Burroughs' drug debut 70 years on

Jazz, the mob and Junkie

I REMEMBER thinking for too long that the addictive behaviour of jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s must have been linked to some psychological failing: naïveté, a self-destructive streak, a devil-may-care recklessness, a cry for help, an attention-seeking gesture, a quest for the ultimate opt-out or merely an existential resignation from the ranks of the conventional order. Maybe some even cultivated a superman fantasy that a chemical fix could make them the very best player on the block.

Then, I heard a BBC Radio 3 documentary and the scales largely fell from my eyes: Sally Marlow’s ‘Hitting the high notes’, first broadcast as long ago as 2017, revealed that, while many of these performers were indeed locked into a pernicious narcotic cycle, it was simply part of a very effective and lucrative business model for the local criminal fraternity.

The Mafia owned many of the clubs where the trumpeters and saxophonists, the pianists, bassists and drummers, plied their craft and the mob also controlled the drug trade in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

It made perfect sense to the gangsters that the jazz stars of the day should bring an extra hit of profit, a regular contribution, to their cynical and single-minded operation. The talent were paid by the bars and theatres to showcase their outstanding skills and then those very same musicians paid a substantial percentage of their earnings back into the hoods’ account via the drugs ledger. The logic was impeccable: let’s call it a jazz tax.

As Miles Davis described in his 1989 autobiography: ‘There was a lot of dope around the music scene and lot of musicians were deep into drugs, especially heroin. People – musicians – were considered hip in some circles if they shot smack. Some of the younger guys like Dexter Gordon, Tad Dameron, Art Blakey, J. J. Johnson, Sonny Rollins, Jackie Maclean, myself – all of us – started getting heavily into heroin around the same time. Despite the fact that Freddie Webster had died from some bad stuff.

‘Besides Bird, Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Gene Ammons were all using heroin, not to mention Joe Guy and Billie Holliday, too. There were a lot of white musicians – Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, and Chet Baker – who were also heavily into shooting drugs’ (Davis with Troupe, p. 129).

Which is not to say that all of those reasons we mentioned at the very start of this account did not have some validity, some part to play in this process of exchange. But dark powers of manipulation were at play. In this sinister compact, initial shots were no doubt passed on for free, got artists on the programme and then had them hooked for their sometimes abbreviated, certainly disrupted, lives. If you were in, there was scant chance of escape.

What did it matter if Charlie Parker or Art Pepper or Lady Day fell victim to the hypodermic and disappeared from the late night shows on 52nd Street? Who cared if the greatest performers of the day were suddenly incapable of delivering effectively on stage? There was always, but always, a further wave of young soloists and singers desperate to hit the high altitudes on this ever-competitive circuit. ‘Here come our customers,’ thought the crooked powerbrokers, ‘sign ’em up.’

These matters came to mind as I mused on this year’s 70th anniversary of the publication of Junkie, William S. Burroughs’ debut title, a controversial addition indeed to the book racks of 1953, in fact so taboo-breaking that its author was not even able to include his name as writer on the cover.

Pictured above: Part of UK Beat scholar’s Dave Moore’s collection of Junkie covers

So sensitive was the material and so genuine was the prospect of legal action against creator and publishers, that a decision was taken to use a pseudonym – William Lee, a straightforward borrowing of his mother’s maiden name – to provide some kind of defensive wall from the possibility of prosecution.

Furthermore, Junkie was issued as a double paperback – the story itself plus a companion volume concerning the memoirs of a law agent who had chased down drug deviants. The argument was, it appears, that the transgressive material carried in the Burroughs account would be somehow counterbalanced by salutary tales of discovery, arrest and conviction. In short, a diligent detective would track you down if you pursued a similar course.

Not that Ace Books, the publishers of the title, were working that hard to keep the book off the media radar. Burroughs’ contribution was, after all, subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict and the supporting account was actually a novel called Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant, originally released in 1941 and thus long present in the public domain.

Perhaps Ace’s presentation of Junkie – Burroughs always preferred Junky, even though its original working title was Junk – with its companion text was a disingenuous bid to seize the moral high ground while masking the prime intention to sell as many copies of this hot little property as they could. But this rather racy, somewhat salacious, combination - evil lived, evil vanquished – did little to shift copies, nor was it reviewed.

Ace specialised in number of sensationalist, downmarket genres – true crime stories, detective fiction, comics and other material with a slightly trashy, somewhat seedy, character, what we might now perceive as almost classic noir. With a price tag of 35¢ (about 1/6 in British cash of the day compared to 2/6 for a reputable Penguin) they were ephemeral, disposable throwaways.

Burroughs was set to make a cool cent – yes, a single cent only – in royalties, each time a subway traveller – the target market – purchased a copy from a news-stand or a kiosk. So the deal with this imprint, negotiated with the help of Allen Ginsberg who had met Carl Solomon, the nephew of the Ace proprietor, during his recent asylum stay, was plainly never going to transform William Lee’s banking profile.

But let us not be too condescending or dismissive of Burroughs’ premiere outing as a published writer. Although it had little bearing on the later dystopian cut-up fiction or his subsequent science fiction forays, it remains today a landmark juncture in the author’s biography, a vital breakthrough. In context, it represents the moment one of the most revered creative thinkers of his age planted his flag on planet Literature.

Junkie comes from shadowy places of the mind, from nocturnal corners of the city. It is a hard-boiled confessional, rather dry, detached and passionless but with period atmosphere, well-detailed set-pieces and suitable tension. However, it does not replicate what would become a regular Beat trope – the presence of real life characters loosely-veiled for the purposes of fiction – so no depictions of Kerouac and Ginsberg in this tale.

Primarily set in mid-century Manhattan (even if a sequence in Mexico concludes the piece), it joins that historic trail of drug writing or writing about drugs, from Coleridge to De Quincy, Baudelaire to Huxley, Kerouac to Alexander Trocchi, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick to Irvine Welsh and Barney Hoskyns.

It’s also valuable to remember that, as Burroughs was producing and completing this essentially autobiographical work, he was continuing to operate under the darkest of clouds prompted by his accidental killing of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in 1951. This traumatic catastrophe is thought to have been a key trigger for his writing surge, but there are also hints that Kerouac’s publication of his debut work The Town and the City in 1950 also had a galvanising effect. Contrition and competition, a heady formula.

Plus, it is well worth mentioning that the 1953 account missed out the details of his own true sexual leanings: his homosexuality. His mentor Ginsberg bravely challenged that American taboo with his own revelations in ‘Howl’ two years later and, some way down the line, in 1977, the text of the Burroughs book would be edited and expanded to restore originally excised sections on those same-sex experiences he had pursued in the 1940s and throughout the 83 years of his life.

In 1985, Queer, Burroughs’ second novel, in terms of his writing chronology, was finally released in an unexpurgated form, an extended account of his gay life in the 1940s. Then six years after his death, in 1997, Penguin issued a new and definitive iteration: Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’. The straps of the societal straitjacket would take many decades to finally loosen.

I wonder though, to go back once more, whether WSB, that patrician Midwest WASP, the Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who enjoyed a monthly, if modest, allowance which largely allowed him to escape the treadmill of the workplace, ever ran into Mafia types in his questing for drugs or the extra cash to pay for them.

Gutter scramblers like Herbert Huncke, I suspect did. That emaciated symbol of the subterranean frontline, sculpted by a roving existence and the perils of the needle, became something of a spectral talisman to the Ivy League renegades – Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg and Lucien Carr – who were fascinated by his streetwise resilience. They sought out stories, conversation and advice from this weary and wiry habitué of war-time Times Square.

Huncke, of course, granted this unlikely gathering of individuals, so different in background and only bound by a commitment to literature and dangerous adventure, their most significant legacy: the term ‘beat’, a mobile feast of a word, a short stab of Anglo-Saxon slang, a four-letter adjective with force, which described the edgy reality of the downtrodden ranks sheltering in those all-night diners around 42nd St, the neon dancing on their pale faces and the noise of the sidewalk masking the stale desperation in their souls.

As for matters of jazz, Burroughs seems to have less interest in music than Kerouac and Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes, all of whom were characterised as bebop obsessives in the 1940s, although the critic Jed Birmingham has contributed some fascinating speculations on the writing voices of Burroughs and the links between the improvisatory methods of figures like Parker and Gillespie then certainly the free experiments of Ornette Coleman who would, in the early 1990s, pen the score to David Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch.

However, could Burroughs have been the kind of prospective customer New York’s nightlife gangsters might have earmarked for the occasional drug transaction? That said, as a man always old before his time and so conventionally garbed with no immediate characteristics to mark him as one of that strange new breed of revellers, slumming it in the murky channels of the seething city, the criminals might actually have suspected he was a narc or a form of double agent himself.

More specifically, I wonder whether Burroughs ever went to Minton’s Playhouse at the south edge of Harlem or to to the 52nd St live venues or haunts further downtown and mingled with jazz stars and their smack suppliers? Was he ever a regular member of the after-hours cast of wheelers and dealers, duckers and divers, enjoying in person the new jazz stylings – cerebral, deep, complex – which were transcending the big band swing of the 1930s, now regarded as somewhat tame and passé among the new cognoscenti.

I turned to a pair of eminent commentators on Burroughs and his own twilight zone – Oliver Harris, esteemed scholar and globally-regarded expert on the writer’s work, and Barry Miles, the celebrated historian of the Beat Generation and the author himself of two biographies of the man, including the substantial edition that emerged on the novelist’s Centenary in 2014. Each had most interesting takes on the Burroughs/jazz conundrum.

Professor of American Literature at Keele University and President of the European Beat Studies Network, Harris is the editor and author of ten books, including William Burroughs: Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’ (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), Queer: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (2010); and the Cut-Up Trilogy: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded (2014) and co-editor of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009).

He comments: ‘Burroughs’ interest in jazz has been overshadowed by the more open interest of Ginsberg and Kerouac and by the sense that it doesn’t quite fit his image. Or to put this another way, external factors have made it hard to recognise or credit his interest. Did he go to the same places and dig the same musicians? You’d need to check Miles and [Ted] Morgan biographies.’

‘But there’s a telling line in Junky: “Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric and a few Louis Armstrong records” (this would be the late 1940s). And of course the novel has a glossary of “jive talk” that coincides with jazz musician lingo via overlaps with drug use and addiction subcultural identities, especially in NYC of the mid-1940s.

‘Remember, Burroughs knew [record producer] Jerry Newman from Columbia, who put together jazz as well as comic cuts of news reports. He almost certainly knew Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir Really the Blues, although I’m not sure if he knew Mezz himself. Several times he refers with a sense of familiarity to Billie Holiday and her junk habit.

‘Other specific recurrent textual references, like to Duke Ellington in Naked Lunch - “Opening bars of ‘East St. Louis Toodle-oo’” – suggest a rather conservative taste. No bebop here. But his own aesthetics – improvisatory routines, mash-ups, etc. – suggesting an interest in more radical jazz makes sense.

‘In 1954, he writes to Ginsberg: “Have you dug Brubeck etc., new telepathic jazz?” What’s that about…?! And then, three years later, when he’s in Copenhagen, he writes “Lots of jazz here which sounds incredibly dead and tenuous, separate from all the tension and horror that gave rise to it.”

‘I think that last comment suggests a key association with social context –discrimination as much as drug addiction – and, although the self-parodic ultra-WASP image gets in the way, Burroughs was clearly responsive to African American history and culture, even if he didn’t romanticise it like Kerouac.’  

Barry Miles, long-known as simply Miles, was a friend of key Beats like Burroughs and Ginsberg and an important connecting spirit with the most significant popular musicians like Paul McCartney. In the London of mid-1960s, he played a vital role in linking those US writers with rising rock acts in the UK. He co-organised the International Poetry Incarnation, went on to co-found the legendary International Times and became one of the most prolific historians of the counterculture.

His biography of Ginsberg (1989) is regarded as a seminal text, his first book on Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait (1993), was followed by William S. Burroughs: A Life (2014). He also penned a controversial life story of Kerouac – King of the Beats (2001) – and further titles on the Beat Hotel in Paris and London’s longer underground history. He also issued multiple publications with rock artists – Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Bowie – at their heart.

Miles’ take on the Beat/jazz axis rejects orthodox interpretations. He is actually sceptical that the association between the writers and bop was that strong at all. He remarks: ‘The fact is, none of the main Beats were that much into jazz, despite Kerouac building that up in his books. They listened to “Symphony Sid” and very occasionally went to jazz clubs was all.

‘When Kerouac wanted a jazz backing he chose white musicians. Allen knew a few musicians via Larry Rivers and Harry Smith, through the San Remo and in the sixties was friends with Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus – he and I visited Mingus once at his place on East 5th Street. But Allen would not sit down and play a jazz album; I don't think he had any.

‘As for Bill, he enjoyed early stuff – Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, and liked Lester Young – but preferred Viennese waltzes. He did play jazz records when he was on his pot farm in Texas with Joan [Vollmer] and Huncke. Later he listened to Moroccan music. I often talked to him about music and his position was a) he was tone deaf; b) he wasn't that interested and knew little about it; c) he didn't have a record player (at least not in London); and d) it was too loud (that also applied to rock 'n' roll).

‘I'd be surprised if any of them went to Minton's more than a few times and I’d be very surprised if Bill ever went there. His junk connections were all personal from what I could gather. I can't see him scoring in somewhere as public as a jazz club. He did enjoy the frisson of going to Avenue D with Stu Meyer and co to score from the burned out buildings down therein the late seventies and early eighties and Stu of course had mob connections. However, even then I think Bill was getting most of his smack from Howard Brookner.’

So it seems, in short, but while Burroughs enjoyed fairly superficial and quite fleeting brushes with the version of modern jazz that the Beats allegedly espoused with large enthusiasm, his own musical interests either lay elsewhere or were so tenuous as to matter little in the overall flow. As for drugs, it seems as if the environments in which bop musicians rubbed shoulders with mob traders were probably not places that this particular writer would have frequented.

While both Harris and Miles can spot fragments of evidence that jazz was a background feature in the life of the man who would go on to write Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, there is little to suggest that Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s ground breaking take on the music from the 1940s was of huge importance to the twentieth-century’s most famous addict nor were the clubs where it was performed likely to have been settings in which he would have pursued clandestine deals for junk himself.

Notes: The actual 70th anniversary of the publication of Junkie falls in the autumn of 2023. Miles mentions Stu Meyer, who was a friend and chauffeur of Burroughs, while Howard Brookner was a filmmaker and director of Burroughs: The Movie.

References: Quincy Troupe and Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 1989; Jed Birmingham’s essay ‘Bebop Burroughs’ was originally published at the website Reality Studio on June 14th, 2006 and re-published as ‘Old Bull Lee and all that jazz’ at Rock and the Beat Generation on April 20th, 2023; and interviews with Harris and Miles were conducted by email, May 2023.

See also: ‘Beat Meetings #6: Heath Common & William S. Burroughs, May 15th, 2023; ‘A close encounter with Burroughs’, October 5th, 2022