by Barry Miles
He took three or four steps and stood by the narrow table in front of the window. He put his hands into his pockets and in one smooth movement brought out two reels of mylar tape and put them on the table.
“Got your tape recorder?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s compare tapes.”
We played his tapes, then some of mine. Nothing was said. […]
Then we put a microphone on the table and took turns talking to the tape recorder switching back and forth between tracks at random intervals. We played it all back and sat there listening to our conversation.8
In London, Bill continued with the three-column experiments and the scrapbook entries that had occupied him in New York and before that in Tangier. He told the Guardian newspaper in 1965, when he first returned from New York, “I spend most of my time editing and filing. […] For ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes on file and more on tape. I use a tape recorder, camera, typewriter, scissors, scrapbooks. From the newspapers and from items people send me, I get intersections between all sorts of things. […] They all tie up, there are connections, intersections.”9 From this material came The Wild Boys, Port of Saints, and The Job. His article explaining these experiments, “The Invisible Generation,” was published in International Times (IT), the new British underground newspaper. He wrote to his French translators and friends, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, “Have you seen International Times? I have given them an article on tape recorder experiments which should appear in the next issue and I hope to get a large number of people experimenting with tape recorders to turn up some results. Basic premise is, ‘what we see and experience is to a large extent dictated by what we hear and anyone with a tape recorder is in a position to decide what he hears, and what other people hear or overhear as well.’ ”10
When Burroughs returned from New York, he spent a lot of time with Antony Balch, who was just putting the finishing touches to The Cut-Ups. The film began life as Guerrilla Conditions, a twenty-three-minute silent documentary on the lives of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, filmed at the Beat Hotel in Paris, the Hotel Villa Muniria in Tangier, the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and the Empress Hotel in London. The earliest sequences were shot in Paris in 1961 and the latest in New York in 1965. After hours of conversation with Bill about cut-ups, Balch now had a very different idea about what he wanted to do with the footage. Using the same technique that Ian Sommerville had used in Tangier in 1964, he superimposed strips of negatives and had them printed, some positive, others as negatives. Sometimes three separate lengths of film would be superimposed. The triple and negative superimpositions were done last and included footage taken from other films, such as Bill Buys a Parrot, the 16-millimeter color short, shot in Tangier, which appears in black-and-white negative in The Cut-Ups. Antony then fed a print of the film onto four reels and had a lab technician assemble them, taking a twelve-inch section from each in strict rotation. Balch was not even there during the assembly. This was done with a print of the film because of the impossible grading problems presented by the master print, and an interneg was made from the finished result. The soundtrack was made by Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin, and Burroughs, using a line from a Scientology routine. Sommerville produced the permutated phrases to last exactly twenty minutes and four seconds, including the final “Thank you.”
The Cut-Ups opened at the Cinephone in Oxford Street, London, in 1966, and the manager, Mr. Provisor, had never had so many people come up to him to praise a film, or so many complain about it. Some members of the audience left during the screening claiming, “It’s disgusting,” to which the staff would reply, “It’s got a U certificate,11 nothing disgusting about it, nothing the censor objected to.” During the two-week run there were an unusually large number of articles, bags and coats, left behind in the cinema by the disoriented audience. After the first few days Antony shortened the film to twelve minutes because Mr. Provisor and his staff were exposed to it five times a day as well as having to deal with walkouts and Antony thought that was too much. There were fewer walkouts in the evenings, when a more appreciative audience attended. Balch always preferred the twelve-minute version. Burroughs was pleased with the result, which was very much an extension of his ideas:
There’s some things you can do with films that you can’t do anywhere else. You’ve got your section of time, you can do all sorts of things. You can slow it down, speed it up, run it backwards, all sorts of possibilities—cut it up—all sorts of things that you can do with it. It has that possibility and very little has been done, really, because Hollywood has never been experimental. For example, flashbacks were very common. Flashbacks started with W. D. Griffith [Birth of a Nation], but flash-forwards don’t occur until Alice’s Restaurant and Easy Rider. There you have it, the idea of flash-forwards didn’t occur to them. Flashbacks, slow-downs. There were some speed-ups in early films, just used as a comedy device, and slow-downs have been used mostly in death scenes like in Bonnie and Clyde, the fall from gunshot wounds, slow-down. But there are all sorts of things which remain untouched.12
Years later, Nicolas Roeg approached Balch and asked him practical questions about the use of cut-ups. He used them in his film Performance starring Mick Jagger. Most of his arbitrary cuts occur at the beginning.
3. Montagu Square
Though Burroughs had a negative reaction to Timothy Leary’s projects in the States, he was initially supportive of Michael Hollingshead when he returned to Britain from Leary’s headquarters to open the World Psychedelic Centre at 25 Pont Street in Mayfair. Accordingly he attended a “Workshop in Consciousness Expansion” that Hollingshead organized on February 14, 1966, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at 17 Dover Street, where he had himself performed with Ian and Brion Gysin. Bill appeared on the panel together with Alexander Trocchi, Ian Sommerville, Ronnie Laing, George Andrews, and others. He was to appear at several such gatherings, but when it became obvious that Hollingshead was getting strung out on methamphetamine, Bill no longer visited Pont Street, knowing it was but a matter of time before the police arrived. He was correct in thinking this and Hollingshead went to jail, not for LSD but other, illegal, substances.
Ian’s accommodation problems were unexpectedly solved, at least for six months, in April 1966 when he was asked to become the in-house tape operator of a small private recording studio. Inspired by reading copies of Big Table and Evergreen Review borrowed from Barry Miles,13 co-owner of the Indica Bookshop, Paul McCartney decided to set up an audio equivalent: a monthly budget-price record album containing bits of interviews, backstage talk, and studio conversations with musicians recording new albums. A deal could be struck with the BBC to include bits of radio plays that people might have missed, and jazz musicians and poets would be encouraged to record their work. NEMS, the Beatles’ management company, and EMI, their record label, would organize pressing and distribution. The sticking point was where these things would be recorded and edited. Ringo had an apartment at 34 Montagu Square that he was not using because so many fans knew the address, so Paul rented it from him, but someone had to be there to operate the tape recorders and set up the microphones. Ian was the ideal person. A meeting was held at Miles’s flat with Paul, Jane Asher, and Ian. A lot of hash was smoked, Ian explained the principles of floating equations, and then Paul asked what equipment Ian needed. Ian passed him a list. “Fine,” said Paul. “Just get it and send the bill to me.”
Ian and Alan quickly moved into Ringo’s rock star apartment, the ground floor and basement, all gray watered silk wallpaper and smoked mirrors. Ian set up a pair of Revox tape recorders and a selection of microphones on stands. The problem was that no one knew about it, and they would have been inundated had it been made public. In the end, the two people to make the most use of it were Paul McCartney and Burroughs, who used the state-of-the-art equipment to the full, conducting a series of stereo experiments, masterminded by Ian. Sadly, these appear to have been lost.
Paul t
old Q magazine in 1986, “I used to sit in a basement in Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco […] doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello.” Paul and Bill got on well. Bill explained all about cut-ups and there was a lot of talk about pot, with Ian at one point accusing Paul of being “just an old pothead.”14 Rich talk from someone who used to stuff his pillow with marijuana leaves when he was in Morocco: “No twigs, just the leaves and flowers. It was as soft as feathers. That perfume is the best sleeping pill, man, you have such beautiful dreams and it is a joy to wake up to that smell!”15
Paul: “In our conversations, I thought about getting into cut-ups and things like that and I thought I would use the studio for cut-ups. But it ended up being of more practical use to me, really. I thought, let Burroughs do the cut-ups and I’ll just go in and demo things. I’d just written ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and so I went down there in the basement on my days off on my own. Just took a guitar down and used it as a demo studio.”
Burroughs: “The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Ian recorded his rehearsals so I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, fairly hardworking.”
Paul: “William did some little cut-ups and we did some crazy tape recordings in the basement. We used to sit around talking about all these amazing inventions that people were doing; areas that people were getting into like the Dreamachine that Ian and Brion Gysin had made. It was all very new and very exciting, and so a lot of social time was taken up with just sitting around chatting.”
4. Groovy Bob
By this time, Bill had become a good friend of Robert Fraser’s, the art dealer. Christopher Finch told Harriet Vyner, Fraser’s biographer, “Robert was very much hanging out with Bill Burroughs at that time. Bill was living in London and over at Robert’s all the time. These times I was invited to Mount Street at least half the time Bill was there. He knew Robert well. He was a walking pharmacopoeia, so I assume Robert was using drugs in a very sophisticated way.”16
Robert’s flat at 23 Mount Street, on the third floor above Scott’s Oyster and Lobster Bar in the heart of Mayfair, was one of the “coolest” sixties pads in London. There were several large daybeds in silver lacquered wood with writhing marine beasts carved at each end and Italian black leather chairs with silvered backs made from interlaced branches. He used his apartment as an extension of his gallery: a blue Yves Klein sponge on a wire armature, a glass table filled with blue pigment, a Lindner, a Dubuffet, collages by Kalinowski. And all the time Robert circling the room, adjusting the lighting—Tiffany lamps, candles, and the latest halogen lights—changing the record—Booker T., Beatles, Stones—rolling joints—Nepalese temple balls, the best hashish—fiddling with lighters, followed by Mohammed, his Moroccan manservant, who silently filled glasses and was rudely ordered about by Robert. There was always lots to drink and even more to smoke.
Robert was a dilettante. According to Bridget Riley, Robert didn’t really help his artists: he arranged no outside exhibitions and gave them little in the way of art world contacts. He wasn’t concerned with developing their careers, only his own. But the biggest problem was that it was always very difficult, and frequently impossible, to get the money he owed them, so that most of them left him in the end because they were fed up with subsidizing his lavish lifestyle. He was charming, amusing, had a great eye, and was one of the coolest people in town, but if money was mentioned he would look startled and shy away.
In the mid-sixties, his flat was the place to be. There Bill would run into Tony Curtis, Tom Wolfe, John Paul Getty Jr., Andy Warhol, Anita Pallenberg, Francis Bacon, Ken Tynan, Donald Cammell, and of course, most of the artists that Robert showed at the gallery. A frequent visitor to Robert’s flat was filmmaker and self-styled black magician Kenneth Anger. Bill held him responsible for an incident of psychic attack. It occurred in the Renommé, one of the empty restaurants that Bill liked to frequent. Bill had gone upstairs to the lavatory, when he was suddenly hit by a wave of hostility. He leaned against the wall, gasping, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” At that moment the Yugoslavian owner came up the stairs and said something and the sensation disappeared. Bill returned to Brion and Ian, who were downstairs, and they said that after he’d left the table, suddenly the proprietor looked around, as if he had received a message, and quickly walked upstairs. “Of course, he knew,” said Burroughs. “He came up there because he knew something was wrong.” They had previously been at Robert Fraser’s house, and Kenneth Anger was there. Brion said, “Kenneth Anger, very definitely.” Bill agreed. Anger was noted for throwing curses all over the place, even threatening his best friends like the Rolling Stones.
Bill was earning very good money by English standards at the time. The notoriety surrounding Naked Lunch was producing royalties. In 1967, for instance, his Grove Press royalties were $44,458.56 after agent’s fees, which he had to pay in addition to 10 percent to Girodias. His gross income that year was £16,305 and 17 shillings ($45,654.00), which Michael Henshaw, his accountant, managed to reduce to £6,602, five shillings, and tenpence ($18,406) after “expenses.” The average income in Britain was £1,381 and in the United States that year was $7,300. In 1968 his gross was only £6,386 ($17,881) and his “profit” a mere £336 ($944). UK average income was £1,489 and U.S. average income was $7,850. In 1969, he grossed £11,629 ($32,559), of which, after expenses, he only made £5,088 ($14,246), but at a time when the UK average income was still only £1,607 and $8,550 in the United States. Of course his real expenses were negligible and by most standards he was quite wealthy. He could afford to get an apartment. After his Christmas 1965 visit to Tangier, he had written to Alan Ansen, “I was definitely depressed by Tangier. […] The bars are empty. I was glad to leave and in no hurry to return,” so Morocco was out. Having recently checked up on Paris and New York, and found them wanting, that left London, where he had friends and his on-off relationship with Ian. He had made his choice. There was a three-room apartment coming up in Antony Balch’s building, Dalmeny Court at 8 Duke Street Saint James’s, just around the corner from the Court of Saint James’s itself. It was £750 a year. He put his name down for it.
Chapter Forty
If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed.
—BEAU BRUMMEL
1. Dalmeny Court
Duke Street Saint James’s was in the very center of London’s traditional gentlemen’s clubland: the Reform, the Athenaeum, the Army & Navy, the Carlton et al. were all one block away. A five-minute walk south, down past Berry Bros. wine merchants where Beau Brummel used to have himself weighed on their coffee scales, took Bill to Saint James’s Palace. A stroll in the other direction brought him out on Piccadilly across from the Royal Academy. To the east was St. James’s Church where William Blake used to worship, and to the west, across the corner of Green Park, was Buckingham Palace itself. It was the most prestigious and expensive neighborhood in London, and probably in the world.
Antony Balch had been a close friend ever since the Beat Hotel days. He introduced Bill to some of the more louche clubs in the Piccadilly area and, now that Bill was living in the land of Burlington Bertie, gave him useful hints on how to dress and comport himself. Bill could now afford to have his shoes handmade at John Lobb, just around the corner on St. James’s Street, joining Onassis, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Duke Ellington in having wooden lasts made of his feet. Burroughs had particularly long thin feet, and these were probably the only shoes that ever fitted him perfectly. He also indulged in a perfect wide-brim Montecristi panama hat from James Lock & Co., also on St. James’s Street, and liked to demonstrate how he could roll it up and put it in his pocket and how it would snap back into shape when he pulled it out. Jacksons of Piccadilly and Fortnum & Mason were his local shops, where in
the early seventies the staff still first looked for your servant before they handed you your purchase. There were cigar shops that hand-rolled cigarettes to your specifications, suppliers of badger-hair shaving brushes and genuine sponges, cheese shops filled with giant rounds of Stilton, and a number of ancient wine merchants.
In the sixties there were several Turkish baths nearby where gentlemen could spend the night, there were pubs where gentlemen congregated and made discreet signals to one another, and outside the Regent Palace Hotel on Piccadilly there was the meat rack. For a less conspicuous pickup the garden in Leicester Square was popular, and if Bill was caught short, just below his flat was the archway leading to Mason’s Yard where there was a gentlemen’s public toilet notorious for cruising. Antony Balch knew them all. In August 1966 Bill moved into the Cavendish Hotel, on Duke Street Saint James’s, a few doors from Dalmeny Court, to wait for his apartment to become free. The new Cavendish was terribly expensive so he flew to Tangier instead, where, unfortunately, all the hotels were full and he had to stay in the Minzah, which was about the same price as the New Cavendish. There, one evening in the dining room with his friend Christopher Wanklyn, he felt the dying feeling. He avoided plunging his head into his gazpacho, excused himself, and walked very slowly and deliberately from the room, very consciously placing one foot before the other in the converging blackness. Cold water on his face and five minutes’ rest on the bed and he was ready to face his meal again, from soup to fruit salad. Christopher asked him if there had been a sensation of heat and Burroughs told him, “Yes, always at the onset. Like a laser gun through the midsections.”1 These attacks had occurred a number of times before; now he seemed to know how to deal with them. “One of the most exhilarating feelings you could have, is to have the dying feeling, and then when you come to you just feel marvelous.”2
