15 years later: Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs
| April 8th, 2009
On this day in 1994 Kurt Cobain’s body was found. Two years earlier, Cobain and William S. Burroughs had produced the “Priest” they called him, an audio collaboration with words by Burroughs and guitar by Cobain.
I’ve been sitting on this for a while, and now it’s time to show you RealityStudio’s “Dossier”, a page of unofficially collected excerpts of information relative to Burroughs and Cobain, and culled from various sources like books, documentaries and various interviews.
When the tour hit Rotterdam on the first of September [1991], it was almost with a nostalgic wistfulness that Kurt approached the last show. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d had on two weeks earlier — it was a bootlegged Sonic Youth t-shirt — which had gone unwashed, as had his jeans, the only pair of pants he owned. His luggage consisted of a tiny bag containing only a copy of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which he had found in a London bookstall.
– Charles R. Cross, Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
So, as we light our candles in memory, and as we give the “Priest” they called him another listen tonight, let our thoughts bend only toward the good that Kurt and Bill brought into our worlds and remember them, truly, as icons of American art.
