Comments on: The Secret Cut-Up

By: Michael Ramirez

Michael Ramirez — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 11:40:10 +0000

David, your essay turned out wonderful. I’m glad the materials I shared with you such as the Browbeat article turned out to be of good use! Keep up the great work.

By: Michael Ramirez

Michael Ramirez — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:44:14 +0000

David, I’m glad that the Browbeat article proved of good use for you – it was my pleasure to share that and those other MMM goodies with you. I think this is a really wonderful essay; I do think LR wanted the album to have some kind of effect on the listener aside from the typical intellectual kind. Rather, I think he wanted it to have a physical, mental, or psychic effect (even if psychosomatic – after all, if you feel it, isn’t it good as ‘real’?). Lou teased that idea in the liner notes by listing alleged negative contraindications; he continued to entertain the idea in interviews through the ’70s, and I never saw him back down from this. Somewhere I cannot remember for the life of me, I did recently hear/read Lou admitting that his claim re: Electric Rock Symphony was just phony stuff he told journalists to boost the seriousness of his work. I will retrace my steps and I’ll let you know where that admission is!
I briefly lived in Morocco following college and I became familiar with the music of the Joujouka musicians in that time – I said “Right on!” as I read your piece. This is really, really wonderful work David. I will dig for that aforementioned bit and I’ll email you when I find it.

By: Marc Myers

Marc Myers — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:24:02 +0000

MMM on 8-track… I was lucky enough to find a copy in a discount bin in a midwest department store in the early 80’s. You could just let it play…over and over….

By: Jim Pennington

Jim Pennington — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:51:16 +0000

It wasn’t Break Thru I worked on but, with Clive Graham of Paradigm Discs the releases of Curse Go Back and Ali’s Smile. Only the former was a ‘tape experiment’ recorded by Burroughs in the mid 60’s. As to what WSB experiments Lou Reed might have heard that could have influenced MMM, well I seriously doubt he heard any because they just did not circulate. If he were in Paris or London, Lou might have caught the Domaine Poetique performances and if he had spent any ‘quality time’ with Bill in Centre Street or Franklyn he might have been lucky enough (as I was in Duke Street*) to have had Bill play some back to him on his Wollensack… screechy scrambled tapes made from radio and/or tv open mic recordings. (* five minutes was all I was allowed when I asked what he was working on). I’ve not listened to MMM but from what David has said, I’d hazard the suggestion that playing with short-wave radio static and tuning noise was an influence… it certainly turns up in what Burroughs produced.

By: Matthew Levi Stevens

Matthew Levi Stevens — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:59:41 +0000

Toni, going to have to beg to differ with you there: the first-ever LP length release of recordings of William was indeed in 1965, the ‘Call Me Burroughs’ album, put out by The English Bookshop and consisting of Readings from ‘Naked Lunch’ and ‘Nova Express.’ There may have been subsequent “bootleg” releases on cassette, etc., but the next “official” release (i.e. sanctioned by William and William Burroughs Communications) was ‘Nothing Here Now But The Recordings’ on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records, in 1981. That indeed did contain many Cut-Ups, and many other tape experiments (indeed, the whole rationale for the release was to “make the tape-recorder experiments available for people to hear”), as well as Arab music taped from the radio, and some Joujouka.
A full-length album by the name of ‘Break Through In Grey Room’ – combining a selection of tape Cut-Up experiments with more conventional Readings, plus also snippets of Joujouka from the sessions recorded with Ornette Coleman – was released by Sub Rosa in 1986, and has remained available quite steadily ever since in both CD and LP format.

By: David Holzer

David Holzer — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:15:49 +0000

Thank you for your kind words Toni. I researched Break Through In Grey Room because I too thought that, if Lou had heard it, it could well have been an influence on Metal Machine Music. I didn’t include a reference to Break Through… in my piece because as far as I could establish, although the recordings date back to 1965, it wasn’t actually released until 1986. My conclusion was that, while Lou might have heard the experiments, he couldn’t have heard the album because it didn’t exist. I believe Jim Pennington was involved in the reissue of Break Through… so perhaps he could shed more light. Anyway, thanks again.

By: Toni

Toni — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:08:36 +0000

This is an excellent article but it misses one important touchstone: Burroughs released an album of cut ups in 1965 called Break Through In Grey Room. I’ve got a copy. It includes tape cut ups AND the music of Jajouka. I’d be willing to bet Lou had a copy as well.

By: Bob Farace

Bob Farace — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:13:53 +0000

I think it was 1984 when I first bought MMM at a used record store in Mystic, Connecticut; I would have been about 24 years old. I had read about MMM but had never heard any of it. I became entranced by it, and despite descriptions of it being nothing but noise, I was hearing layers of sound. I felt that most listeners never really listened and dismissed it much too quickly.

Interestingly, I found that I heard different things depending on the system I played it on. I had read Reed’s claim to Lester Bangs that he had sneaked bits of classical music into MMM. I dubbed the LP onto cassette so I could listen in my car, and once—and only once—I could swear I heard a sped-up snippet of Ravel’s Bolero. (Bangs wrote that Warhol had told Reed that “you don’t always have to tell the truth,” and apparently Lou took that advice to heart. Among his other claims described to Bangs was that he had somehow managed to include a forbidden frequency on the recording, a frequency that he had also played through the PA at his shows and which caused fights to break out.)

MMM might be my favorite album. I also own it on CD and 8-track, and gazed longingly at a quad copy I once found in a used record store, which I only resisted because not only was it priced at $100, I knew it would send me on a search for a quadraphonic sound system so that I could listen to it. I kick myself for not buying it, but only lightly.

Oh, and it’s also great for eradicating earworms. :)

By: Desmond Traynor

Desmond Traynor — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:10:46 +0000

Well done, David. How’s life?

By: Jim Pennington

Jim Pennington — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:23:20 +0000

Nice one David…. new (to me) intersects at work , particularly where the Kaimanos music comes out of that tiny courtyard in front of the Sidi’s mosque where the olive tree has those chains for the sick body and then ends up phased into the Brian Jones release to keen itself next into Lou Reed’s MMM.
I have just one small intervention; it’s to add another layer to the Moka Myth – in 2014 a small theatre group did a one-off show about esoteric Nodnol with one un-rehearsed sketch being a reading of the Moka Bar tape playback take-down. The actor, Daniel Dresner, delivering the Burroughs text said, when he finished, that he was a little freaked-out because it was his grand-parents who had had that cafe and he had never heard this story. A week or so later I got to talk to his mother who had often done Saturdays there and as far she re-called they closed down because the family had moved to Southend and the commute was just too much. They had done well enough out of the place and got good key money off the Maltese gang who took it over. It got given a new name: The Queens Snack Bar. She couldn’t remember what the cheese cake was like.