by Sanders, Ed
Meanwhile, the popularity of The Fugs brought us the attention of federal law enforcement. A few weeks after The Fugs Second Album was released, there was an investigation of The Fugs by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, which I learned about years later when I obtained part of my files under the Freedom of Information Act.
Someone at a radio or television station wrote an indignant letter to the New York City district attorney. The letter contended that The Fugs Second Album was pornographic. The letter of complaint was forwarded to the U.S. attorney, who, in turn, sent it on to the FBI. Of course, in those years the FBI was known to write letters to itself, or set up such letters, to justify investigations of American activists.
In the early summer a DOJ memorandum stated that a postal inspector had finished an investigation: “He advised The Fugs is a group of musicians who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers, i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. . . . It is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene.”
I felt a surge of patriotism when I read this memo years later among the documents turned over as a result of a Freedom of Information request. Plus this! If we’d only known about this letter, we could have put a sticky label on the record: “Ruled NOT obscene by the United States Government and the Postal Service!”
DOJ memo declaring Fugs Album not obscene.
A Trip to Gloucester to See Charles Olson
In late spring, in a rickety old green Ford station wagon, writer George Kimball drove me, Panna Grady, and English poet George MacBeth to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to hang out with Charles Olson. I’m pretty sure it was the first meeting between Olson and Grady, and it rekindled my cunning scheme, hatched the previous year, for her to help the genius of Gloucester, whose financial status was always on the edge, especially since he had left his professorship at Buffalo.
I brought a gift to Olson of a French edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, with the original Greek helped by a French crib. It was the edition into which I had handwritten the “Out of the Foam, O Aphrodite” section of “Virgin Forest” on the second album.
Olson was glad to see us, recounting a recent visit by Tim Leary (who had given him a vial of pure LSD). We had dinner at the best place in town, called the Tavern, followed by a long walk on the beach by the harbor.
I’m not totally certain this initial meeting between Panna Grady and Charles Olson had anything to do with it, but Grady rented a fancy stone house in Gloucester, where she spent the summer and early fall with her daughter. She had an affair with poet John Wieners that year but broke it off, and she and Charles Olson would travel to England together in the late fall.
A page from the Town Hall playbill for the gig.
June 12 at Town Hall
A young fan named Henry Abramson put up money for The Fugs to “move uptown” to a concert at Town Hall! The Town Hall gig came along at a miracle moment for us. We were without a theater, having been tossed from the Astor Place Playhouse. I used the $1,500 concert fee from Town Hall to rent the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street, and we soon began a long, long run.
Robert Shelton reviewed the Town Hall concert in the New York Times. To my enormous relief, given his stature among writers on current music, Shelton liked the show! Among his comments:The Fugs might be considered the musical children of Lenny Bruce, the angry satirist. Their music, while growing in capability, is secondary to their lyrics, patter and antics. Complete personal freedom, whether in sex or in drug experiences, seems to be one of the Fugs’ ensigns. Two songs, including “Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out,” were dedicated to Dr. Timothy Leary, the researcher in use of psychedelic drugs. “Kill for Peace” lambasted the United States policy in Vietnam.
While obviously far out by most accepted standards of popular music, the Fugs are clever, biting and effective satirists. In settings of poems by William Blake and Charles Olson, they showed a gentler nature. While not for every taste, the group can be commended for its originality, courage and wit.
The Players Theatre
Located at 115 MacDougal, the Players Theatre was owned by a gentleman named Donald Goldman, who did not seem to mind our rough language and wild stage antics. His theater manager, on the other hand, was an ex-army guy named Howard Dwyer, who didn’t like the word “fuck.” In fact his face went red at it, and although all other words were okay, he seethed at the use of fuck in our routines. Thank goodness theater owner Goldman was more worldly and didn’t care about our language. Whew.
The Café Wha was located in the basement, and there were oodles of Greenwich Village sidewalk traffic, so our shows started selling out when we opened in July. Our run there during 1966 and 1967 lasted over seven hundred performances. During the summer and fall we did three shows a night on the weekends—8:00, 10:00, and midnight. The theater was filled, and the shows were fluid, well done, and hot. It was the peak time for The Fugs.
Ed Sanders collection.
A Patriotic Flavor
We always struck a theme of patriotism. Examples are our red, white, and blue logo and our ad in the Village Voice for our run at the Players Theatre.
Pete Kearney left the band, and during that first summer at the Players Theatre Jon Kalb, brother of Dan Kalb of the Blues Project, was our excellent lead guitarist. And so the summer of ’66 Fugs included Sanders, Kupferberg, Ken Weaver, Jon Kalb, Vincent Leary, and Lee Crabtree. We were joined at various points in our run at the Players Theatre by Jake Jacobs, a fine arranger and singer. For a while we hired a vocal coach, Bruce Lang-horne, reputed to be the inspiration for Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
With our second album on the charts and our shows sold out, we were treated to the eerie sensation of sudden fame. Though I lived in an apartment in a slum building, fans located it and hovered outside near the incredibly dingy ash cans and their squashed lids connected by chains to the cans.
Famous people began to watch our shows at the Players Theatre, and we were thrilled to shake the hands of stars such as Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein in quick backstage visits. To Kim Novak we gave a Fugs T-shirt, hoping she might pop it on.
Patriotic ad and red, white, and blue Fugs ticket.
The Fugs’ Renown Among the Literati
In addition to renowned guests such as Kim Novak, “New York Intellectuals,” including those associated with the New York Review of Books, began to appear at Fugs shows at the Players Theatre that summer. Elizabeth Hardwick actually wrote a good review of the show, which we cherished. Novelist Philip Roth also came to a show on an evening that Tuli sang “Jack Off Blues,” which always brought an explosive round of applause from the audience.
Tuli singing “Jack Off Blues,” Players Theatre, MacDougal Street. Ed Sanders collection.
It was around then that Roth began Portnoy’s Complaint , which was published in 1969. A lingering question is this: Was Portnoy’s Complaint inspired by the “Jack Off Blues” lyrics?
Could there have been royalties for Tuli? Probably not. Shakespeare did not have to give credit, and certainly no bread, for plundering histories of Denmark when writing Hamlet.
Tuli’s “Jack Off Blues” from our 1965 performance book.
Fugs playbill, Players Theatre, MacDougal Street. Royalties, Mr. Roth?
Elizabeth Hardwick, I’m afraid, captured my Entity of 1966 in an essay published in the December 15 New York Review of Books. “What we might have hoped for,” she wrote,was the mad anarchistic pantomime of The Fugs, of Tuli Kupferberg in “Kill for Peace.” Looking like some obscene Yeshiva student, he has a catatonic relaxation that does more in one pornographic slump than all the agit-prop frenzy of Viet Rock. The Fugs are neither art nor theater, but noise (“total assault”) and Free Speech. Still they make all sorts of popular entertainment obsolete. After “Coca Cola Douche” it is not the easiest thing in the world to sit through the first act of The Apple Tree and watch Bar
bara Harris and Alan Arkin in the garden of Eden, trying to “evolve” a word for love. The Fugs are soft, liberal exhorters to “Group Grope.” There is a schizophrenic sweetness and dirtiness about them and the leader of the group, Ed Sanders, is a dismayingly archetypal American. If he weren’t “groping for peace,” he would have been in the Twenties an atheist, in the Thirties a Trotskyite. But he is an actor, possessed of a subversive energy that does not come forth on records and certainly not in his books of verses, or whatever you might call these “lyrics.” In person he is a new, indefinable image. (Kupferberg is a more accomplished actor, but he is not the prime spirit of this group, a group whose purpose is far from evident.) Ed Sanders in dirty black cotton pants, a horrible white plastic vest, dirty red scarf, matted hair, holding a mike with a cord, is some sort of parody of all the MC’s of history. He looks like James Jones, or a foul Bob Hope. Neither he nor his “slum goddess of the lower east side” is aphrodisiac, but they are wildly funny because he and his songs have trapped the infantilism of smutty little boys. To be clean and well-dressed and concerned about homosexuality or four-letter words: that is the real madness. It is not free sex, but free speech they celebrate: dirty words, dirty feet, laughter. The Fugs are idealogues of some kind, not orgiasts; their ideas are few and simple, and all of them are pacific. The young couples in the audience, soiled, long-haired, were strangely soft and domesticated also, as if they had some parody nest, with a few pans, a few drugs, and then, all smudged and sweaty, tucked themselves into a passive sleep. Still there is something final about The Fugs. It is hard to see how Alan Jay Lerner can carry on after “My Baby Done Left Me and I Feel Like Homemade Shit.”
Subletting a Pad in the Summer
Miriam and I and Deirdre sublet a furnished apartment on East Thirteenth that summer. We rented it from Tom McNamara, a columnist for the East Village Other. It was a very hot summer. I purchased a new reel-to-reel tape recorder and spent lots of hot hours working on new tunes.
Chart-Anguia
On July 9 the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” was number seven on the singles list and “Paperback Writer” was number two. And wow! there on the album charts! The Fugs! at eighty-nine, just above Martha and the Vandellas’ Greatest Hits! It spawned the peculiar hunger that I call “chart-anguia,” a thirst to get on the charts again, difficult to do with tunes like “Kill for Peace” and “I Feel Like Homemade Shit.” Even so, for a few years I compulsively looked at the Billboard or Cashbox charts, even though none of my projects got very far up in the lists!
There we were! on the Cashbox list, up there with Martha and the Vandellas!
The Revolution at Fillmore and Geary
Meanwhile out in San Francisco, rock shows, augmented by poetry, were going full blast at the Fillmore Ballroom. As Ralph Gleason, esteemed jazz writer and chronicler of the psychedelic music revolution, described it, “It’s an old joint, built in the year One, and used for decades as a dancehall. It’s an upstairs loft at Fillmore and Geary with several small balconies and a café or lounge. There’s no booze, only soft drinks, near beer and food. And it has become, in recent months, the general headquarters for the artistic revolution that is taking place here.”
Friday and Saturday, July 15 and 16, the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead were on the same bill, filling the Fillmore. Attendees were treated on Saturday to a half hour version of Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” performed by the Dead and the Airplane all together, with Marty Balin, Pig Pen, Joan Baez, and Mimi Farina sharing the vocal. Wish you’d been there? Me, too.
The next night there was a sold-out benefit for the Artists Liberation Front, a masked Mardi Gras–themed ball, with the Mime Troupe, Garry Goodrow, the Sopwith Camel, and others. Robert Creeley read, and Allen Ginsberg, too, wearing an Uncle Sam top hat and performing sections of his just completed and remarkable poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” Allen received a standing ovation at the Fillmore that summer night. Wish you’d been there? Me, too.
The Mystery of Frank O’Hara
The summer saw the death of brilliant poet Frank O’Hara, struck down by a dune taxi on Fire Island July 24. Charles Olson wrote in a letter, “Oh Lord I hate the fact that he will not continue to be a master.” Allen Ginsberg wrote one of his finest poems for O’Hara, “City Midnight Junk Strains.”
Frank had sent $50 to help defray my legal expenses and had agreed to be an expert witness at my upcoming Peace Eye raid trial.
This was the year that I was filmed at Peace Eye for a National Educational Television series USA: Poetry. I shared a segment of the series with O’Hara. (It was broadcast September 1, 1966. It was Frank’s final reading.)
The day after O’Hara’s tragic death on Fire Island, Bob Dylan had his motorcycle accident in Bearsville. He suffered an injured neck and other bruisings. Allen later told me that several weeks later he visited Dylan in Woodstock, bringing him some books, including Rimbaud, Blake, Dickinson, and Shelley.
I flew out for a quick trip to Kansas City for a Family Reunion. I was attired in striped pants and rock-and-roll finery. The success of The Fugs at the Players Theatre enabled me to flash a thick wad of cash. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sudden glut of money (as temporaryas it turned out to be) and even explored purchasing my childhood home on Cemetery Hill in Blue Springs. A few years later Janis Joplin joked with me about purchasing HER hometown! It was part of the phenomenon of Sudden Rock-and-Roll Cash.
A Call from Jack Kerouac
Kerouac called me at the Peace Eye Bookstore one night in the late summer. He wanted me to jot down a poem, so I did. He said it was about “Mother Kali, Hindu goddess who gives birth and eats back her children.” Then he dictated:The Secret
of Kali
The basket
is a casket
Signed,
Jack Kerouac
He sometimes walked past Peace Eye on the way to Allen’s up the street. Orlovsky stopped by the store after one of Jack’s visits. He’d blown the author of Subterraneans and complained just a bit about it, he confided to me, in the same conversation, that he had not fully dug the taste of John Wieners’s duck-buttery lingam.
The Peace Eye Bookstore around the time Kerouac visited Allen Ginsberg just up the street. Ed Sanders collection.
Performing with Little Anthony and the Imperials
One interesting gig for The Fugs the summer of’66 was at the El Patio Beach Club, billed as a “College Mixer” with Little Anthony and the Imperials. “Girls not permitted in slacks,” the ticket read. It was exciting to share the bill with the creators of top-ten classics such as the doo-wop “Tears on My Pillow” of ’58 and 1960’s “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko Ko Bop.”
Lenny Bruce Memorial
On August 3 Lenny Bruce was found face down on the bathroom floor, a needle sticking from his right arm and a blue bathrobe sash around his elbow, in his house in Los Angeles.
The Fugs sang “Carpe Diem” at the packed Lenny Bruce Memorial held at the Judson Memorial Church on the edge of Washington Square Park on August 12, with Bob Fass producing the recording of it for WBAI. The Fugs performing at the Bruce Memorial can be found on The Fugs boxed set Don’t Stop! Don’t Stop.
A Bomb Scare in the Musette Bag
We were very excited about our free outdoor concert in Tompkins Square Park, scheduled for the evening of August 16. The audience filled up the park from the new bandshell all the way to Tenth Street at the park’s northernmost point and spilled out onto the sidewalks of Avenues A and B. There must have been over 10,000 on hand.
Walt Bowart, editor of the East Village Other, spotted my nemesis in the crowd, Sergeant Fetta, who had led the raid on Peace Eye, and asked him, “What do you think of the concert?”
Fetta: “You call this a concert?”
Bowart: “Do you have any comments you’d like to make about this concert?”
[loud music]
Fetta: “About what?”
Bowart: “About this music? About the lyrics.”
F
etta: “Why don’t you go about the audience asking them? With this crowd here tonight, it doesn’t seem to matter what I think.”
We were asked by the cops to turn down the amplifiers because our tunes, such as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side” and “Group Grope,” could be heard all the way to Fourteenth Street. We got through our first set, and we were backstage hanging out.
Suddenly there were police officers on the stage. And who should come back behind the scrim to see us but my nemesis, Sergeant Charles Fetta!?
“We’ve had a telephone call that there’s a bomb planted in the park.”
A guy from the Lower East Side Civic Improvement Association came to the microphone and intoned, “The police have informed us that there is a bomb in the park. It’s probably just a hoax, but will the audience please move back from the pavement and benches onto the grass?”
A totally packed Tompkins Square Park for the free Fugs concert, August 16, 1966. Ed Sanders collecti
