Richard Strange

“All that summer we was mad” (with apologies to Quentin Bell)

In the summer of 1967, my best mate Joe Gilbert and I had two obsessions. While other kids were dating girls, or playing football or going fishing, Joe and I were besotted by contemporary art and the American beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and, above all, William Burroughs. I was 16 and Joe was 18.  We had discovered Burroughs through the pages of International Times, the underground newspaper which, for two glorious years, was the source of all, mainly illicit, knowledge. 

As soon as the school summer holidays began, as the sun beat down seemingly endlessly on our South London home, we hatched a plan to hitchhike to Paris to buy a couple of Burroughs’ books, which were banned in Britain on grounds of obscenity, blasphemy, poor taste and much else besides. We would only be away for a couple of days, and we would invent an alibi to spin to our parents to cover our absence. One-year “visitor” passports were surreptitiously bought, with our photos countersigned by obliging but unwary adults. Amazingly, we found ourselves quickly and safely in Paris.

Joe Gilbert and Richard Strange in Paris 1967 © Richard Strange

Our destination was, of course, the iconic and legendary Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Co., and there, on the shelves marked  “New American Fiction”, was our quarry, between the sleek olive green covers of Olympia Press. Published in 1959, Burroughs’ seminal text Naked Lunch was the Holy Grail for us. It was contraband of the highest order, the first example of Burroughs’ famous “nonlinear” style of writing, using cut-ups and fold-ins, a method designed to “Storm the Reality Studio and Retake the Universe”. Although this method of writing had been experimented with before, by the surrealists under Andre Breton, for example, and more recently by Burroughs’ lifelong friend and collaborator Brion Gysin, it was Burroughs who made the technique his own. So, titles like Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, promised the mixed delights of sci-fi, futurology, iconoclasm, irreverence, drugs and perverted sex, laced with a humour that Joe and I found irresistible, and we would spend hours that summer quoting whole passages to each other. Some of the best readings of these books are by Burroughs himself, in his own inimitable deadpan Southern drawl. An interbellum St Louis gent became the voice (to us, at least) of the 60s. For a flavour, I would recommend the album Let Me Hang You, produced in the 1990s from archive material by my friend Hal Willner. Taking its title from a, ahem…risky sexual practice described in an orgiastic scene in Naked Lunch, the album is a hilarious romp through the darkest (and funniest) recesses of Burroughs’ take on human depravity.

The Beats and Contemporary Art came together magnificently and unforgettably, for Joe and I, when we returned to London from our shopping trip and read, once again in International Times, of the impending release of an album that we probably both dreamed about long before it was actually recorded…a coming together of the most desirable elements of the Beat writers…rebelliousness, iconoclasm, frequent and exotic sex-on-demand and (remember, this was the Summer of Love!) DRUGS with the coolest man on the planet, American Pop artist Andy Warhol, in the form of an avant-garde rock band called (as if the random progeny of a Burroughs cut-up) The Velvet Underground. The Whhaaat???!!! We KNEW we would adore them before we heard a note…before we’d even seen the iconic cover art…and we did. Forever.

Richard Strange and Joe Gilbert in Paris 1967 © Richard Strange

A testament to the magical alchemy of unlikely collaboration, the Velvet Underground (whose name was, in reality, lifted from a salacious paperback by Michael Leigh about the sexual demi-monde of the 60s) brought together the most unlikely quintet ever to change the face and the sound of music. It reads like an idea for an unfinished joke… a Welshman, a New Yorker and a German fashion model walk into a bar….

John Cale, the son of a Carmarthen coal miner, a sexually-abused child who excelled on the viola, found himself in New York on a Leonard Bernstein music scholarship, furthering his studies with such radical musical luminaries as La Monte Young and Cornelius Cardew. He developed a taste for durational works, once performing an 18-hour piano marathon of Vexations by Erik Satie. A note on the score suggests Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif (Play this section 840 times). Cale obeyed. Working with other musical trailblazers such as John Cage, Terry Riley and Tony Conrad, Cale developed an interest in minimalism and musical drones, which he would take with him into his musical collaboration with his new friend, the Syracuse University graduate Lou Reed. 

In 1964 New Yorker Reed graduated with a BA cum laude in English from the university, having studied under the tutelage of the writer and friend Delmore Schwartz, whose influence on the young man would be lifelong. While Reed maintained his love of literature until his death in 2013, it was to music that he turned on graduation, trading his role as a conventional songwriter with bands with names like The Jades and The Primitives to a much more experimental approach to rock and roll, thanks to his friendship with Cale. Both “damaged” by their experiences in childhood, (Lou was diagnosed as "depressed, anxious, and socially unresponsive" and his parents were having difficulty coping. A psychologist recommended the boy receive electroconvulsive therapy, and his parents consented. Reed stated later in an interview that he was treated to dispel his feelings of homosexuality), the two young men bonded in music, and lived together on the Lower East Side and decided to form a band.  Lou invited his college friend Sterling Morrison to join them on guitar, and eventually a quartet was completed by drummer Moe Tucker, the sister of a college friend of Morrison and Reed.  With the line-up complete, the band’s sound and image coalesced. Reed’s whined, cynical, streetwise lyrics and deadpan vocals, Cale’s droning electric viola, Morrison’s feedback-drenched distorted guitar and Tucker’s untrained, primitive approach to drumming became the hallmarks of the band’s sound. They sounded like no other band on earth and soon came to the attention, as anything cool or groovy inevitably did, to the high priest of boho-chic Andy Warhol, who integrated them into his multi-media extravaganza The Exploding Plastic inevitable. Reed was in awe of Warhol, and referred to him as his mentor, incorporating the daily freak-show of drop outs, drug addicts, transvestites and assorted lowlife who frequented Warhol’s studio, The Factory, on East 47th Street, into the roll call of doomed characters who populated his songs. Warhol persuaded them to include the German fashion model Christa Päffgen, known as Nico, into the performance. Despite Reed’s initial reluctance, the two briefly became lovers and The Velvet Underground and Nico were born. You know the rest. 

Joe and I bought that album on American import in One Stop Records in London’s South Molton Street that summer. We weren’t disappointed. The songs were about drug dealers, sadomasochists, hipsters and heartbreakingly beautiful girls. Fifty-three years later, I could still sing you every single note.

As is often the way of things, that was the last summer that Joe and I were so close. He went on to study Fine Art at Newcastle University and, like Bryan Ferry a few years later, was taught by Richard Hamilton and Mark Lancaster. When he graduated, he returned south and eventually became an art master at Eton. Bryan Ferry subsequently formed Britain’s own Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, with Brian Eno, who famously said “Everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album went on to form a band”

I did.

Text © Richard Strange 2020

Doctors of Madness new album Dark Times is available from here.