William S. Burroughs

No one outside music shaped rock and roll more decisively than William S. Burroughs, the senior representative of the Beat Generation and, by that token, of American counterculture at large. This contentious provocateur, celebrated for his singular cut-up prose technique, had already adopted the rock-and-roll way of life long before the genre existed; the archetypal outcast, he inhabited society’s shadowy margins in a fog of narcotics, firearms, and brutality, and he retained his status as hipsterdom’s guiding spirit until the end. His reach into the broader culture proved exceptional: virtually every creator cited him as an influence, bands such as Steely Dan and Soft Machine took their names from his distinctive phrases, and younger musicians including Kurt Cobain and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy stepped forward to supply musical accompaniment for his infrequent spoken-word appearances.

William Seward Burroughs entered the world on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, as the grandson of the man who established the Burroughs Adding Machine company. A bookish homosexual drawn to firearms and criminality, he studied at Harvard University yet deliberately spurned conventional society, choosing instead the criminal underworld of New York City. After developing a heroin habit he joined forces with the drifting addict Herbert Huncke, an association that introduced him to the future Beat icons Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr; he also met Joan Vollmer, who became his common-law wife. Although older than the others, Burroughs had not yet begun to write; initially indifferent to literature, he eventually finished the autobiographical addiction narrative Junky, issued in pulp format by Ace Books in 1953. Queer, an equally candid treatment of homosexuality, was declined by the publisher and remained unpublished for decades.

In the mid-1950s Burroughs, Vollmer, and their children moved to a farm in East Texas; as his heroin dependence deepened he attracted official attention, prompting the family to flee to Mexico. The marriage ended in tabloid notoriety when Burroughs, attempting to display his marksmanship, enlisted Vollmer in a William Tell-style stunt that ended with her death; afterward he wandered the world before settling in Tangier. Once On the Road and Howl brought fame to Kerouac and Ginsberg and the Beat Generation entered public consciousness, the pair located Burroughs in Africa, where he remained severely addicted yet continued to produce striking experimental prose fragments. Kerouac transcribed the material and supplied the title Naked Lunch.

Its appearance in 1959 instantly elevated Burroughs to celebrity; the book faced a widely publicized obscenity trial and remains his most famous and influential work. Beginning with The Soft Machine in 1961 he developed the “cut-up” compositional method, physically slicing and reassembling disparate textual fragments to disorient the reader. In 1965 he extended his practice into other media by recording the spoken-word album Call Me Burroughs, drawn from Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. Although he sustained a steady literary output with titles such as The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) and Exterminator! (1973), he released no further major recordings until William S. Burroughs/John Giorno in 1975; Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, assembled by Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV, appeared in 1981, followed by another joint project with Giorno, You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With.

Long a cult favorite, Burroughs had become a pop-culture emblem of decadence and foreboding brilliance by the late 1980s; his supporting role in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy afforded him unprecedented mainstream visibility, and nearly every self-respecting hipster invoked his name. After 1987’s Break Through in Grey Room he issued Dead City Radio in 1990, featuring performances supported by Sonic Youth, John Cale, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and additional musicians. He appeared on Ministry’s “Just One Fix” single in 1992 and, the following year, recorded The “Priest” They Called Him with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Also in 1993 he completed his final album, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, while his sampled voice surfaced on tracks by the Jesus and Mary Chain, Laurie Anderson, and Material. In collaboration with Tom Waits he co-wrote The Black Rider. The last major surviving member of the Beat Generation, Burroughs died of a heart attack on August 2, 1997, in Lawrence, Kansas.

His influence persisted after his death. In 2016 producer Hal Willner and musician Arish Ahmad Khan (aka King Khan) began reshaping recordings of Burroughs reading favorite passages from Naked Lunch, passages often chosen for their explicit content. Khan supplied fresh musical settings to the 1995 Willner-produced sessions that had originally included contributions from Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz. The resulting album, Let Me Hang You, appeared in July 2016 on Khan’s Khannibalism label through Ernest Jenning Record Company.