by Rufus Lodge
As nobody was buying a magazine called Fuck You unless they already had a taste for the avant-garde, there were no complaints, no prosecutions. Thus emboldened, Sanders felt free to publish transcriptions of two taped encounters between Allen Ginsberg and his lover (and fellow poet) Peter Orlovsky: the first describing precisely what was said and groaned when Peter gave Allen a hand-job, the second leaving Allen to do the work by himself. Michael McClure, in an issue which Sanders dedicated provocatively to ‘the flaming boy cock and the twelve-year-old snatch’, contributed a ‘Fuck Essay’ which instructed the readers to ‘say FUCK, say CUNT, say SHIT’ (they probably already were) and described how he had used the word ‘fuck’ as ‘a mantra to break a barrier that kept me from straight speech’.
Having already shattered all respectable standards of decency, Sanders could do nothing more than to widen the scope of his authorship, and his readership, by inviting more famous names to join the fun. (Literary scholars should note that Norman Mailer provided a poem entitled ‘The Executioner’s Song’ a full fourteen years before he used the same title for his Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘novel’ about the murderer Gary Gilmore.) By the summer of 1965, when Sanders was boasting that his was ‘the magazine of butt-fucking, revulsed freaks, dope dealers and group grope’, and inviting his audience to sign up for a ‘FUCK-IN … at a romantic screwable public location’, to protest against the Vietnam War, his Fuck You antics were starting to seem no more outrageous than any of the other outlaws and misfits who were gathering under the loose heading of ‘the underground’.
Yet a man who rented a post office box in the name of Fuck You could not be allowed to continue his unrestrained adventures indefinitely. At the dawn of 1966, his Peace Eye store was busted by the police, and numerous items confiscated. Among them was the 100 per cent non-obscene film footage Sanders had taken of his brother’s wedding, and his stock of Fuck You back issues. Most men in his situation would have negotiated a plea bargain and accepted a fine, but Sanders enlisted the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union and fought his charges in a succession of courts, until he was eventually acquitted on all counts in 1968. But the legal hassles – plus his burgeoning career as a rock star (see elsewhere in this book) – forced him to close Fuck You forever.
We leave the Fuck You Press, and its ‘three years of quality printing and aggressive innocence in the pornography industry’, with a brief glimpse of one of Sanders’s most prized publications. In 1965, Fuck You issued a pamphlet enticingly titled Bugger! An Anthology of Buttockry. It was, Sanders explained, a collection of ‘anal erotic, pound cake cornhole, arse-freak and dreck poems’. And the normally mundane details of its publication history summed up the ethos of the Fuck You press with admirable energy: it was, he exclaimed, ‘printed, published, freaked, groped, slurped, sucked, fucked, edited, finger-stalled, supposited and ejaculated by Ed Sanders at a secret BUGGER scene’. (Fuck you – ed.)
A Message from our Sponsors
From the golden age of the F-word: here are two posters that could have graced your wall at the height of the hippie counter-culture.
(1) FUCK FOR PEACE: A simple slogan, accompanied by even simpler cartoons of mixed-race couples across the world’s hottest war zones (distributed with the underground newspaper Yeah in 1965).
(2) FUCK HOUSEWORK: Mock-embroidered, like a granny’s sampler from the nineteenth-century, with a picture of a witchy woman holding a broken broom, and the words ‘Women’s Liberation’ forming the hem of her skirt (issued in 1971, ‘for liberated women and men’).
F**k the Abbreviation
FTA was an abbreviation familiar to the ‘grunts’, the infantrymen who were serving with the US armed forces in the Vietnam War. It stood for an attitude that, at one time or another, all but the most blinkered members of the service had shared: Fuck the Army. As such, it was the perfect name for a radical anti-war theatre group which toured America and overseas in 1971–2, playing venues as close as they could to Army bases so that service personnel could attend. As it grew, FTA began to involve many well-known names from the American entertainment industry, including Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Country Joe McDonald and Nina Simone. They swore that ‘FTA’ actually stood for ‘Free the Army’, but audiences preferred to believe otherwise.
The Vietnam War was not the only conflict in the early 1970s to spawn an F-related abbreviation. Outsiders who toured the troubled streets of Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland saw graffiti painted on walls in Protestant and Catholic districts – FTP in the former, FTQ in the latter. Locals had no problems deciphering what they meant: they could take their choice between Fuck the Pope and Fuck the Queen.
All You Need Is ‘Love’
Ah, the Beatles – John, Paul, George and Ringo, the Fab Four, the Moptops, the lovable lads from Liverpool who were irrepressibly cheeky and yet unfailingly adorable. Until they started taking drugs and going all oriental, that is. And (yes, John, we mean you) sleeping with Japanese performance artists when they had a nice English wife waiting for them at home. And (John again) taking their clothes off on album covers. And (guess who?) marching through the streets of London carrying placards in support of the IRA.
Anyway, there was a brief period when it was hard for anyone who wasn’t a member of parliament or a moralising columnist on a broadsheet newspaper not to love the Beatles. Yet beneath their shiny fringes lurked the brains of four angry young men from the North, who in keeping with the times thought nothing of utilising all the swear-words that were in common parlance, albeit not yet in the dictionary. John Lennon (him again) may have refrained from slipping them into his teenage love letters to Cynthia Powell, who would soon become his first wife; but he had no such qualms when unloading his soul to his college friend Stuart Sutcliffe. ‘I remember a time when everyone I loved hated me because I hated them,’ he wrote in a 1961 letter, channelling the timeless spirit of the self-pitying adolescent. ‘So what, so what, so fucking what.’
The Beatles would never have dared to use such language in public at the height of their fame: Beatlemania would have died in an instant if they had tossed around the F-word in front of impressionable teenagers. What’s remarkable in retrospect is that, as early as 1964, evidence that their private speech wasn’t quite as cuddly as their media image was freely available to anyone who could afford four shillings and sixpence for a paperback book.
The volume in question was Love Me Do: The Beatles’ Progress by the American journalist Michael Braun. He accompanied the group during several of the most frenetic months of their career, during which they graduated from home-grown pop sensations to international superstars. Clearly Braun had not granted the group or their manager editorial approval of his work, and the Beatles were sufficiently relaxed in his presence to talk exactly as they would have done if he hadn’t been there. And so it was that Braun was able to quote John Lennon as having uttered a word that had triggered an obscenity case at the Old Bailey just three years earlier. More strangely still, the source for his quote was actually Brian Epstein, the group’s manager, who would usually have been desperate to deny any such uncouth utterances.
Here’s how Braun told the anecdote: ‘Epstein recalled that at the [Royal] Command performance he had asked John how he would get that kind of audience to join in. “I’ll just ask them to rattle their fucking jewellery,” John had said, and with obvious deletions the statement had remained, and become the Beatles’ most widely quoted line.’ It’s a testament to the respect with which the British press regarded the group at this point that none of the London papers chose to exploit this revelation with a ‘BEATLE IN FOUL-MOUTHED SHOCKER’ headline.
Four years later, when the Beatles’ authorised biography was published, few fans or journalists retained any illusions about the balance between the group’s innocence and experience. The author, Hunter Davies, quoted George Harrison as having relished John Lennon’s line, in the song ‘I Am the Walrus’, about a girl taking down her knickers. ‘Why can’t you h
ave people fucking as well?’ Harrison continued. ‘It’s going on everywhere in the world, all the time. So why can’t you mention it? It’s just a word, made up by people. It’s meaningless in itself. Keep saying it – fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. See, it doesn’t mean a thing, so why can’t you use it in a song? We will eventually.’
Yet when they did, smuggling the F-word into one of the best-selling singles of all time, nobody noticed. There were lots of other things to note about the record in question: it was a global chart-topper, the first release on the Beatles’ own label, and it was a seven-minute pop anthem, still capable of uniting any audience in the world in a glorious singalong. But ‘Hey Jude’ was also something more unexpected: the home of the Beatles’ first (musical) ‘fuck’. To be precise, a ‘fucking hell’ – uttered by one of them (experts divide almost fifty/fifty between Lennon and McCartney) at precisely 2’57” into the song. The Beatles were the masters of aural chaos in 1967 and 1968, often using their fade-outs as collages of ‘found sounds’ (‘I Am the Walrus’ being the best example). On ‘Hey Jude’, however, they seem to have located an accidental exclamation deep in the mix, and deliberately retained it on the final single – a boyish prank or an act of artistic subversion, as you prefer.
Those impulses were neatly combined almost a year later, when George Harrison agreed to release a single by a little-known American songwriter via the Beatles’ Apple label. Stephen Friedland, who recorded under the pseudonym of Brute Force, had submitted a demo tape to Apple which included a gentle ditty about the monarch of a distant land called Fuh (rhymes with ‘duh’, not ‘you’). As Friedland sang, ‘Everybody called him the Fuh King’, which was where the fun began: ‘mighty, mighty Fuh King’, indeed. This was as blatant as the ‘Hey Jude’ fuck had been discreet, and the ‘King of Fuh’ single received only the most limited distribution.
A decade of Beatle profanity climaxed in December 1970 with the release of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, an album of savagely personal confessional songs. It included ‘Working Class Hero’, in which a middle-class Liverpudlian who lived in an aristocratic mansion staked his claim to proletarian roots. In keeping with the album’s theme of frankness and honesty, ‘Working Class Hero’ included not one but two unashamed renditions of the word ‘fucking’. (Another song found Lennon clinging bravely to a single ‘cock’.) After much internal debate, EMI Records, who distributed the Beatles’ music, agreed that Lennon could retain the forbidden adjectives, but insisted that they should be deleted from the lyric sheet – although Lennon’s diction was so clear in both instances that there was no mistaking the colour of his invective. Elsewhere in the world, notably in South Africa and Spain, the offending song vanished entirely from the record; in Australia, merely the F-words were snipped. To coincide with the album, Lennon gave an interview to the magazine Rolling Stone in which he set a new world record for swearing in the act of record promotion – an achievement that endured another twenty-five years until the arrival of Oasis.
Ironically, the pinnacle of the Beatles’ ‘fucking’ career didn’t involve any of the Fab Four. In the early Seventies, Tony Hendra of the comedy troupe National Lampoon took choice extracts from Lennon’s expletive-rich Rolling Stone interview, and set them to Lennonesque music. The result was ‘Magical Misery Tour’, a song that begins with ‘John Lennon’ complaining ‘I resent performing for you fuckers’ and ends with a series of ‘Fuck!’ shrieks that descend into incoherent screaming. As the song says, genius is pain.
Not F-F-F-Fade Away
Rolling Stones Songs that Don’t Eff About
(1) ‘ANDREW’S BLUES’: Andrew is Andrew Loog Oldham, who was ostensibly producing the early 1964 session at which this F-filled frolic was recorded. Besides the Stones, other participants included two members of the Hollies, solo star Gene Pitney, and legendary producer Phil Spector. And it was the notorious murderer-to-be who took charge of this R&B romp, which poked fun both at Oldham and at Decca Records boss Sir Edward Lewis (who is impersonated as saying, ‘The Rolling Stones are a fucking good group’). Not surprisingly, Oldham didn’t ask Decca to release it.
(2) ‘SCHOOLBOY BLUES’: The Decca hierarchy wasn’t quite so lucky six years later when the Rolling Stones’ contract reached its conclusion. The label informed Mick Jagger that the band still owed them one more single, so Jagger responded with this solo acoustic blues tune, more popularly known among fans as ‘Cocksucker Blues’. It was the plaintive tale of a young man adrift in dirty London town, with two questions on his mind: ‘Where can I get my cock sucked? Where can I get my ass fucked?’ Sir Edward and his boys opted to file the track away in their archives – which is where it remained, at least until the early 1980s, when the company’s German arm included it as a bonus track in a Stones retrospective. And had their corporate ‘ass’ well and truly fu— sorry, smacked by the head office in London. ‘Cocksucker Blues’ later gave its name to Robert Frank’s vivid documentary film of the Stones on tour, and also provided a fairly accurate description of the movie’s contents.
(3) ‘STAR STAR’: By 1973, when this song was released on the Goats Head Soup album, the Rolling Stones were struggling to concoct the same notoriety that had been theirs by right a few years earlier. This rather jaded effort, originally titled ‘Star Fucker’, aimed to capitalise on their association with Hollywood’s rich and famous, name-checking Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw and John Wayne in its portrayal of a rock groupie whose pet cat, if I read the lyrics correctly, was very well turned out.
The Ultimate Film Festival
The mother of all concepts, for any art-house brave enough …
A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING EXPERIENCE (USA, 2013): No sex, I’m afraid – just a documentary about a run of eight shows along the Mississippi Delta by the American art-rock band Flaming Lips.
BACK TO FUCKING CAMBRIDGE (Austria, 1987): This art movie was too arty for the art-houses, though its sixty minutes feature appearances from no fewer than thirty-four avant-garde artists and gallery owners. They play various members of the Viennese cultural élite circa 1900 and enact the relationships between … no, it’s no good, I’m losing the will to live. Cambridge council should have sued them.
CORPSE FUCKING ART (West Germany, 1987): Jörg Buttgereit’s catalogue of films about death, sex and (obviously) necrophilia was both celebrated and satirised in this documentary about the making of his grossest work. The movie inspired the formation of an Italian death metal band, Corpsefucking Art, whose oeuvre includes ‘No Woman No Grind’, in which a Bob Marley anthem is first dive-bombed and then has its brains sucked out.
DEAD FUCKING LAST (Switzerland, 2012): Films don’t get any sexier than this drama about two competing firms of cycle couriers, in what is effectively a remake of Carry On Cabby for the post-fossil-fuel age.
FUCKING AMAL (Sweden, 2000): In which top Swedish film-maker Lukas Moodysson examines the agonised landscape of teenage sexuality and love, focusing on the embarrassment of real life rather than the fantasies of porno movies. It was released in English-speaking territories under the more multiplex-appropriate title of Show Me Love.
FUCKING DIFFERENT (Germany, 2005): The first in a series of portmanteau projects combining short dramas by gay film-makers. Subsequent projects were centred in particular cities: Fucking Different New York, Fucking Different Tel Aviv, and Fucking Different Sao Paulo. Sadly, production on Fucking Different Bognor Regis seems to have been terminally delayed.
FUCKING FERNAND (France, 1987): A war comedy about a blind man who wants to lose his virginity. There’s nothing like the French sense of humour.
FUCKING KASSOVITZ (France, 2011): Not your usual making-of DVD extra: this documentary about the tortuous creation of the lame sci-fi flick Babylon A.D. features an opening scene in which the movie director introduces himself to his bewildered cast: ‘I’m not Orson Welles. I’m not Steven Spielberg. I’m fucking Mathieu Kassovitz.’
FUCKING SHEFFIELD (UK, 2006): Kim Flitcroft’s reality drama is a tale
of junkies, lap dancers, and lots of Mods on scooters. A young woman sticks needles into every available part of her body. And someone has their teeth pulled out. Strangely, it’s not mentioned on the website of the Sheffield Tourist Board.
YOUNG PEOPLE FUCKING (Canada, 2007): It sounds like an open invitation for a visit from your local police force, but it’s nothing more risqué than a comedy drama chronicling the sex lives of five young couples, who are attempting in different ways to grapple with the etiquette of the erotic encounter. Also known more discreetly as Y.P.F.
An Actor’s Tale
It’s a dramatic moment at the local theatre, at some point in the last hundred years. The hero flings open the door, and finds the heroine slumped on the sofa, the marks of the strangler’s hands still fresh around her delicate neck. He falls to his knees, flings his arms wide in agony, and cries out to the audience: ‘What’ll I do?’ The response from the back of the stalls, in this much-quoted but probably apocryphal anecdote of life on the provincial theatre circuit, is short but straight to the point: ‘Fuck ’er, while she’s still ’ot.’
