1975.

  SW OK. So you were by then listening to music I’m sure, reading I’m sure. What kind of literature were you engaging in at that time? Were you a fan of the Beats by the time you were that sort of age or had you not encountered the Beats at that age?

  ST I had read Kerouac. When I met Ginsberg I had read The Dharma Bums, On the Road and a piece of Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’, called ‘Footnote to Howl’. That was my experience with the Beats. Before that I had read a lot of novels, I had read all the way through the Russian novelists, just on my own, nobody telling me, just as a reader, sort of undirected reading. I read a lot of Russian novelists. I had some familiarity with American poetry but not a lot. Emily Dickinson was a favourite. So when Ginsberg came along, I did sort of understand the Beat thing from Kerouac and those novels.

  SW When did you first meet Allen Ginsberg?

  ST I met Allen Ginsberg when I was 21 years old in 1976, the spring of 1976, May.

  SW We will certainly come back to that but, initially, to fill in the musical elements that you were absorbing as a late teenager and in your early 20s … I guess that you were listening to rock music, were you? Were you listening to other kinds of music?

  ST I had always been classically trained to the extent that one could be classically trained, given my class background. For example violin lessons at school in England. The choir, singing as one does, and then in high school, in America, studying clarinet and then guitar which very quickly won out. I took up the guitar at age 13 and by the age of 16 that became classical guitar, classical guitar training. So, very much a musician, in terms of practice, attached to the page with fairly sophisticated understanding of that, someone who read music well and so forth – not a great improviser but with a great interest of the music of the 1960s and, of course, I was living in Manchester in 1963 when the Beatles appeared on People and Places, their first regional television programme, and was completely swept away by that.

  SW So as early as that? The Beatles?

  ST It completely took over. It took over. It was huge. I mean you were there when that happened.

  SW And I was feeling similar things, yes.

  ST It was incredible. I remember walking home from school and singing those songs and the joy of that. Ginsberg talks about that in some of the interviews I did with him. That sense of joy, like ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, this explosion. Suddenly everyone is dancing, you know. I saw that as a child. He saw that as an adult and was much more impressed by that as a phenomenon.

  SW So even before you came to America in the mid-1960s, still as a boy, the new popular music, if we can call it, had been touching you?

  ST It was hugely important. And as somebody who had taken up the guitar, you know, of course that is what you did. You know, Cream, the arrival of these bands on the scene were like huge events in your life and discovering The Who, discovering Cream, Jimi Hendrix…oh my God! What’s that? You know.

  And having not, I mean at that time, not knowing the background of that music, so it was like this phenomenon that exploded which must have been the experience in the mid-1950s of much of middle-class white America to see Little Richard. Like, what the hell is that, you know, and something like that. I had my own experience and so did my friends. And then sort of learning that way, at the same time, I had classical guitar lessons and initially had been studying with an old jazz guitar player called Vincent Delmonte who was an Italian-American guy, very old, and had been a big band guitarist. He was a superb musician, gave me correct technique, taught me to read, so made me quite a good guitarist, in that sense, as a kid.

  But then the whole rock ’n’ roll thing hit and that just took over and at the same time I am studying the Bach literature for the guitar, somewhat clumsily, and also simultaneously learning the Beatles tunes and copying licks from Eric Clapton, you know. It was a huge part of one’s life.

  SW So you mentioned Cream, the Who, Hendrix and so on, How did the arrival of punk and new wave affect you in the mid-1970s? Did you quickly latch on to that or was it something you picked up on later?

  ST That is an interesting question. By the time I had finished music school, I was basically mostly interested in the music of myself and my friends plus a few favourite great artists who I listened to over and over again. By the time punk hit I was basically listening to John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix and classical music, so quite limited, but over and over and over again, listening to those things. But also arranging, doing arranging work, doing some composing, doing a little bit of the alternative theatre work, music composing, accompanying poets a lot.

  I was never a discophile and never had a big record collection and I never did sit around listening to a lot of music. There are probably a thousand bands that you could mention that most pop music fans would know that I would barely be familiar with. That is the kind of funny paradox of my becoming an ethnomusicologist, looking at pop music, because really, as in my book, I am looking mostly at myself and my friends. I don’t have a huge history of that.

  I will give you an example, and this is somewhat embarrassing but it illustrates the case. Ginsberg took me to meet the Clash and I had no clue who they were. It was at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village and down in the basement of this studio with Joe Strummer and they were playing this music in the studio and Joe said ‘Do you like this?’

  SW Was Ginsberg recording with them at this time?

  ST Yeah. They had asked him – it was ‘Ghetto Defendant’ the tune –
to take part. They had told him they wanted the voice of God. And he had this big deep voice and they were sort of really interested in him plus he was also this great character and great company and had been a friend to several generations of rock musicians going back to the Beatles and Bob Dylan and so forth.

  So, Joe says ‘Do you like this music?’ and I says ‘Yeah this is really cool’ because I thought it was theirs and I had no idea who they were and what they were doing. But of course, I very quickly learnt. Then though, I was kind of out of it.

  So punk. Well first of all, when the Pistols came out with ‘God Save the Queen’, I just thought that was terribly offensive. But then so very quickly flipped and realised this was fabulous. And the bigger thing with punk rock was when I was on leave from college on a weekend – it must have been 1975 or 1976 – and somebody took me to a bar in Dover, New Jersey and it was crowded, it was full of all these people. I mean at this point, I was the kid from the suburbs with a classical music education.

  I was in this bar and all these people with leather jackets which was immediately menacing and this band came on and it was like the lights went on and it was the Ramones, I’d never heard of them, they came on and it was like ‘Oh my God. This is it. It’s back. Rock ’n’ roll is back’.

  That was the moment when punk just hit for me, because I was just like, Bruce Springsteen, what is this crap, and the Beatles had broken up, Jimi Hendrix was dead, that was done, it was over as far as I was concerned. I was listening to jazz because, you know, that was finished, there was nothing going on.