Norman Mailer once famously said that William S. Pepper (he’s in there between Marilyn Monroe and Fred Astaire), William Burroughs was the rock rebel’s choice of Literary Outlaw: from David Bowie and Jimmy Page to Patti Smith and Tom Waits, experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil, even Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain – generations of alternative rock stars have collaborated and paid homage.
From the moment he received that ultimate 1960s imprimatur of cool, being included by The Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Fields, mixing camp twang and knowing drawl with the educated tones of an old-fashioned Southern gentleman. With his three-piece suit, glasses, hat and raincoat, Burroughs seemed like the ultimate undercover hipster, and that voice certainly didn’t hurt: pitched somewhere between T.S. William Burroughs had originally exploded onto the literary scene back in 1959 with his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch, causing hip critics everywhere to claim they had seen the future – even if nobody was really sure that they understood it. That somewhere along the line he became an unlikely mentor to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, who had opened the way for the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. All the usual well-rehearsed lines were trotted out, about how he was the Harvard-educated product of the WASP elite and scion of the family that founded the Burroughs Corporation, who had turned his back on it all to become a junkie queer, trawling the steaming jungles of South America, sleazy ‘Interzone’ of Tangiers, and shady back-streets of Paris and London for drugs and boys.
Burroughs passed away at the ripe old age of 83 back in August 1997, the media coverage was definitely more in keeping with his status as a counter-cultural icon than it was for his literary fame – or infamy – alone.