In Great Demon Kings, John Giorno (1936-2019) writes the following about being at a Ronettes and Shirelles concert with Andy Warhol at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre in 1963: "By chance, I was smack in the middle of something extraordinary." "Well, when weren't you?" readers may find themselves wondering while devouring Giorno's edifyingly dishy book.
Great Demon Kings charts Giorno's life well spent in the New York art scene, where as a poet, performer and impresario he had romantic relationships with a series of household-name artists. For a time, he was the constant companion and sort-of lover of then-ascendant Warhol ("I loved Andy, but I was not sexually attracted to him"). After Warhol lost interest in the poet, Giorno slept with Robert Rauschenberg's boyfriend, and then with Rauschenberg: "He was rich, famous, and beautiful. These were all good reasons to abandon myself to love and attachment." Again Giorno was spurned, after which he and William S. Burroughs turned what had begun as a non-tempestuous affair into something better: they would perform their work together for two decades.
For all his scene making, Giorno had a spiritual side, and his longtime fascination with Tibetan Buddhism culminates with a 1971 visit to India financed by the sale of a Warhol painting. Looking back on his life through a Buddhist lens, Giorno writes in his epilogue, "I have one more really important thing to do, and that is to die. I hope I do it right." That he did. A note at the front of Great Demon Kings says that Giorno completed the book the week before his death. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer