The "Priest" They Called Him

It's been a moment since I dropped any William S. Burroughs material, so have this ten inch record of Uncle Bill reading his excellent short "The "Priest" They Called Him" with the squealing guitar background created by one Kurt Cobain.  A harrowing tale of a junkie at Christmas, a pair of severed legs, and the immaculate fix, punctuated by Cobain's "Silent Night"-based noise wall, this little miracle is as ultimately hopeful as it is nauseating.  Sweat it out.

Fight tuberculosis, folks...

Dead City Radio

Well, wee ones, I'm currently in the middle of a William S. Burroughs-related project on the meatplane and I've decided to rest my poor wrists and eyes and brains by staring at a computer screen, typing overlong sentences as usual, and listening to William S. Burroughs! This is another Burroughs joint populated by many other disparate musicians and personalities I'd otherwise generally ignore, from John Cale to Donald Fagen to Sonic Youth, but all sense of taste and decorum must be set aside when Uncle Bill is in the room; it'll all seem like a horrible prophetic dream once it's over anyway.
Present here is the standard Burroughsian subject matter: priapic lizard men, colorful sticky fluids, drugs from dark parallel universes, catholic symbolism profaned, nonsense syllables strung together in ululant mantras, cheap suits made threadbare from sleeping fitfully, cold war nihilism, etc. The usual, as we call it in the Swamp.
Splat!

The Nova Convention

Strange weather keeps making the power cut in and out. Moments ago I was alone and in the dark but for a single flickering candle, and now here we are together in the Swamp. Let's not waste time: here's The Nova Convention, another William S. Burroughs project with contributions by Bryon Gysin, Patty Smith, Phillip Glass, Timothy Leary, John Cage, Frank Zappa, and Robert Anton Wilson, among others. Dark, heinous weirdness, oh yes.

Dead Fingers Talk - Storm The Reality Studios

Named after the exquisite fifth novel by William S. Burroughs, a work partially derived from cut-up bits of the first books glued back together randomly, Hull-via-London band Dead Fingers Talk (fronted by the wonderfully monikered Bobo Pheonix) played a jangly deadpan punk style informed by the Velvet Underground but also seemingly in tune with the New York scene, especially Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Pheonix's plainly homosexual lyrics and defiant persona echoed Burroughs as well, as exemplified on the fiercely catchy "Nobody Loves You When You're Old and Gay." Humorous and humanistic, this album (and what seems to be many bonus tracks, as it's well over an hour of music) was also produced by one Mick Ronson, who gives it a soothing buzzing warmth that keeps all the angular guitar from poking holes in the upholstery.
Hold On to Rock And Roll

Tom Waits - Black Rider Demos

Primitive garage recordings of the Waits/Burroughs/Wilson collaboration The Black Rider, even creakier and stranger than the final LP released the same year. This bootleg was quickly suppressed at the time but thanks to the magic of the internet it resurfaces to air out its stinky blow-holes in the sweltering sun. A morbid carnival of tuneless horns, hard drugs, and stomping armies of dwarves.
Step right up.

Better An Old Demon Than A New God

Well, that might be a tiny jpg but left to right: Lydia Lunch, David Johansen, William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, and presumably label impresario John Giorno. Giorno's one of those winguts you'd expect to to see over-analyzed on the Illogical Contraption, a failed poet who started his own hip label and ended up releasing many quality-variable LPs of much more interesting artists and wormed his own obnoxious tracks in with the rest of them. Without him many fascinating records of this stripe would not exist and yet he manages to shit all over them and consitently be the most obnoxious part of the collective, which might be strong words considering that he funded the most grating unfiltered gibbering from Diamonda Galas and Einstürzende Neubauten! Nonetheless, Uncle Abdul's favorites on this album are "Uh Oh, Plutonium," a Cold War dance-party meditation by Anne Waldeman, and Richard Hell's self-parody/self-aggrandizement "The Reverend Hell Gets Confused." Not merely poetry, most of this is weird self-conscious "jokes" and typical drug-addict narcissism, exemplified by Jim Carroll's hilarious spoken word sparring match with a blind kimono-clad hunchback chick who mistook him for Iggy Pop.
What it is?