Addicts synonymous

Rock meets Beat head-on as the original cover of William Burroughs' debut novel Junkie is adapted by graphic artist Todd Alcott for a forthcoming collection of music writing by Michael Goldberg

I’VE BEEN a fan of US graphic artist Todd Alcott for some time. He takes old school pulp fiction paperback covers and brilliantly splices them with a rock music theme. The juxtaposition is both eye-catching and amusing: an outstanding postmodern homage to the crime and sex dime store exploitation novels of the 1940s and 1950s.

I was very recently writing about a fictional trilogy created by one-time Rolling Stone journalist Michael Goldberg. I also mentioned that later this year articles from his significant archive will be gathered in a compilation of his work to be published by Backbeat Books.

Goldberg has long been drawn to the Beat writers and, with Alcott on the design brief for the new anthology, he has found a perfect blend for the cover of the collection Addicted to Noise – a reference in itself to an online music magazine which the journalist launched to some fanfare in the early 1990s.

Alcott has taken the original cover of William Burroughs’ first published novel Junkie, which first saw the controversial light of day in 1953 under the authorial pseudonym of William Lee, and paid tribute in a striking pastiche of past and present, drug den shock horror combined with much later rock references.

Rock and the Beat Generation shares those complementary images below.

Then…

…and now

Note: ‘Book review #6: “Freak Scene Dream” trilogy’, a return visit to the fiction of Michael Goldberg, was published in R&BG on April 21st, 2022