The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Collaboration Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Burroughs

It was a dark col­lab­o­ra­tion folks. There’s no deny­ing it. In Sep­tem­ber of 1992, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs entered a stu­dio in Lawrence, Kansas and record­ed a nar­ra­tion of “The “Priest” They Called Him,” a short sto­ry orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in his 1973 col­lec­tion The Exter­mi­na­tor. It’s a grim tale about hero­in, addic­tion, with­draw­al, and the “immac­u­late fix.” Two months lat­er, the read­ing was giv­en a sound­track when Kurt Cobain, then the front­man for Nir­vana, stepped into a Seat­tle stu­dio and gave Bur­rough’s read­ing a sound­track full of harsh, dis­so­nant gui­tar riffs that cap­tured the spir­it of the sto­ry. Mixed togeth­er  by E. J. Rose and James Grauer­holz, the col­lab­o­ra­tive record­ing was released as a lim­it­ed edi­tion vinyl pic­ture disc in 1993, and then again on CD and 10-inch vinyl.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nirvana’s Home Videos: An Inti­mate Look at the Band’s Life Away From the Spot­light (1988)

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His First Nov­el, Junky

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981