Victor Bockris

While a lot of these Playboy interviews released to Kindle tend to suffer from mediocre interviewers (even when they’re well known) and not enough real depth, the first one is terrific. Alex Haley must have realized right away that Keith was a different kind of cat, and almost brutally honest, even introspective at times. Haley did the smartest thing he could do: he used questions as prompts, then got out of the way and let Keith be Keith. What emerges is a deeply flawed but very likable show more guy with more depth than some would expect, and with some surprising views on who should — or at least has a reason to — use drugs, and who shouldn’t. By allowing Keith to give full answers to sparse questions, even when he hits the switchback, Haley makes this short interview seem more than it is, because we get a real sense of Keith, who comes off as both a charming rogue and a surprisingly thoughtful and pragmatic guy. You also come away with an unflattering image of a legendary rock and roll icon (not one of the Stones) by Keith that’s inadvertent, rather than intentional; just Keith telling the truth. If Keith Richards wasn’t your favorite Stone before reading this, he might be afterward. Brief, but definitely worth a read, since it’s available on Kindle Unlimited and can be read for free. show less

10 pages in, I nearly gave up on this biography: vague and trite statements, random paragraphing of kitchen-sink facts. But 10% in, it became a more coherent and grounded book that told me much I didn't know about Richards and the Stones. Sadly, the final chapter updating to 2003 reverts to the hodge-podge of random opinions and semi-facts, with frequent typographic errors. Did the revised edition entirely bypass an editor and proofreader?

Way more fun to read than Naked Lunch or the Cut-Up Trilogy, but suffers from the same problem as all of Bockris's biographical works: inexactness. The awkwardly funny 1979 meeting between Burroughs and Lou Reed that was featured as an appendix in Transformer (Bockris's Reed bio) also turns up in this book...but here, it's supposed to have taken place during two separate dinners, and the wording is similar but not identical. What actually happened? Did a tape recording ever exist, or did show more Bockris piece the conversation together from memory? And were there two separate meetings or only one? We don't know. There's a photo of Burroughs and Reed together at the Bunker, so obviously they did meet, but the details are murky.

Lots of photos and interesting discussions--which Burroughs tended to monopolize--with musicians (Reed, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein), visual artists (Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat) and other writers (Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag). I'm sure that most of them are at least a fair approximation of reality; Bockris was, after all, a fan and faithful friend. However, if I were writing an academic paper or even a magazine article on Burroughs, I would avoid using any direct quotations from this book. show less

Burroughs, the eccentric, brilliant artist who burned the bridge with logic and wrote the classic Naked Lunch, has a court recorder in Victor Bockris. Bockris has collected into a cogent whole the man's most brilliant moments of conversation, thinking, and interview repartee. This fascinating material, gleaned from the fertile time at Burroughs's New York headquarters, the Bunker (which was located on the Bowery, three blocks from CBGB), encompasses the years 1974 to 1980, and also includes show more a 1991 Burroughs interview from Interview magazine. The Beats' devotion to subjective experience has left readers with a profound amount of objective material to analyze and debate. Choice public and private utterances, hallucinatory and prescient diatribes such as these, remain rich sources of literary history. As Americans we find the Beats' approach to life romantic, even heroic. Tearing the walls down in the name of freedom and spirituality strikes a particularly pilgrimesque chord. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker is a fascinating compendium of Burroughs-speak, so complete it can be considered a credo. show less