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Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam
‘Patti Smith queens your pawn - Anarchy prevails - It
is poetry which breaks the bars of jails!’
No sooner had I finished than a
thoroughly stoned Herman comes strolling towards
the stage, his face beaming with a broad smile.
“Alles okay, baba? I ask.
“I’m fine, man, just fine,” he drawls.
Followed by, “I brought some friends with me.”
The friends were half a dozen wellseasoned
Hell’s Angels, each of them holding a large
bottle of beer. Herman would be knocking out
poems, not singing songs. And minus his band, these
dudes were his backup boys.
They accompanied his
recitations by stomping their
feet in cadence to his words. It
was a perfect performance that
saw the audience cheering and
howling for more. They got
more, though not from Herman.
He’d disappeared with all but
one of the Angels, the tallest of
the lot. Who then approached
me and politely asked if he could
recite a poem. I said sure,
introduced him, he stepped up
to the mike, pulled a tiny slip of
paper from his jeans’ bicycle-key pocket, and
“In New York if
you’re carrying
and shoot someone
in self-
defense, no one
will bother
you.”
William
Burroughs to
Eddie Woods
proceeded to recite an unbelievably sweet love poem.
A pin-drop silence gave way to a round of applause.
Bringing the reading to a close, I made a
point of thanking William for the many hours of
reading pleasure he’d afforded me over the years.
“Pleasure?” Simon snarled loudly. “He’s
trying to stick a knife in your heart!”
“And if I get a kick out of that,” I snapped
back, “what’s it to you?”
The audience filed out...to the main hall,
the café, the bar, the house dealer’s counter, wherever.
We participants, sans Herman, adjourned to the
Melkweg office, with the Angels tagging along.
“Where’s Jack?” Angel Jack demanded to
know from William.
“He’s wherever you care to find him,” Bill
responded, in his mind meaning Kerouac.
“I’m Jack,” said Jack, stabbing at his own
chest with a forefinger.
“Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” Bill
replied with a wise nod of the head. “It’s all in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
“Eddie, get those guys out of here,” Soyo
Benn pleaded with me, “before they drive William
nuts.”
I forget how exactly, but I got them to
leave without a fuss.
William made his exit shortly afterwards.
We shook hands. Then referring to the remainder of
the opium he’d already gulped down, he said: “Thank
you, Eddie, I’m well away.”
William and I next saw each other in 1985
when he and his manager James Grauerholz, in
company with Benn, visited Ins & Outs Press for a
long afternoon into early evening.
Plus we spoke on a live telephone
hookup (that the audience could
hear) during a 1993 Soyo Bennorganized
Burroughs Tribute at the
Melkweg that I co-emceed. And I
had Bill affirm that I was not the
Eddie Woods who witnessed him
accidently shooting and killing his
wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs in
Mexico. (Literary Outlaw, Ted
Morgan’s biography of William, had
many people seriously believing it
was me.)
“No, Eddie,” Bill said
dryly, “it wasn’t you.” And went on to describe my
infamous namesake. Red hair, short, a good nine
years younger than I, et cetera. I wrote about all of
this in the essay “Thank God You’re Not Eddie
Woods” that I delivered at the William Burroughs
conference Naked Lunch@50 in Paris, 2009, and was
subsequently published in Beat Scene.
Btw, I was only half-joking when I said that
Burroughs and Gysin were partners in cut-up crime.
1) I don’t much care for the technique. (Neither did
Gregory Corso, who collaborated on Minutes to Go
only reluctantly); 2) To the extent it has any validity, I
consider Harold Norse to be its real master. As
exemplified in his ground-breaking novella Beat Hotel;
3) I by far prefer Burroughs’ straighter writings to any
of the cut-ups. None of which negates Norman
Mailer’s 1962 appraisal of Burroughs as “the only
American novelist living today who may conceivably
be possessed by genius.” Hear, hear. That’s my Bill
Burroughs, all right.
© 2014 by Eddie Woods
EDDIE WOODS is at http://eddiewoods.nl/
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