When photographer Marcia Resnick was laid to rest the other day, Victor Bockris was there as he he’d been on so many other occasions with his long-time friend and collaborator. On the scene in the early 70s, Bockris helped link the Beats to the punks and was a connector of the highest order, including arranging a famous meeting between William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger that Resnick photographed at the notorious Bunker on the Bowery where Burroughs lived. Resnick’s mock up of her opus Punks, Poets and Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys 1977-1982 sat unpublished until Bockris and Resnick reconnected after she had “cleaned up” and was ready to go back to work on her long-tabled project. Bockris is credited as the writer on the book, thanks to the work he put in back in the day as part of the creative process he formed working with Resnick.
I spoke to him on the phone on the occasion of the book’s publication in 2015 for an article I was writing for Paper magazine. The erudite author of a dozen non-fiction books, including biographies of Burroughs, Blondie, Warhol, Keith Richard and Lou Reed, is the foremost chronicler of that golden era, a life he lived as well as recorded.
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