It's Only Rock and Roll

William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch (1959), was one of the most important figures in western culture during the latter half of the twentieth century, not just because of his incendiary literature but because he influenced musicians in almost every genre.

Although Burroughs professed to know little about music and, unlike his Beat contemporaries, was largely nonplussed by the jazz movement that flourished during his early adulthood, his impact on musicians from the 1960s onwards was unparalleled. A look around the musical landscape of the past half century may well yield artists who didn't even know the name William Burroughs, but they were nonetheless direct descendants of other musicians whose work, personalities, and image had been in some way shaped by the man known as El Hombre Invisible.

In William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll, Casey Rae sets out to demonstrate how important Burroughs was, not just on rock music but on almost all forms of music. The book is "part literary biography, part sonic travelogue," in the author's own words. Indeed, that's probably the best way to put it. It's hard to classify it any other way. The chapters are set out as though the book were a collection of essays tackling different genres or artists, yet they certainly aren't conventional essays. Nor is it conventional biography, as it jumps around in time and space, chopping up Burroughs' life like…well…rather like one of Burroughs' own books.

Each of the book's chapters loosely tackles a period of Burroughs' life and ties it to his influence on or relationship with either an artist, a group of artists, or a genre. The first chapter, for example, looks at the time Burroughs met Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain, who called the author "one of my only idols." Rae introduces us to two deeply troubled men, one an old, recovered junkie and the other a young, reluctant superstar with his own heroin addiction. By the time of their meeting, Cobain's life is spiraling out of control and he is continually depressed. However, a brief visit to Burroughs' home in Lawrence, Kansas, provides him an unusual respite. He is giddy with excitement at meeting his hero, while the older author is left feeling concerned for the grunge icon's well-being. For Cobain's 27^th birthday, Burroughs sent him a painting and a surprisingly sweet note, but two months later Cobain had shot himself.

Rae attempts to connect Burroughs' meeting with Cobain with his own visit to Louis-Ferdinand Céline many decades earlier. He also connects it to Burroughs' shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, blames Burroughs' books for Cobain's drug problems, and asks, after discussing the singer's suicide, "Would Cobain have made different choices had he not encountered Burroughs?" The book jumps around a lot like that, mixing fascinating, well-researched stories with rather speculative, haphazardly composed connections. In the following chapter, a single meeting with Bob Dylan, about which almost nothing is known, ultimately leads Rae to conclude that Burroughs encouraged the singer to "go electric" in 1965, and that a reading by Burroughs (which Dylan may have attended) featured an image of tarantulas, possibly inspiring the title for Dylan's 1971 experimental novel. Elsewhere, the author attempts to tie Burroughs and Dylan closer together by quoting Iggy Pop, who believed a line in "Tombstone Blues" referred to Burroughs: "I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill." It is interesting, but not exactly convincing.

The book tends to jump around in this fashion, cramming too many stories, too many ideas, and too many names into each chapter, and indeed sometimes even into each paragraph. It can become repetitive and speculative, bogged down by pointless digressions, and yet it is also entertaining and at times incredibly witty. These tenuous connections seem somehow reasonable in a book about William Burroughs, whose own interest in fringe science...