Call Me Burroughs | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | 1965 | |||
Genre | Avant-garde/spoken word | |||
Length | 43:22 | |||
Label | The English Bookshop, Paris | |||
Producer | Ian Sommerville | |||
William S. Burroughs chronology | ||||
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Call Me Burroughs is a spoken word album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, which was released on LP by The English Bookshop, Paris, in June 1965, and then issued in the United States by ESP-Disk, New York, in 1966. Rhino Word Beat reissued the album on Compact Disc in 1995, the company's first ever reissue. [1]
All of the readings were from Burroughs' novels Naked Lunch , The Soft Machine , and Nova Express .
According to Barry Miles, Burroughs believed "it was Gaît Frogé's idea to record Call Me Burroughs". [2] Frogé was the owner of the English Bookshop in Paris, located at 42 Rue de Seine, and the album was recorded there, in what Jean-Jacques Lebel described as its "vaulted medieval basement." [3] Frogé paid producer Ian Sommerville a flat fee, [2] and asked Fluxus poet Emmett Williams and Lebel to write liner notes, which were published in both English and French. [3] [4] Burroughs stated that he believed the recording had "almost certainly" been made "using Brion Gysin's broadcast-standard Uher" tape recorder. [2] The album was pressed in 1965, with a date of April of that year on the French liner notes.
Frogé published 1,000 copies of the album, [5] and Miles points out that "For many years, Call Me Burroughs was the only recording of William Burroughs available." [2] In 1966, Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label released the album in the United States, extending its reach. [3] According to Miles, Stollman simply added the ESP logo and address to the original sleeve. [2]
The album would go on to have a wide influence, particularly in England. Barry Miles, in his liner notes for the 1995 Rhino rerelease, says, "The Beatles may have been the soundtrack to 1965 for the beautiful people of swinging London, but to the cognoscenti there was something even cooler to listen to." [6]
Miles continues:
"It's in all the best homes, my dear," said Brion Gysin, and he was right. At the height of the '60s, Call Me Burroughs was an essential record. The Beatles all had copies (Paul McCartney included Bill on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . Art dealer Robert Fraser bought ten copies to give to friends such as Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards' dealer had copies, as did numerous painters and writers. [2]
McCartney, in particular was a fan:
William Burroughs's spoken-word album Call Me Burroughs was a great favourite for late-evening listening when people were stoned; Paul heard Burroughs's cold, flat Mid-Western voice reading from The Naked Lunch before he saw the book. [7]
McCartney was so impressed by the album that he hired the producer, Ian Sommerville, to set up a studio and act as tape operator for him in an apartment Ringo Starr owned, but was not using, at 34 Montagu Place. [8] Sommerville ended up living in the apartment, and subsequent tape experiments were conducted there by Burroughs. McCartney was said to have found all of this very interesting and relevant to his own recordings. [9]
In his book The Old, Weird America , Greil Marcus calls the album "a talisman of cool in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s." [10]
All composition by William S. Burroughs
Tracks 1 and 2 from Naked Lunch; 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8 from Nova Express; track 6 from The Soft Machine.
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Naked Lunch is a 1991 surrealist science fiction drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of Canada, Britain, and Japan.
Cities of the Red Night is a 1981 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. His first full-length novel since The Wild Boys (1971), it is part of his final trilogy of novels, known as The Red Night Trilogy, followed by The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). The plot involves a group of radical pirates who seek the freedom to live under the articles set out by Captain James Misson. In near present day, a parallel story follows a detective searching for a lost boy, abducted for use in a sexual ritual. The cities of the title mimic and parody real places, and Burroughs makes references to the United States, Mexico, and Morocco.
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
"The 'Priest' They Called Him" is a collaboration between the American novelist William S. Burroughs and musician Kurt Cobain. On the piece, Cobain provides noisy, discordant guitar backing based on "Silent Night" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" to Burroughs' deadpan reading. Originally released as a limited edition 10-inch picture disc on Tim/Kerr Records in 1993, it was subsequently re-released on CD and 10-inch vinyl.
Changes is the ninth studio album by the American pop rock band the Monkees, released in 1970 by Colgems Records. The album was issued after Michael Nesmith's exit from the band, leaving only Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones to fulfill the recording contract they had signed in the mid-1960s. Changes was their last new album for Colgems Records and the group's last album of all new material until Pool It!, released in 1987.
Antony Balch was an English film director and distributor, best known for his screen collaborations with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs in the 1960s and for the 1970s horror film, Horror Hospital.
Interzone is a collection of short stories and other early works by William S. Burroughs from 1953 to 1958. The collection was first published by Viking Penguin in 1989, although several of the stories had already been printed elsewhere, including an earlier publication titled Early Routines. The title was inspired by the International Zone in Tangiers, Morocco, where Burroughs lived for a time and by which he was greatly influenced.
The Nova Trilogy or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental novels by William S. Burroughs.
Dead City Radio is a musical album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, released by Island Records in 1990. The CD is a collection of readings by Burroughs set to a broad range of musical compositions. It was produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, with musical accompaniment from John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, among others. It was dedicated to "Keith Haring, at the Apocalypse."
Sinclair Beiles was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka is an album by the Moroccan group the Master Musicians of Joujouka, released on Rolling Stones Records and distributed by Atco Records in 1971. It was produced by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who recorded a performance by the group on 29 July 1968 in the village of Jajouka in Morocco. Jones called the tracks "a specially chosen representation" of music played in the village during the annual week-long Rites of Pan Festival. It was significant for presenting the Moroccan group to a global audience, drawing other musicians to Jajouka, including American composer Ornette Coleman who collaborated with the group.
This Girl's in Love with You is the sixteenth studio album by American singer Aretha Franklin, released on January 15, 1970 by Atlantic Records. It reached Billboard's Top 20 and was reissued on compact disc through Rhino Records in 1993. Her version of The Beatles' "Let It Be" was the first recording of the song to be commercially issued. Songwriter Paul McCartney sent Franklin and Atlantic Records a demo of the song as a guide.
This is a bibliography of the works of William S. Burroughs.
Ian Sommerville was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called "Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and "systems adviser".
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
Dreamachines is an album by John Zorn recorded in New York City in April 2013 and released on the Tzadik label in July 2013. The album is inspired by the works of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.