Wild Bill's Last Stand

Poet John Giorno makes Burroughs accessible.

by a.d. amorosi

William S. Burroughs was the literary overlord of pragmatic thought, an assimilator of conspiracies, and the perplexing promoter of alien sex and the fall of all political systems. An anarchistic boy scout/cut-up journalist, his best moments floated on a hashish-filled info highway littered with beats, finks and fedora-wearing bohos waiting for a fix.

From Naked Lunch to Place of Dead Roads Bill presented cretinous clowns and troubled souls—characters depicted in hyper-real writings. They were mean robber baron John Stanley Hart, drug-addicted Dr. Benway and sheep-killing cowboy Kim Carson.

But be honest with me. You'll never read Burroughs.

And I don't know if I blame you. He's dense and complicated.

John Giorno knows that.

As Burroughs' best friend, touring partner and owner of Giorno Poetry Systems record label, it was he who took the Wild Bill Experience on the road from 1971 to 1987. They presented abbreviated bits of Bill, stand-up comic routines that summarize the comic force of Burroughs' writing now found on a four-CD coffeetable box, The Best Of Burroughs (Mouth Almighty).

Filling Bill's coffin with his favorite things—a .38 snub nose pistol, a sword cane made of hickory, a red bandanna, a ballpoint pen, a gold coin (to spend in the afterlife) and a joint of really good grass—Giorno kissed Burroughs goodbye.

"He always made it clear that he was doing these shows for money," chuckles Giorno, on the phone from his New York City apartment (the Bunker on Bowery), where he was Bill's neighbor. "He was very professional. While I loved to perform for 'the art' of it, Bill, like any developed performer, wanted to be paid. He used to say, 'The greater the stage fright the better the performance.'"

To achieve this "Jell-O-like" state, Giorno says Burroughs would ply himself with vodka and marijuana to become "that steely voiced grey persona."

Giorno packed this steeliness and stark humor tightly into the records like Big Ego, Sugar Alcohol & Meat and Biting Off The Tongue Of A Corpse. These raw vocal recordings of Bill at his sinewy St. Louis best stand as perhaps the finest representation of his work. "It was weird hearing and collecting these," says Giorno of hilariously caustic bits from The Wild Boys and Ah Pook Is Here.

"Between recording him, touring with him and living in the same building as him, I may have missed the nuances. He rehearsed and honed each bit to brighter brilliance." Collecting the tapes, unearthing new recordings (like the piece Burroughs read only once, "Sexual Orientation," which Giorno found in the University of Ohio's archives) and designing books that included in the box set, Giorno has been working on this project for the last 10 years. Giorno has set Bill to CD in lineal fashion, going from the earliest book, Junkie, to the last one, The Cat Inside. Yet the performances are random: a five-minute piece from 20 years ago and 10-minute bits from several years later.

"We go from the naive performer in the early '70s to the more studied Bill," laughs Giorno. "Your attention span is held by the shifting of tone, the flipping of pages and the sheer comic virtue of it all. It is sound, vision and literature combined—really the best thing he's ever done."

Giorno and Burroughs met in '64 through Panna Grady, a Dakota apartment resident "with a bit of bread and a literary bent" who liked any association with the beats and the pop art crowd.

"It was a very small but interactive scene in the '60s," says Giorno of his fast friendships with the likes of Andy Warhol, Brion Gysin, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Abbie Hoffman. Giorno went on to create performance prose masquerading as a gossip column in Culture Hero magazine, turning his howling laments and mantra-like poetry to Dial-A-Poem—a New York City phone forum for poets to connect with a wider audience to which Allen Ginsberg, John Cage and Burroughs contributed new works. Giorno, a Buddhist, felt a "karmic connection" to Burroughs—"a truly kind, gentle compassionate man"—from their first meeting. It was a sensation he knew would make them more than just passing acquaintances.

"William invented his own religious belief. I used to quiz him about what he would do when he faced death head on. Six weeks before he died we talked about how he was prepared for death."

Encouraging Burroughs to perform was part of a connection that lasted till the day Burroughs died.

"It was the very best day I ever spent with him. His consciousness was very real. It lingered days after he died."

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