Nicholas F. Centino's Author-Curated Razabilly Playlist

A hybrid of country music and rhythm and blues, 1950s rockabilly is loud, raucous, and rebellious. Rockabilly music, recognized as one of the earliest iterations of what we now know as rock and roll, is responsible for launching the careers of musicians including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Now, decades after the genre’s midcentury heyday, a vibrant scene for rockabilly musicians and fans thrives in the Latinx metropolis of Los Angeles. While the genre is dominated by white people outside Los Angeles, within greater LA, Latinas, Latinos, and Latinx peoples make up the critical mass of the Rockabilly scene.

Despite the eponymous name, LA’s contemporary Rockabilly scene embraces a broad range of roots music, including not just rockabilly but also jump blues, western swing, and others. While all the tracks cited here are excellent, the following playlist is best thought of as an audio companion to Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene rather than a “best of” compilation. As such, each track was selected to provide particular insight into the scene and the sensibilities of its Latina/o/x participants.

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“Power of the 45,” pts. 1 and 2
Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys

There is no better way to kick off this playlist than with the ambassador of Southern California roots rock himself: Big Sandy. A fixture of the contemporary international Rockabilly scene for well over thirty years, Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys draw on a broad family tree of musical lineages. Featured on their 2006 album, Turntable Matinee, “Power of the 45” pays homage to those lineages and legacies as enduring capsules of joy and memory shared among friends and family. Pay close attention to the band and artist names dropped as the music fades out at the end of part 2, including, among others, rockabilly legends Sleepy Labeef and pioneers of the Chicano Eastside sound Thee Midniters. Stick around after that and you will be treated to a hidden acoustic rendition of their composition “Spanish Dagger.”

“The Hippy Hippy Shake”
Chan Romero

While Richie Valens is remembered as the quintessential Latino 1950s rocker, he was only one of several Latino rock and roll musicians on the national stage in those formative years. Chan Romero, a Mexican American teenager from Montana, was recruited by Bob Keane to be Richie’s heir after Valens tragically lost his life in 1959. With their growling guitars, relative obscurity, and the cultural resonance of the lead singer, songs by Romero, especially “My Little Ruby” (1960), are tailor made for the Latina/o/x Rockabilly scene of Los Angeles. Released in 1959, Romero’s signature tune, “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” would later be covered by the Beatles in their 1963 performance on the BBC.

“Dance in the Rain”
Luis and the Wildfires

Helmed by Reb Kennedy, Wild Records has been taking the international Rockabilly scene by storm since the 2000s, introducing a global audience to young Los Angeles musicians and performers, many of whom are Latina or Latino. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, Luis Arriaga brings an unbridled energy to his music, providing a sight to behold on stage and a sound to be enveloped by on tracks such as 2010’s “Dance in the Rain.” Speaking to the broad retro tastes embraced in the Los Angeles scene, the Arriaga turns to a hypnotic post-rockabilly sound to craft an organized chaos.

“La Plaga”
Los Teen Tops

As demographics continue to shift in contemporary Los Angeles, migrants bring legacies of popular music from their nations of origin. A cover of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “La Plaga” (1959), by Los Teens Tops, typifies an archive of 1950s rockabilly tunes interpreted by Latin American artists in the 1960s. This soundscape formed a familiar musical terrain that appealed to first- and second-generation immigrant youth from Mexico and Central America discovering the Rockabilly scene in the 1990s and 2000s.

“‘Til the Well Runs Dry”
Wynona Carr

With a big brash sound, “Till the Well Runs Dry” is a vocal- and horn-driven number that begs listeners to dance. Given decades of solidarity and interethnic cultural exchange, it is little surprise that African American jump blues from the 1940s and 1950s dominates the playlists of many DJs in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly scene. In the 1950s Carr was signed to Specialty Records, a Los Angeles–based record label that launched the careers of musical icons including Little Richard and Sam Cooke.

“Boy with the Angel Eyes”
Vicky Tafoya and The Big Beat

Drawing on the soulful legacy of Chicano lowrider oldies, “Boy with the Angel Eyes,” like other, similar songs, is a sharp departure from the hiccupping, guitar-driven sounds of rockabilly. Nevertheless, that cultural and emotional connection keeps the Inland Empire’s Vicky Tafoya ever-present in the Los Angeles scene. Often adorned in zoot suit slacks and crowned with an elaborate 1940s hairstyle, Tafoya draws on rich elements of Chicanx cultural memory in her performances, covering fan favorites such as “Angel Baby” alongside her original material.

“How Low Do You Feel?”
Ray Campi

Substitute teacher by day, rock star by night, Ray Campi enjoyed a career that represents the longevity of the rockabilly revival in Los Angeles. An original 1950s performer, Campi was rediscovered by Ronny Weiser (Rollin’ Rock Records) in the 1970s and continued to perform rockabilly until his passing in March 2021. With its foot-stomping call-and-response structure and taunting guitar riffs, “How Low Do You Feel” (1979) is a classic of the Rollin’ Rock era of Los Angeles rockabilly.

“Rosa Maria”
Moonlight Cruisers

Epitomizing the Latina/o/x transformation of the Los Angeles Rockabilly scene in the early 2000s, the Moonlight Cruisers, Pachuco Jose y Los Diamantes, and other such bands peppered their performances with straight-ahead cumbia tunes. Cumbia, a working-class musical genre originating in Columbia and expanding to other parts of Latin America, is simply the go-to party music for many Latinas/os in the Los Angeles area. Listen closely, however, and you will hear the distinctly rockabillyesque picking of Al Martinez behind the lyrical delivery.

“Parachute”
Thee Lakesiders

Representative of possible new and divergent directions that retro-Chicanx music can take in (post-) COVID-era Los Angeles, Thee Lakesiders’ “Parachute” (2018) is a melancholic rumination invoking intense feelings of loss and yearning. The duo’s pachuco/a aesthetics synchronize with their self-conscious interpellation of cultural memory and resistance in the postindustrial landscape of LA. Available as a 45 rpm disc, their latest work, “Can’t Fool Me Twice/Show Me Love,” was released in May 2021.

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Chat on the phone with Go-Go's bassist Kathy Valentine!

Want to chat on the phone with a member of The Go-Go’s? Kathy Valentine will be making phone calls to readers who purchase a copy of her book All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir!

Here’s how to get a call:

• Order a copy of All I Ever Wanted by Kathy Valentine from your local bookseller.
• Post proof of purchase on social media, tagging @UTexasPress with the hashtag #ChatWithKathy.
• Submit your information on bit.ly/AllIEverWantedTour. 

Share your book and submit your phone number through Monday, April 6!

Biographer Fred Goodman Remembers Lhasa de Sela

An artist in every sense of the word, Lhasa de Sela wowed audiences around the globe with her multilingual songs and spellbinding performances, mixing together everything from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, chanson française, and South American folk melodies. Tracing de Sela’s unconventional life and introducing her to a new generation, Fred Goodman's book Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the first biography of this sophisticated creative icon.

Lhasa de Sela was born on September 27, 1972, and on the anniversary of her birth, biographer Fred Goodman pays tribute to her and her legacy, revealing the ways her unorthodox life shaped her creativity. Following Fred Goodman's tribute is his curated playlist that serves as a musical introduction to America's first world music chanteuse [ Spotify | YouTube ]. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the latest book in our Music Matters series and publishes November 11, 2019.

Remembering Lhasa de Sela

By Fred Goodman

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The singular, otherworldly American singer Lhasa de Sela—who wrote and recorded in Spanish, French, and English and performed songs in nearly a dozen other languages—would have turned forty-seven on September 27. A spiritual and artistic pilgrim, she possessed an insatiable hunger for knowledge and left behind a musical legacy culled from her unique affinity for the romantic, mystic, and cerebral.

Beginning with her first album in 1997, Lhasa’s multilingual songs and her spellbinding shows made the singer-songwriter a sensation in Montreal and Europe. But even today, nearly ten years after her death, her work and individuality have yet to register with listeners in her homeland. Contradictory and complex, Lhasa was both a naïf and a melancholic, a pixie with an enduring apprehension of life’s hardships as well as its magic. In the course of a heartbreakingly brief career of just thirteen years and three albums, she worked her own musical turf, part Edith Piaf, part Tinkerbell.

She came by her artistic and spiritual wanderlust honestly. Raised in a family of bohemian nomads, Lhasa was born in an unused Catskills Mountains ski chalet in Big Indian, New York, twenty-five miles northwest of Woodstock. The attending hippie doctor, shirtless and in overalls, focused most of his medical supervision on splitting a gallon of Gallo burgundy with the expectant mother. Beautiful and healthy, the as-yet unnamed baby was wrapped in a blanket; with no cradle to hand, she slept in a dresser drawer.

Her peripatetic life began just a few days later, when the family was kicked out of Big Indian and set off for Mexico. But it wasn’t until five months later that her parents finally found a name they felt suited their new daughter. Having read Timothy Leary’s popular handbook on LSD, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the couple then tackled the original Buddhist tome that had inspired Leary. Along with providing a spiritual guide to navigating bardo, the state in which a Buddhist’s consciousness sits suspended between death and rebirth, the book told of the holy city of Lhasa, built high on the Tibetan plateau. The name means “place of the gods,” and somehow, those rarified heights and aspirations felt like an appropriate christening and wish.

“They were incapable of having a middle-class life,” Lhasa de Sela would say years later when asked about her mother and father. “Their parents were well-off, but they were the black sheep of their families. They took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and took incredible risks.”

Raised in a converted school bus crossing back and forth between Mexico and the United States, Lhasa and her three sisters were homeschooled and grew up without a telephone or television. And while their parents rejected the bulk of mainstream America’s material and social assumptions, they were fierce about instilling in their children an unquenchable curiosity, a deep devotion to spiritual and intellectual advancement, and the veneration of creativity.

“What was really passed to us in the way we were raised is that life is an interior search,” says her sister Miriam. “A lot of soul-searching and trying to be truthful to your intuition. And in a very vague way trying to trust something that’s invisible. I would have to say that was a huge part of Lhasa’s life: constant self-searching.” That spiritual and intellectual search would, in turn, illuminate her writings and performances.

An exhilarating childhood, it was also a life of uncertainty, isolated and lived without nets. The month that Lhasa turned eight, she was living in a broken-down bus behind an Exxon station in Elk Grove, California. Her father was picking melons by day and rebuilding a replacement engine salvaged from a junkyard by night; Lhasa and her sisters studied with their mother in the mornings and worked gathering tomatoes in the afternoons. On her birthday, there was a Raggedy Ann party in the bus; Lhasa’s mother made a doll, her sisters crafted a piñata, and friends provided a Raggedy Ann cake. As an adult, Lhasa would tag it her most memorable birthday.

Though lived close to the bone, that unorthodox upbringing proved a petri dish for nurturing a family of extraordinarily focused iconoclasts and autodidacts. Lhasa’s sisters would go on to careers as circus performers—a tightrope walker, a trapeze artist, and a gymnast—with Lhasa at one point taking a break from her own career to join their circus troupe in France. A loner at heart, Lhasa would always remain somewhat estranged from society at large; her unusual upbringing and the lessons imparted by her parents—particularly, that life is an adventure not to be missed—left her unable to fathom the lack of curiosity and discipline in so many of the people she met. “She kind of fit in everywhere but also nowhere,” says her half-brother, Mischa Karam.

At the age of twelve, Lhasa heard Billie Holiday for the first time and became obsessed with transforming herself into a singer. A move at nineteen to Montreal, with its thriving dual French and English music scenes, broadened her perspective. Lhasa’s unique ability to incorporate whatever came her way, forged in that unlikely, supercharged childhood, would lead her as a musician to make use of anything she deemed moving and meaningful, from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana, jazz and fado, chanson française and South American folk melodies. She had an eye for the authentic, an unfailing ear for the heartfelt.

Though she was likely this country’s first world music chanteuse, Lhasa nonetheless remains virtually unknown in the United States. In recent years, reggaetón and Spanglish pop hits such as “Despacito” have worked their way into America’s pop lexicon, but that wasn’t the case twenty-odd years ago, when Lhasa released her first album, the all-Spanish La Llorona. A musical séance calling up ghosts from a long-lost world of legend and romance, the album became a bestseller in Canada and made her a star in France and much of Europe but never registered here. Her trilingual second album, The Living Road, was one of the United Kingdom’s most critically lauded albums of 2003, and critics there acclaimed Lhasa “a multilingual global diva.” Her continuing American anonymity feels inexplicable. “The language really did not make any difference,” observed the Canadian music journalist Nicholas Jennings. “What she was putting forth transcended language, she was such an intense performer. She had all the depth of emotion of an actress or an opera singer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

As ambitious as she was artistic, Lhasa had set her eyes on conquering the United States. She didn’t imagine her time was running short. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, Lhasa nonetheless continued to plot an American tour while writing and recording her only all-English album, 2009’s Lhasa. But for Lhasa, America would prove a dream that has yet to come to fruition: she died at her home in Montreal on New Year’s Day, 2010, at the age of thirty-seven.

About the author: Fred Goodman is a former editor at Rolling Stone whose work has appeared in the New York Times and many magazines. His previous books include the award-winning The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce.

Spotify Playlist | YouTube Playlist

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Annotated Playlist by Casey Rae for 'William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll'

The most transgressive of the Beat writers, William S. Burroughs was also something of a clandestine agent in the development of rock ’n’ roll—a spectral figure who haunted the cultural underground and helped usher it into the mainstream. Naked Lunch, Junkie, and The Wild Boys remain fixtures of bohemian bookshelves the world over. From the Beatles to punk to today’s remix scene, Burroughs helped accelerate an evolution in sound that continues to reverberate across genres and eras.

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Burroughs’ biography has become as legendary as even his most celebrated novels. Here was a homosexual drug addict, born in the Gilded Age, who killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell and wrote infamous prose featuring orgasmic executions, shape-shifting aliens, and all manner of addicts, sadists, and creepy crawlies. But there exists a real person within the legend, a man who exhibited genuine kindness and hospitality to those who knew him, including many of the musicians appearing in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll.

It’s not hard to see how Burroughs’ writing—exploding with disquieting, even ghastly, imagery—might serve as fodder for music genres like punk, heavy metal, and industrial. To be sure, it is within these subcultures that the majority of present-day Burroughs acolytes are found. But his anti-establishment attitude and unconventional personal habits also found favor with such artists as Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and countless other musical innovators. This playlist captures only a sliver of the artists who were directly influenced by Burroughs; the descriptions below are a sliver of that sliver. To get the whole story, you’ll want to grab a copy of the book.

Find the full playlist on Spotify | YouTube

“East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”—Duke Ellington

William S. Burroughs was actually not much of a music aficionado. Well, that was his standard line, anyway—the reality is that he had many friendships with musicians and felt affinity for rock ’n’ roll’s anti-establishment attitude and shamanic potency. Nevertheless, his personal tastes were more in line with the songs he heard growing up, including this 1927 composition from Duke Ellington, which name-checks Burroughs’ childhood hometown. Ellington’s big band music is raucous and sly, with bold melodies and a streetwise swing. It’s not hard to picture Burroughs’ fictional stand-in, William Lee, skulking through urban streets as this tune blares from open tenement windows. “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” was covered by Steely Dan some four decades later, which is not their only connection to Burroughs—the band members were huge fans who took their name from a state-of-the-art dildo described in Naked Lunch.

“Tombstone Blues”—Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan became a Burroughs obsessive when he first got his hands on a copy of Naked Lunch as a young man. The author’s quicksilver abstractions opened up new creative possibilities for Dylan, whose work only became more abstract, caustic, and surreal. “Hey, you dig something like cut-ups? I mean, like William Burroughs?” Dylan asked interviewer Paul J. Robbins in a conversation published in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1965. D. A. Pennebaker’s early Dylan biopic Don’t Look Back shows the songwriter giving a how-to on cut-ups, which Dylan claimed he didn’t actually use for lyrics due to the need to rhyme. That’s debatable, but we do know that Dylan sought out Burroughs for a face-to-face encounter in a small café in Manhattan’s East Village in 1965—a meeting recounted in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll. Not long after, Dylan aggravated the folk music cognoscenti with an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. That same year saw the groundbreaking album Highway 61 Revisited, which contains the song “Tombstone Blues.” Another Burroughs fan, Iggy Pop, spotted what might be a reference to Burroughs: “I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill / I would set him in chains at the top of the hill / Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille / He could die happily ever after.”

“Eleanor Rigby”—The Beatles, Revolver

In 1966, Burroughs was 52 years old and living in Great Britain. It’s hard to picture this taciturn relic of the jazz age serving as inspiration to the psychedelic minstrels of the mid-sixties. And yet the fabbest of the fab, the Beatles, put Burroughs on the cover of their kaleidoscopic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His wan visage appears alongside several dozen luminaries, including Mae West, Aleister Crowley, Lenny Bruce, Aldous Huxley, and Carl Jung, to name a few. Burroughs’ experiments with tape manipulation were inspiring to Paul McCartney, who set the author up with a makeshift studio in a flat owned by Ringo Starr. Burroughs and McCartney would chat about computers making the music of tomorrow, as the future Knight of the Realm listened to Burroughs’ sonic experiments such as the 20-minute “K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens.” As McCartney told Q Magazine in 1986, “I used to sit in a basement at Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello.” Burroughs even got to witness McCartney composing “Eleanor Rigby.” Of the Beatle, Burroughs later said, “I could see he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and prepossessing. Nice looking young man, fairly hardworking.”

“Casino Boogie”—The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street

Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards—the latter of whom was persuaded by Burroughs to try the infamous “apomorphine cure” for heroin addiction—used the cut-up method on choice Stones lyrics, including “Casino Boogie” from the 1972 album Exile on Main Street. “It's in the style of William Burroughs,” Jagger explained to Uncut in 2010. “We just wrote phrases on bits of paper and cut them up. This is the conceit.” And reflecting on the 1983 single “Undercover of the Night,” Jagger said, “I'm not saying I nicked it, but this song was heavily influenced by William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, a freewheeling novel about political and sexual repression.” Burroughs was hot and cold on the Stones, but he did attend the band’s tax exile farewell party in 1971. “I remember Keith Richards talking to me and I couldn’t understand one word he said,” Burroughs recalled. He did reserve some praise for Jagger, however. “I had admired his work, what I’d heard of it, and I also admired him because of the pressure he was under,” Burroughs said. “There’s something about Mick that arouses great antagonism in a certain kind of person, the cabdriver-hardhat-redneck strata throughout the world, and to be able to stand up to that and be able to maintain his equilibrium and cool, as he certainly has, is quite something.” At one point in the 1970s, Jagger was even considered for the lead in a film adaptation of Naked Lunch, but the project never got off the ground (the David Cronenberg-directed version arrived in 1991 with Paul Weller as Burroughs stand-in William Lee).

“Take Me With You, My Darling, Take Me With You”—The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka

Burroughs was a longtime appreciator of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a group of Sufi musicians based in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco. Burroughs initially encountered the Master Musicians while living as an ex-pat in Tangier in the 1950s, and promoted their music for the rest of his life. In 1968, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones surreptitiously recorded the Master Musicians while on a trip to Morocco. Jones tinkered with the tapes in the studio right up to his death in 1969, experimenting with effects, splicing audio, and playing sections in reverse. Even though the Stones had already booted Jones out of the band, they released Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka on their own vanity label in 1971. Liner notes were provided by Burroughs, who described the record as “the primordial sounds of a 4,000-year-old rock 'n' roll band.” The music of the Master Musicians is intense and entrancing, with piercing tones from a reed instrument called the rhaita and the relentless thrum of hand drums. This is the sound of Burroughs’ fabled Interzone—a treacherously liminal locale from Naked Lunch.

“Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”—David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Burroughs’ influence on David Bowie was profound and enduring—so much so that an entire chapter of William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll is devoted to the topic. Bowie was a dyed-in-the-wool Burroughs fan who embraced the author’s outré prose and creative methods. “That guy messed me up when I first started reading him in the late ’60s, and I've never gotten over it,” he recalled. Throughout his career, Bowie employed Burroughs’ cut-up method in his lyrical compositions. “It seems that it would predict things about the future, or tell me a lot about the past,” he remarked in 1974. “I suppose it’s a kind of Western tarot.” Bowie was particularly fascinated by Burroughs’ lifestyle. A drug user and homosexual at a time when society treated both activities with outright enmity, Burroughs spent much of his life dodging authorities and rankling the establishment on multiple continents. Bowie’s identikit aesthetic was informed by Naked Lunch, which boasts a coterie of characters who morph and evolve with little adherence to narrative logic. He looked to The Wild Boys for his Ziggy Stardust persona, which also borrowed from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. “They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs with their Bowie knives,” the singer said. Bowie was also interested in Burroughs’ occult outlook, where random chance is used to uncover and amplify subconscious intent. The two artists first met in 1975—their conversation becoming the basis of an article in Rolling Stone—and Bowie continued to revere the author until his own passing in 2016.

“Heroin”—The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico

Burroughs was an essential part of Lou Reed’s creative makeup. A shrewdly insightful writer, Reed rendered potent truths about the human condition in terse, economical prose. Like Burroughs, Reed chronicled desperate characters and squalid situations while refraining from moral imposition. The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” captures the anxiety of the addict, and is a direct descendant of Burroughs’ Junkie. Even more obvious is “Heroin,” a micro-symphony of self-destruction: I have made the big decision / I'm gonna try to nullify my life / 'Cause when the blood begins to flow / When it shoots up the dropper's neck / When I'm closing in on death / You can’t help me now, Reed mumble-sings as drummer Maureen Tucker mimics an accelerating heartbeat. Reed said Burroughs was “the person who broke the door down . . . he alone had the energy to explore the interior psyche without a filter.” He claimed Burroughs “changed my vision of what you could write about, how you could write,” which makes perfect sense to anyone who has heard his work with the Velvets and solo. Burroughs and Reed had mutual friends but the two didn’t actually meet face-to-face until 1979. By then, Burroughs had become a fixture in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There, in his windowless, three-room apartment at 222 Bowery, he held court among the musicians, intellectuals, writers, and junkies littering the scene like discarded show posters strewn across the sidewalk of nearby nightclub CBGBs. The Reed-Burroughs confab—at turns hilarious and provocative—is covered in detail in William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll.

“Land: Horses”—Patti Smith, Horses (Legacy Edition)

Patti Smith was not only influenced creatively by Burroughs, she was also part of his inner circle and remained a close friend until the author’s death in 1997. Though her music wasn’t precisely punk, Smith heralded the New York scene in the early-to-mid-1970s. Her fearless performances helped restore rock’s primal drive, which had been diluted by musicians more concerned with instrumental virtuosity than connecting with audiences. Smith, too, was obsessed with Burroughs. “He's a hard guy to get into bed, that's why I like him,” she said. She initially encountered Burroughs as a visitor to the infamous Chelsea Hotel, where the older writer would stay while in town. “Burroughs showed me a whole series of new tunnels to fall through,” she said. “He was so neat. He would walk around in this big black cashmere overcoat and this old hat. So of course, Patti gets an old black hat and coat, and we would walk around the Chelsea looking like that.” Smith would go on to sprinkle Burroughs references in her work, including “Land: Horses,” which features a character named Johnny on loan from The Wild Boys. Over the years, Smith and Burroughs developed an affectionate relationship. “I had the biggest crush on William,” she said. “Really, a big one. And I used to even daydream about, you know, he would fall in love with me and we'd get married.” Smith also keenly observed Burroughs’ stealth influence on music and culture. “He’s another Bible . . . so many things come from him,” she said.

“Six Six Sixties”—Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Funk Greats

Formed in 1975, Throbbing Gristle terrorized British society with an incendiary mix of abrasive sound and provocative theatrics. Members Genesis P-Orridge, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Chris Carter invented an entirely new genre—industrial music—and their modus operandi owed everything to Burroughs. Using tape recorders to play back abrasive noise alongside electric instruments in intensely jarring performances, the band blended the primal energy of punk with occult ideas. Throbbing Gristle borrowed imagery from humanity’s history of mass violence and donned paramilitary outfits embossed with a menacing symbol of their own invention. Burroughs took a shine to the group, going as far as to write a letter of support for a cultural grant and offering further assistance when P-Orridge faced charges for sending postcards that UK authorities deemed obscene. “He helped us when we got all the legal action against us, with a lot of recommendations and advice, of what to do and what not to do, and to be polite, and not try and turn it onto a big battle,” P-Orridge said. Few have done more to advance Burroughs’ magical mindset than P-Orridge, who maintains a worldview directly imparted by the author.

“The Priest They Called Him”—Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs

“Heart-Shaped Box”—Nirvana, In Utero

“There's something wrong with that boy,” Burroughs said following a meeting with Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain in 1993. “He frowns for no good reason.” Cobain initially discovered Burroughs as a teenager, furtively reading dog-eared library copies of Naked Lunch and Junkie in between ditching class and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t just a lifestyle crush; he was also taken by Burroughs’ pioneering work with cut-ups. In an interview shortly after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” catapulted Nirvana into the mainstream, Cobain referred to Burroughs as his favorite author and called the cut-up approach “revolutionary.” On the 1991 European tour for Nevermind, Cobain’s sole piece of luggage was a small bag containing Naked Lunch, which he had recently rediscovered at a used bookshop in London. Cobain even released a record with the author in 1991. “The Priest They Called Him” features Cobain’s junk-sick guitar weaving webs of feedback around Burroughs’ laconic croak to arresting affect. Not long after, Cobain asked Burroughs to appear as a crucifixion victim in the video for “Heart-Shaped Box.” Burroughs declined the offer—he would not be depicted as dying on film—but he did give Cobain a standing invite to visit him at his home in Lawrence, Kansas. Nirvana tour manager Alex MacLeod recalled a visit that took place in 1993: “William made him feel at ease very quickly. There was definitely a connection on an artistic level. I think William saw a lot more in him than Kurt even realized.” Burroughs was fond enough of Cobain to send him original artwork on his birthday; sadly, this did not become tradition, as the younger artist killed himself in 1994.

Casey Rae is the director of music licensing for SiriusXM and a longtime music critic whose work has been featured in a wide array of publications. His commentary on technology’s impact on creators has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Billboard, and other media outlets. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a course developer for Berklee Online, Rae is also a musician and played with several bands in the 1990s.

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Hanif Abdurraqib's 'Go Ahead in the Rain' at Winter Institute

Every year, the American Booksellers Association gathers independent booksellers together for professional development and author appearances at their Winter Institute meeting. This year's Winter Institute was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and hosted authors Reshma Saujani, Margaret Atwood, and our own author—poet, essayist, and music expert Hanif Abdurraqib. Hanif's delivered his keynote to a packed auditorium, reading passages from his latest book Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest and emphasizing how bookstores had shaped his life as a reader and a writer. The audience connected deeply to Hanif's incredible, writerly voice and his deep love for bookstores. Read Robert Gray's summary of the keynote address for Shelf Awareness.

Before the keynote, we scoped out the auditorium. We'll be honest; everyone involved was a little nervous about how many people would show up to see Hanif. The room seemed huge, and the podium onstage quite formal—a far cry from the ice cream parlors and cozy, local bookstores Hanif's voice has graced at his readings in the past.

As booksellers started to stream into the auditorium, Hanif began to read Go Ahead in the Rain passages on stage, from behind the podium. At some point, attendance swelled and Hanif left the stage to read closer to the audience. He welcomed those who wished to come forward and sit at his feet, which were characteristically adorned in the freshest kicks.

The response on social media was overwhelming. In advance of Go Ahead in the Rain's publication date next Friday, February 1st, we gathered a selection of the social media love for Hanif and for his book to celebrate a truly masterful piece of music writing. A special thanks to the American Booksellers Association for inviting Hanif to give a keynote, which is a huge platform for a university press author. Most of all, though, our deepest gratitude to all the booksellers who engaged with Hanif and his book during Winter Institute this year. The University of Texas Press is honored to share Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest with communities of readers across the country and around the world.

From Unabridged Bookstore and 57th Street Books | Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, Deep Vellum Books in Dallas, the American Booksellers Association,  Two Cats Communications, and Duende District Bookstore

Watch these Instagram stories on our Instagram page. Find the #Wi14 Highlights!

And finally, a sampling of the Twitter love:

Follow Hanif Abdurraqib on social media for dispatches from his upcoming appearances (Facebook | Twitter | Instagram). Follow the University of Texas Press on social media for more books and author news!

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Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang Join American Music Series Editorial Team

Authors and music critics Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang have joined David Menconi of the Raleigh News & Observer on the editorial team of the American Music series published by the University of Texas Press.

“We are at a particularly ripe time within music culture to interrogate what is American music; we're overdue for an expansion of the canon,” says Hopper.

“There’s such great potential to publish more books about pop music that are smart and

cogent but written for a broad audience,” Wang added. “It’s a thrill to play a role in helping shepherd some of those projects.”

The American Music series, which began in 2012, publishes cultural histories, essay

collections, critical artist biographies, memoirs, and other forms of inventive storytelling that expand readers’ perceptions of music.

“There are so many incredible music journalists, critics, poets, academics, amateurs, and musicians writing right now whose perspectives and curiosities can serve to enlighten our own,” says Hopper. “My hope is that in this new phase of the series we can publish work informed by both fandom and scholarship, delve into regional scenes, and raise up marginalized sounds and ideas, contemporary and historic.”

Highlights from the series include Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chestnutt, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist for the American Booksellers Association 2016 Book of the Year, and John Prine: In Spite of Himself, praised by Publishers Weekly as “an admiring portrait of an often restless though always canny songwriter.”

The newest release, Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives, edited by Holly Gleason, is a collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers on the female country artists who have inspired them, including Brenda Lee, June Carter Cash, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Taylor Swift.

As the series has expanded beyond Americana and roots music, the editors have made it a priority to seek out manuscripts from diverse voices across genres.

“I’d like to see more books focused on particular music scenes, both historic and contemporary,” says Wang. “I like thinking about how music roots itself in neighborhoods and communities and the rich relationships that flow out of that.”

More info

Adds Hopper, “We need more books by black and brown women. We need more books on music by trans and queer pioneers. We need more books about hip hop. We need more books about Latinx artists shaping American music. We need women telling their own stories. We need books to explain how the AIDS crisis impacted American music making. And we need books that get at the histories that are unGoogleable, before they ebb away entirely.”

Upcoming books in the series include A Spy in the House of Loud, a memoir from Chris Stamey, founding member of the dB’s, that will be available next April; and, tentatively slated for 2019, a history of women in punk by journalist, musician, and “Punk Professor” Vivien Goldman, and a critical biography of A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

More information about the series, forthcoming books, and submissions can be found at: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/series/american-music-series.

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Jessica Hopper is a Chicago-based writer and producer. She was previously the executive editor of MTV News, Senior Editor at Pitchfork, and Music Editor at Rookie. Her essays have appeared in Best Music Writing for 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011. Hopper was the longtime music consultant for This American Life. She is the author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking (2009), The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (2015) and the forthcoming Night Moves (2018).

David Menconi is a music critic and arts reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has also written three books, two of them (2012's Ryan Adams: Losering, A Story of Whiskeytown and Ray Benson's 2015 memoir Comin' Right at Ya) published by University of Texas Press.

Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, and author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes regularly on music and arts, including for KCET’s Artbound, NPR, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the creator of an audioblog, Soul Sides, and host of a weekly podcast, Heat Rocks.

The American Music series is written for pop music enthusiasts of all stripes, and books in this series treat important, enduring, and perhaps under-recognized aspects of our most dynamic art form. Any definition of American music must encompass the full diversity of people, genres, and forces that have shaped it, and to that end the series publishes cultural histories, essay collections, critical artist biographies, and memoirs, as well as other forms of inventive storytelling.

Additional Information:

Cameron M. Ludwick | Senior Publicist | cludwick@utpress.utexas.edu | T: 512.232.7633

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How Austin, Texas, Became the Live Music Capital of the World

Before Austin, Texas, was the "Live Music Capital of the World," a rollicking music hall run by a bunch of hippies threw open the doors for fans to enjoy a new blend of country music and rock. Over its ten-year lifespan, the Armadillo World Headquarters hosted thousands of high-profile musicians—Willie Nelson, Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, Taj Mahal, AC/DC, Charlie Daniels, the Ramones, Roy Buchanan, and Bette Midler, to name a random few. The Armadillo helped define the Austin lifestyle, culture, and identity, setting the stage for successors such as the SXSW music festival, PBS’s Austin City Limits, and the ACL festival, which have made Austin an international destination for music fans.

In the newest UT Press podcast, Armadillo co-founder Eddie Wilson shares stories from behind-the-scenes of the beloved temple of "Redneck Rock." Below we've transcribed some of the best bits from the interview, but be sure to tune in and turn on to the whole thang!




We ask Eddie Wilson how he discovered the building that eventually came to house the Armadillo World Headquarters:

UT Press: You did some urban parkour to find the building, right?

Eddie Wilson: Well, the bathroom was broken at the Cactus Club, and so there wasn't anything to do but go out back. And there was this giant wall looming up with broken windows way up top. It was 25 feet tall at least, and so, I knew that there had to be a giant room on the other side of a construction like that. I went around the building and managed to pick a flimsy lock--I watched James Garner a lot--but, uh, I was awestruck. I pulled my car in it, reached in and flipped on the lights, and almost had a heart attack. I think I turned them off as quick as I could. And it was just this huge room. And then we made it bigger by tearing out all of the rooms that were inside of that room.

UTP: And it had a stage?

EW: It had a concrete riser. If I had known at the time that Elvis had played on it, I probably would have kept it like it was. But he played there in '55.

Co-authors Eddie Wilson and Jessie Sublet discuss one of Frank Zappa's visits to the Armadillo World Headquarters and his introduction to local musician Blind George:

EW: Zappa was such a professional, he wanted a three-hour rehearsal--the contract read three-hour rehearsal, an hour off for supper, and then an hour for, uh...

Jessie Sublet: Sound check?

EW: Yeah, just the sound check, I guess it was. Anyway, his equipment got there about a half-hour before the show was supposed to start. We waited and waited and waited all day long. It was really nerve-wracking. And when it got there, he got to see the crew, who were at their very best; everybody just hustling and setting up, building that mountain of speakers that he was hauling and hauling. And, uh, he got a seventeen-minute sound check, and I figured he was going to keep on going until he was satisfied. Well, he got seventeen minutes and his road manager Marty Perellis ran his finger across his throat, and Zappa stopped immediately. And we opened the doors and they just came flooding in. Zappa, he uttered some excuse for a sound check, so I tried to disarm him a little bit with my Blind George story:

We had an entertainer in town named Blind George McClain, who was not just blind but close to deaf and crippled and twisted. He had a little board under his feet on the piano that he would stomp back and forth on for his rhythm. We had just found a videotape of him doing at least about 20 verses of "Tennessee Stud" at an outdoor benefit.

JS: Cool!

EW: Really good black and white [video]

JS: He had good hair though, didn't he?

EW: (Laughs.) Oh ho, yeah. Yeah, that was a great--I remember he did the nastiest version I've heard of "Cherry Pie."
. . .

So, Zappa was in a bad mood, it seemed to me, and I hadn't spoken to him yet. . . . "Let me try and disarm you," I thought. "Would you like to meet your opening act? He's deaf, dumb, and cripple." He said, "What does he do?" I said, "He plays the piano, stomps on a board, and sings Ray Charles and, uh, George Jones." And he said, "I want to meet him right now."

We went up the stairs and over to the office, and George was kind of crushed down in his terrible, cripple sort of way with black sockets, you know, just dark dark caverns where his eyes would have been. And I whispered to Zappa as we approached him. I said, "Remember he's kind of deaf." And [Zappa] was so stunned when he saw him that he just kind of mumbled. And George said, "Huh?" And he said (louder), "Did you hear our sound check?" George bellowed back, "Yeah, you were too damn loud!"

Jason Mellard, author of Progressive Country: How the 1970's Transformed the Texan in popular Culture (2013), talks to Eddie Wilson about the fateful Thanksgiving Day in 1972, when Jerry Garcia decided to invite Leon Russell to jam at the Armadillo World Headquarters:

EW: Jerry Garcia wanted to go on stage at the free jam that we had on Thanksgiving Day in 1972. . . The only reason that I was pushing was because we had no advertising; we had nothing to let anybody know that we were going to be open on Thanksgiving Day. And I did one of those--one call to the radio station --and I couldn't say who because I didn't know who was going to show. But as Garcia was leaving the auditorium, Palmer, the night before, after we fed him at the Armadillo, Jim Franklin and Leon Russell were coming in the back door, comin' down from Tulsa because Leon wanted to meet Willie Nelson.

And so Jerry Garcia looked up and saw Leon Russell and said, "Why don't you come over and jam tomorrow at the Armadillo?" He hadn't wanted to tell me what time because he had committed to doing it around the meal--that was going to be too much detail, and he was above detail. And when Leon [asked] what time, Garcia kind of looked at me and gritted his teeth, and I said, "How about 3 o'clock?" They agreed, 3 o'clock.

So, of course, at 3 o'clock the next day, I was just a nervous wreck. Who's going to really show? Garcia was there early and then Leon finally showed. So okay, guys, you know, let's do it. Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) was on bass and a lot of the best local pickers were all--

Jason Mellard: Yeah, I think, was it Furman, formally of the Elevators, was there?

EW: Benny Furman, he had a fiddle there; yes, he did.

JM: Sweet Mary Egan (Greezy Wheels)?

EW: Yeah, yeah. Hank Alrich (Tiger Balm).

JM: Jerry Barnett (Shiva's Headband), I think also?

EW: He did a lot of drumming. And, uh, Jim Finney also played some drums. But, Garcia said, "Let's just wait until Doug [Sahm] gets here, he needs to be the bandleader for this thing. He knows at least 1,000 songs." And Leon said, you know, not long before he died, he came through town and we had a good visit; and he actually said to the audience in our beer garden, he said, "I played Armadillo World Headquarters with the Grateful Dead, and it was the worst performance of my career.
(Laughter)

EW: He's not a jam guy! He's an arranger. And, you know, it just wasn't his particular bag. Oh, but you couldn't have wanted more.

Click here for more information on Armadillo World Headquarters: A Memoir.

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