10/21/2022
ON THIS DAY
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain visited author William S Burroughs at his home in Lawrence Kansas on October 20th, 1993.
Burroughs a visual artist and author had long been a hero of Cobain’s.
Charles Cross wrote in his Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven:
“During this first week of the (In Utero) tour, Alex MacLeod (Nirvana's tour manager) drove Kurt to Lawrence, Kansas, to meet William S. Burroughs. The previous year Kurt had produced a single with Burroughs titled The “Priest” They Called Him, on T/K Records, but they’d accomplished the recording by sending tapes back and forth. “Meeting William was a real big deal for him,” MacLeod remembered.
“It was something he never thought would happen.” They chatted for several hours, but Burroughs later claimed the subject of drugs didn’t come up. As Kurt drove away, Burroughs remarked to his assistant. “There’s something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason.”
Carrie Borzillo wrote in her book Nirvana: The Day-By-Day Chronicle:
Burroughs describes the meeting… “I waited and Kurt got out with another man. Cobain was very shy, very polite, and obviously enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t awestruck at meeting him. There was something about him, fragile and engagingly lost. He smoked ci******es but didn’t drink. There were no drugs. I never showed him my gun collection.” The two exchanged presents — Burroughs gave him a painting, while Cobain gave him a Leadbelly biography that he had signed. Kurt and music video director Kevin Kerslake originally wanted Burroughs to appear in the video for “In Bloom.”
The following night, October 21st 1993, Nirvana played a capacity show to rabid fans at the Memorial Hall, Kansas City.
Meanwhile, after Kurt's death in April 1994, William Burroughs sat poring over the lyric sheet of In Utero. There was surely poignancy in the sight of the eighty-year-old author, himself no stranger to tragedy, scouring Cobain’s songs for clues to his su***de. In the event he found only the “general despair” he had already noted during their one meeting.
“The thing I remember about him is the deathly grey complexion of his cheeks. It wasn’t an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.”