Randy “Biscuit” Turner’s cover art for the Micronotz’ third LP, The Beast That Devoured Itself
 
Last year, I posted about the Micronotz (originally named “The Mortal Micronotz”), a punk band from Lawrence, Kansas that released four albums and a live EP between 1982 and 1986, all out of print for yonks. Hoboken’s Bar/None Records has just digitally reissued the band’s entire catalog, and to celebrate, we’ve got previously unseen video of the Micronotz playing at Minneapolis’ First Avenue 31 years ago, to the day!

As you may know, William S. Burroughs was a punk sympathizer. He sent the Sex Pistols a telegram as a gesture of solidarity in ‘77, and when he moved to Lawrence in ‘81, he gave the local teenage punk band a song lyric he’d written. This nursery rhyme about a woman eating her children became “Old Lady Sloan,” a thrash tune on the debut The Mortal Micronotz. Years later, the author contributed to a Micronotz tribute album, doing his own interpretation of “Old Lady Sloan.”
 

 
The Micronotz’ early records have the anger and momentum of punk, and the melodies and chords are continuous with garage rock tradition (i.e., not Flipper). They played with everybody, or everybody who came reasonably close to Lawrence: X, REM, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, Suicidal Tendencies, TSOL, et al. They even opened for SPK at the mindhurting Lawrence show captured on The Last Attempt at Paradise. American Hardcore (the book) likens them to the ‘Mats:

TAD KEPLEY (Anarchist activist): The Micronotz from Lawrence were one of the original American Hardcore bands. They started playing in 1980, and broke up in 1986 after an album on Homestead. They never got the recognition they deserved. They were along the lines of the Replacements — and were equally as popular in the Midwest. They played Minneapolis all the time at First Ave/Seventh Street Entry, and they played Oz in Chicago. The first Micronotz record and EP could easily fall under Hardcore — the other bands back then certainly considered them to be Hardcore.

 
More Micronotz after the jump…

The Mortal Micronotz’ debut LP
 
In 1981, when William S. Burroughs moved there, Lawrence, Kansas was home to a punk band called the Mortal Micronotz. Bill Rich, owner of Lawrence’s Fresh Sounds label and editor of Talk Talk magazine, was friendly with the author—according to Barry Miles’ Call Me Burroughs, Rich knew Burroughs’ longtime companion and editor James Grauerholz from the latter’s college days in Lawrence—and he arranged a meeting at the band’s request. Burroughs liked them well enough to give them a song lyric about paedophagy, “Old Lady Sloan,” which became a 90-second blast of disgust on the Mortal Micronotz’ eponymous debut. A few lines:

Old lady Sloan, she likes her chow
Burping up her baby like a happy old sow
Old lady Sloan, chewin’ on a bone
Chewin’ on the bones of her child
Old lady Sloan, she went hog wild
Old lady Sloan, she butchered her child
She stuffed him with apples, mincemeat and fig
and she roasted him in her ashpit like a fat little pig

 

A ghostly image of Burroughs and the Mortal Micronotz from the LP’s lyric sheet
 
A later lineup of the Micronotz discussed the association with Burroughs in a 1985 interview with Memphis station WLYX:

STEVE EDDY: We got hooked up with him, and he wrote some lyrics for one of our songs on the first record that we put out, a song called “Old Lady Sloan.” And it’s just about a fat old lady who eats her children. And we had some lyrics, and when Dean, our old singer, found out that Bill was an acquaintance—Bill Rich, our record producer, was an acquaintance of William Burroughs, he saw it as a good opportunity to find out what could be done in that area.

JOHN HARPER: Aside from that, the guy who produced our first album was James Grauerholz, who’s William Burroughs’ personal manager, so that kinda helped out.

The Mortal Micronotz’ debut album is long gone—you’ll need to buy a used copy or download a needle drop if you want to hear the original one-and-a-half-minute punk thrash version of “Old Lady Sloan”—but, remarkably, Burroughs recorded the song himself for 1995’s The Mortal Micronotz Tribute! The quality of moral outrage is missing from Burroughs and the Eudoras’ laid-back interpretation of the number, which makes use of a vibraphone; as one imagines Ms. Sloan lingered over her roasted child, they take their sweet time savoring WSB’s words and the Micronotz’ chords. Bon appétit!
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘punk’ album: ‘YOU’VE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR MINDS!!’
‘Birdbrain’: Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist punk single, 1981