Thursday, July 8, 2010

the last loose nickel



a doctored photograph by loomis dean, paris, 1959.

Previously:

"
The CD, "Break Through in a Grey Room" comprises a collection of cut-ups recorded in the 1960's in various hotel rooms in New York, London and Paris... recorded circa 1965 with Ian Sommerville between the Chelsea Hotel; 210 Centre Street, NYC and London, and owes as much to Sommerville's technical innovations as Burroughs' readings. "

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: BURROUGHS CALLED THE LAW from "Break Through In Grey Room" CD (Sub Rosa) 1994 (US)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have to love Burroughs even if he's incomprehensible. Thanks for the recording - what a gem.... got to love Willie the Rat

ib said...

Glad you enjoyed. The high priest of snide is on top form on this one, dribbling vitriol to great effect; so much so it physically set me off on a laughing jag.

I have not a clue as to whether said incident is entirely fictitious or in some fashion rooted in genuine public nuisance.

Whatever. It doesn't have any bearing on the entertainment value. Like the living precedent for one of Crumb's misanthropes; the gaolbird tailing Mr. Natural in a battered fedora.

said...

Always a hearty thanks for any M. WSB.

Grey Room being one of my all time favorite of his recordings.

I'm not sure if he's really so 'incomprehensible', though. He always gives me laughs. 'The high priest of snide' indeed.

ib said...

I was lax in documenting the provenance of this excerpt, the last track on the CD.

UbuWeb - It may well have been - underlines the "routine" as his "dropping a dime on the Nova mob". Definitely from the mid '60s (in spite of the fidelity), his precise location at the time is not recorded.

The earliest segment dates from 1960, recorded by Brion Gysin at the BBC studios in London and utilising (Gysin's) "permutational technique". "Grey Room" also includes later recordings, from Morocco and London, made in 1971 and 73.