Biographical Details #3: William S. Burroughs by Casey Rae

Cult author's rock influence unwrapped

OUR SERIES, in which authors who have created biographical portraits of the Beat writers and their musical associates talk about their approach to creating a published work, continues.

In 2019, the US academic and music critic Casey Rae released William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock’n’Roll, an original and well-received history of Burroughs and his links to the world of popular music: its connections to him and his impact on generations of rock music makers who have followed.

Rae, who is also a musician himself and played with several bands in the 1990s, is based in Vancouver, Washington. He has authored and teaches courses at Georgetown University and Berklee College of Music on copyright, digital disruption, public policy and the entertainment industries.

His book on Burroughs and rock culture, which was issued by the University of Texas Press, Austin, has been translated into seven languages. Rock and the Beat Generation interviewed him about the title… 

What is biography for?

I wouldn’t presume to be able to answer that question, and I’m not sure it can be answered, given the squishy nature of post hoc investigation. Ultimately, it is impossible to truly describe participatory experiences unless one is a direct participant. And even then, individuals may have wildly varying recollections regarding their involvement or the situation generally. Inference and imputation are part of the biographical pie no matter how you slice it. And no record is permanent. (Hooray for that.)

What is interesting to me is how biographical accounts come alive to the reader, and where any authorial insights might resonate with a reader’s own experiences and understandings. All of which depend on the meeting of the writer’s mind with the reader’s mind, the outcome of which is quite often left unknown to the author!

What did you hope to achieve with your account here?

Although I don’t necessarily consider myself a biographer, I have an interest in cultural intersections, with an emphasis on the evolutionary sociology of mass media, art (particularly music), and what might be called the ‘impetus to mysticism’. The Burroughs study was my attempt to satisfy these curiosities through the life story of one of the most compellingly inscrutable characters of the 20th century.

Pictured above: The 2019 edition of the Casey Rae book

The primary case made is one of influence on musical culture, but I endeavored to explore other synergies, particularly how Burroughs and Brion Gysin employed chance as a mechanism for both media-making and occult operations. It became clear at least to me that Burroughs didn’t see these categories as distinct. 

Were you invited or did you pitch?

I was invited. As I recall, it was due to a policy pundit quote relating to the music industry that my literary agent saw in the New York Times. I was originally called on to pitch a book on ‘creativity in the age of Big Data’ or something along those lines. I wrote up a short proposal based in part on a graduate course I was teaching at Georgetown University at the time. I suppose I hoped to stick my book in the syllabus somewhere down the line.

But when I was in the room with the literary agents, they told me they wanted my cultural critic voice, which I really hadn’t used in years. It seems the Burroughs connection had been swimming around in my subconscious for some time, so I pitched it on the spot, and they bit. I whipped up a full proposal, and we sold the project shortly after.

Would you have liked to have had contact with your subject? Is that useful, vital? Or can it be unhelpful?

Maybe. I think I’d have gotten along with William, as I’m known to collect misfit visionary geezers. Estates can be complicated, though. Overall, I think not being tied to original sources gives an author like myself a certain amount of freedom. As previously noted, my approach is more along the lines of sociological synthesis than establishing or embellishing an historic record. Insights, if any, arise from personal experience within specific thematic areas, and are supported by wide-ranging surveys of biographical and historical texts composed by authors with far greater investment in first source preservation. I thank them immensely!

What problems did you face in writing this particular project?

My own confusion is usually the biggest problem. Especially so with my current project for Oxford University Press, which is tentatively titled Dead Dharma: The Grateful Dead & the American Pursuit of Enlightenment. It touches on a dizzying number of intersections and histories, and encompasses a broad range of philosophical-spiritual-social views and practices. In some ways, it’s the flip side to my Burroughs book, as it explores the Beat phenomenon from a left-coast, Buddhistic perspective, and how these aspects inform the ‘almost tantric’ praxis of the Grateful Dead in their milieu and beyond. 

With the Burroughs project, I wanted to find a way to talk about his killing of his wife Joan Vollmer, whom history tends to depict as a tragic footnote to another Important White Guy’s story. In retrospect, I’d have liked to have further explored their relationship prior to its ugly end. But it wasn’t the focus of the book I was tasked with writing.

Even addressing it as I was able posed something of a challenge, as the actual record is sparse beyond what has already been published and new data is unlikely to emerge due to the passing of time. I do think I managed to reflect something of their entanglement, which, while it survived, did so with deep mutual affection and no small amount of wit. I don’t let him off the hook. He didn’t let himself off the hook, either, though he tried just about every way to do so.

If you're portraying/critiquing a living individual, does that give you a particular obligation to the 'truth'? Obviously WSB was long dead. Do you have thoughts on this?

As a modestly well-trained former journalist, I believe I pay appropriate fealty to historic truth, such as it is. I also recognize that there is no single – or even ultimate –truth to be judged or weighed against its alternative. With regard to Burroughs, I mostly hoped to present a multifaceted character; one whom his closest associates told me meant different things to different people. And it was a lot of people!

Which meant that, in addition to the ‘main character’, I needed to establish credible micro-biographies of the musicians and other individuals with whom Burroughs engaged or influenced, and try to give them contextual dimensionality. Doing that in a way that has narrative and thematic flow and isn’t just a Wikipedia page or an AI-composed ‘article’ is where the challenge and artistry lie. I do my best.

Your subject showed some interest in popular music but also tended to keep a distance from that world. How do you perceive that association – important or peripheral? 

Burroughs understood rock’n’roll on a shamanic level, in that he recognized its potencies as well as its potential for disrupting a transcendentally limiting establishment which he called Control. The artists who really ‘got’ Burroughs to whatever degree shared this outlook, and employed techniques – ritual, pharmacological, technological – to variable internal and external effect.

In the book, published way back in 2019, I ponder whether Burroughs’ prime operation – to storm the citadels of the Enlightenment – was more successful than we recognize. We do, in fact, live in a world where small units of information – image, text, sound – are weaponized and communicated electronically. And this has had a very real and quite corrosive effect on the institutions that defined the 20th Century. At any rate, it’s all in my weird little book.

To what extent did it shape this artist's work? 

On a mundane level, his connection to musicians kept him visible in underground and popular culture, particularly as the original punk movement evolved into subgenres like industrial, etc. But interest in Burroughs from the musical side goes all the way back to Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, all of whom had direct contact. Clearly, Burroughs had an influence on all these artists, but he wasn’t particularly affected by their creative product.

A few closer friendships, such as those with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson, no doubt had personal impact, as any meaningful relationship would. And Burroughs certainly seemed touched by Kurt Cobain, who considered the old man some kind of sage. My assessment is that, when Burroughs wasn’t distracted or incapacitated (and perhaps even then), he was fundamentally concerned with the work. Artists who shared that sensibility were at the very least well considered, and at the most, invited into his strange mandala. 

Were jazz or rock and other styles ever more than just a passing trend in his life?

It was pointed out to me by an individual who knew him well that Burroughs enjoyed some of the popular tunes of his day, including a handful of bawdy ditties (including a few about reefer) from back when he was a bona fide dandy. In terms of rock music, I think he was more attuned to its effect, which he described quite well upon witnessing Led Zeppelin’s sturm und drang. Again, he mostly considered it in a magical context; its ability to affect not only people’s minds, but their gross physicality.

He and Bowie, for example, discussed the weaponizing of ultra-low frequency audio, which is now a real thing. And Burroughs could relate to the theatrical-conceptual aspects of rock and its offshoots, as he did with Bowie, Patti Smith, and, later, groups like Throbbing Gristle, who took the idea of cut-ups to the realm of audio manipulation in performance. 

Any other thoughts?

Well, I’m about halfway done with my next book, which delves into the spiritual-ecological aspects of Beat culture as it seeded and transformed the subsequent generation’s inner and outer explorations. It seems I’ve waltzed myself into another multi-biographical cluster-eff, and this one spans millennia! So hopefully at some point, we can discuss that, should civilization persist.

See also: ‘Biographical Details #2: Allen Ginsberg and Jonah Raskin’, October 29th, 2023; ‘Biographical Details #1: Jack Kerouac and Steve Turner’, September 30th, 2023