Casual remarks like this, with Michael Stipe thrown in an afterthought, are one reason I like reading artist memoirs.

Burroughs was a key originator of the cut-up technique used by beat poets and musicians including Kim Gordon, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Thom Yorke, in which sentences or paragraphs are cut up and put together again. A friend of the Beatles, Burroughs also happens to be one of the people on the cover of Sgt. Peppers.

Cut up was the feature behind David Bowie’s Verbaliser app.