Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side

by Sanders, Ed

  There were a few boos and hisses.

  I then went to the mike and told the crowd that we were cooperating with the bomb search. Meanwhile backstage, Fetta was looking for bombs in people’s musette bags, you know, joint-sized receptacles.

  Finally we went back on stage and resumed our concert with “Ah Sun-flower, Weary of Time,” “Supergirl,” “Turn On/Tune In/Drop Out,” and, of course, the epoch-shaking Kupferberg masterwork, “Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing.”

  To me the police action smacked of fascism. And I pulled as many strings as I could to get Sergeant Fetta transferred out of the Lower East Side.

  September 13

  Panna Grady sent me a postcard from P.O.B. 14 Riverdale, Gloucester, Mass.

  Dear Ed,

  Charles (Olson) said—two nights ago—why don’t we send you a telegram—haven’t seen him since to do it so this is instead to tell you we both would like to make the visit we’d planned earlier with your wife and child. I’ll be here till mid-Oct., so anytime.

  Love!

  Panna Grady.

  Airmail, 8¢, postcard, to Mr. Ed Sanders

  Box 193

  Stuyvesant Station, NY, NY from Gloucester

  Poseidon’s Mane

  I decided to take up Panna and Charles’s kind invitation to visit. Ken Weaver and I flew from New York to Boston on the Eastern Shuttle, then took a cab to Gloucester to see the O in midafternoon, his morning. Olson had to clear away books from the stove to make us tea.

  We had dinner. Then we were sitting in the kitchen at Fort Square. We were to stay in the house rented by Panna Grady near Dogtown Commons. (She was not there that night.) Olson had a bottle of orange-red psilocybin pills, plus a bottle, literally, of acid he’d gotten from Tim Leary. He went into a back room and returned with the bottles of LSD and ’cybin.

  “Want a swig?” he said, thrusting the liquid acid in my direction, as if it were a shot of rum in a bar by Half Moon Bay. “A swig!!” I exclaimed, knowing full well that 500 micrograms was more than enough—why should we risk some 500,000 mcg gulps? So we settled on the psilocybin. Olson had apparently tried some in December of 1960 and in February of 1961, and there was the remainder in a bottle, almost six years later.

  Olson shook out a handful of red orange pills. I took about eight; Weaver, as I recall, had twelve; and Olson, at six foot seven, had an initial twelve or so, then a few more. We sat talking in the kitchen as the magic mushrooms began to bring us the Galactic Mush.

  Olson drove us over near the part of Gloucester called Dogtown where we were to sleep. He drove slowly, so slowly that when I looked back a line of cars was close pressed behind us. He pulled over, as I recall, to let some of them roll by; then we proceeded. I felt a great surge of confidence that my mentor, the O, was driving and would get us there safely. Then I glanced to the front seat, and Olson had turned into the Greek god Poseidon! literally! the Horse from the Sea! with kelp in his mane matted and wet.

  So onward drove Poseidon—the seat cushions washed in the froth of his greeny mane, which seemed ornamented with sea wrack, bone bits, shells, and oceanic oddments! I thought, well even if I am bonkers, the driver, my hero, my guru, my bard, was Safety Assured! Until we passed a clump of what appeared to be boulders, in the gloom to the left.

  “Woooo, look at the elephants!” Poseidon shouted.

  At last we arrived at the stone house, rented by Panna, with stone-arched doorway and sat in the living room to talk. Meanwhile, the psilocybin was having a profound effect on me. It seemed as if the house had become the Chapel Perilous, and I began to walk outdoors, spend a few minutes in the dark, then return back to the Chapel. I did this a few times and seemed to live through life cycles as I left the house, walked through the woods, then returned.

  In one life cycle I spoke Akkadian, building a mud brick hut by the River Euphrates. In another cycle I was a Hasidic store owner on Hester Street in the Lower East Side.

  Weaver later kidded me about calling out to the trees when I wandered out of the stone house and onto the lawn. Olson, meanwhile, talked onward. Weaver pointed toward O: “Look at those sparks coming out of his forehead.” I looked. The top of his head seemed enormous and was showering with blue arcs!

  On a table was a jade and silver cross that Dean Stockwell had given John Wieners. I asked Olson, “What is there to hold on to?” He handed me the cross. I tasted it and felt it melt in my mouth.

  When I went outdoors, Charles warned me about the “quarry.” I recall he was speaking about sachems and Algonkian longhouses. Finally in one of the life cycles I got lost in the woods, crashing among trees—leaves in long hair. I must point out that I was in my full rock-and-roll attire—all in red: red boots, red sweater, red pants, and a red scarf. Finally I thrashed down into a street. I thought maybe there had been an accident and I was dead and in fact might have been in Sheol, or purgatory, or some kind of William Burroughs Gray Zone.

  I walked through deserted Gloucester streets and was just getting ready to go into a house for shelter. Good thing I didn’t. A police car came along, and I hailed it. He was at first suspicious of a young man dressed all in red, with leaves affixed up and down the redness.

  I recalled poet Gerrit Lansing’s address on Main Street in Gloucester and called him from the police station. Gerrit’s friend Derek picked me up and drove me back to Dogtown, where Olson and Weaver were still talking! It seemed they had not moved an inch during my adventure!

  I called Miriam at our pad on Avenue A, and once again she helped me to land from another trip into the universal mosaic. She always talked me down from On the Road Orbit during those years. During the psilo’ trip I was thinking I should give up The Fugs and return totally to poetry. I told Miriam that over the phone from Gloucester. But I was trapped in Fugland.

  The polka-dotted jacket I wore for the dinner with Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. Ed Sanders collection.

  A Hunger to Record Again

  It would have been difficult to break up The Fugs right at that moment. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records had expressed interest in signing us. I had gone out to dinner with him at an uptown Chinese restaurant and had visited his office to pitch having The Fugs on his label. At that time it was the label of The Rolling Stones. He’d also put out an album of Allen Ginsberg reading his great poem Kaddish.

  The Loss of John Anderson and Jon Kalb

  The summer of 1966 was a time of Glory for The Fugs. We were playing sold-out shows at the Players Theatre, and we had an album on the charts. It seemed as if this Glory would last forever! Then a kind of calamity occurred—first our hot lead guitarist, Jon Kalb, decided he wanted to return to college! And second, our hot bass player, John Anderson, received his Draft Notice, now that he had dropped out of Yale.

  I hatched a scheme for The Fugs to accompany John to his Draft Board naked, but alas, it was not to be, and after his father showed up, John allowed the Draft to go forward. Soon he was “Pfc John Anderson, 206th Sig. Co. at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.” After serving in Vietnam, he returned to Yale, graduated, then got a law degree from Harvard. His legacy: The Fugs first and second albums and our red, white, and blue logo.

  Limo-Anguia and a New Pad

  There is a condition called “limo-anguia,” in which young people in rock bands have a hunger to be taken around in limousines. I actually rented a limousine to look for an apartment to rent amid the slums of the Lower East Side.

  Miriam, I, and Deirdre, now two years old, moved from East Thirteenth Street at the end of the summer. For a while we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, then we moved into an apartment at 196 Avenue A at Twelfth Street.

  I signed the lease on October 15. It was a floor-through, with a marble fireplace; it had once, I was told, been a dental office. There was a buzzer system, and the apartment was on the second floor. There was a door off the kitchen that led to a flat-roofed area that we could possibly use in the summertime, put tables and chairs out there and maybe plants.

 
It was another calm pad where we tried to wall off the weirdness. We allowed no one except close friends to visit. We were to live there until early 1970, when I flew off to Los Angeles to write about the Manson “family.”

  During the first few weeks in the new apartment on Avenue A, we allowed our friend Al Fowler, and his mate, poet Mimi Jacobsen, to store their belongings, including some furniture. But it became difficult to allow Fowler access to our pad because, as Miriam recalls, he would arrive, she would let him in, and he would proceed to grab items that he could sell to fuel his habit, so we had to ban him. Al and Mimi moved soon to Minnesota, where she had been raised and had attended the University of Minnesota. They began to raise salukis commercially and were together until 1971.

  Fowler continued writing, though he grew to hate junk with a passion. In 1971 he was struck on the head from behind by a guy wielding a pipe, which left him an epileptic, prone to severe seizures. He served several jail terms in the North Country. Al remained in Minnesota until after his final jail sentence. He returned to New York City in 1979 and lived with his mother, Bertha, until his death.

  On January 23, 1980, Al Fowler either fell or was shoved into the path of an oncoming subway train in Manhattan. He showed up at the ticket booth, gave his name, then collapsed into unconsciousness. He lingered for nine days, never recovering consciousness, then passed away. It was two weeks after his fortieth birthday.

  Meanwhile, in the fall of 1966 times were more or less flush for us in our new pad on Twelfth and A. The Fugs were selling out most of our shows at the Players Theatre, and I was in the midst of negotiating with a major label, Atlantic Records!

  Trouble Inside The Fugs

  We were still playing at the Players Theatre during the fall of 1966. The loss of Anderson and Kalb dented us badly. With these personnel changes, we decided to define The Fugs as Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver.

  The Fugs’ relationship with ESP records was, to state it mildly, turbulent. We were told, for instance, that Organized Crime was illegally manufacturing Fugs records and selling them. We can be forgiven for not really believing that the Genovese crime family would bother with The Fugs when there were The Beatles, The Stones, Mantovani, and Petula Clark to rip off.

  The owner of ESP had insisted on ducking some of the lyrics of Ted Berrigan’s song, “Doin’ All Right,” when we mixed it. “I ain’t never going to go to Vietnam / I’d rather stay right here and screw your mom.” “Screw,” after the level duck, became like a “humm.”

  Things didn’t add up. A close relative of the label’s owner told me the family viewed the owner as unstable and helped bankroll in lieu of therapy or confinement.

  I was determined to put together a brilliant band. For a while we had a fine guitarist named Stefan Grossman, who replaced Jon Kalb.

  Reading at the 92nd Street Y

  Monday, October 24, in the evening, Robert Creeley and John Wieners read together at the 92nd Street Y. I was asked to introduce them. Wieners was very happy at reading, for the first time, at such a prestigious place, where T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, and other emeralds of poesy had plied their bardery in the past.

  There was a party at the Chelsea Hotel afterward. Charles Olson called Bob Creeley at the Chelsea party and insisted that Bob hand the phone to John Wieners. Then he informed Wieners that he and Panna Grady were traveling to London together. It must have been a blow to John and did not reflect well on Olson, who must have known the joy Wieners was experiencing that night, reading with Creeley at the prestigious 92nd Street Y. (Wieners and Grady had had an affair that summer, but she had broken it off.)

  The invitation to the Creeley-Wieners reading, a bit tattered from being in my archive for over forty years.

  The Fugs to California in Late 1966

  We played the Earl Warren Fairgrounds in Santa Barbara with Eric Burdon and the Animals. It was the first time I’d had my shirt torn off by fans. It wasn’t pleasant, youthful fingers grabbing the skin of my arms and back.

  I met a hot singer named Janis Joplin at the California Ballroom in San Francisco, where she was performing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. She asked me about ESP Records, which was trying to get Big Brother to sign a recording contract. I urged extreme caution in dealing with ESP.

  While The Fugs were in California, we appeared on the Les Crane television show. Phil Ochs was in the audience, and we became friends, with many capers together over the years.

  Jimi Hendrix at the Wha

  I was grateful to get to know a great young guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, who was performing at the Café Wha in the basement next to the Players Theatre. Jimi came to some Fugs shows, where I was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, which seemed to turn him on to the idea, and he began himself to sport a cowboy. I attended some Hendrix shows at the Wha, where he was performing as Jimi James and the Blue Flames. I remember him turning around to glare a couple of times at his players as they fell out of musical focus.

  One evening as we chatted, Jimi Hendrix told me he didn’t like his voice. I told him his voice was beautiful.

  It was right around the time the wah wah pedal was invented, and Dan Green, who was working for The Fugs at the time as equipment manager, turned Jimi on to the wah wah, and soon afterward he began utilizing it in his songs. Then Hendrix was discovered and taken to England, where he soared all the way to the Monterey Pop Festival of the following spring.

  The Frank O’Hara Award

  On December 30 I received a letter from attorney Edward Ennis announcing that the Trustees of the Poets Foundation had selected me for a $500 award “in recognition of your contribution to poetry.” The award was given “in honor of the memory of Frank O’Hara.” I was very grateful.

  1967: The Year of Love and the Great Be-In

  Gary Snyder began the Human Be-In on January 14 in the Golden Gate Park polo field with a riff on a conch shell. The formal name for the event was “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.”

  The name, of course, came from the sit-ins in the South to integrate lunch counters, say, at Woolworth’s and later the popular teach-ins against the war in Vietnam. Now it was be-in, and this one event set the cultural tone of the year, along with the rhymed doublet: flower power.

  There were 20,000 there to surge in primary-color splendor with the fine Pacific psyche light at last outshining the puritanical searchlight from Plymouth Rock as the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jerry Rubin, Gary Snyder, Tim Leary, Lenore Kandel, Allen Ginsberg, and others made words and music. All across America that spring there were be-ins, smoke-ins, love-ins, tipi-ins, and in-ins. These set the tone of 1967, even in the counterculture haunts of the Lower East Side.

  Angry Arts Festival in New York City

  Meanwhile in New York City, there was a big cooperation among artists, musicians, writers, and moviemakers to scream out against the war in Vietnam. It was called the Week of the Angry Arts.

  About sixty filmmakers contributed short anti–Vietnam War films to the Week of the Angry Arts. These were first screened in New York on January 30 at NYU’s Loeb Student Center on West Broadway. Among the film artists were Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Hillary Harris, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Storm de Hirsch, John Hawkins, Stan Vander-beek, Robert Breer, Dick Preston, and the group known as USCO. (A version of this Week of the Angry Arts films can be rented from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.)

  There were a wide variety of public performances in dissent against the war. From January 29 to February 5 hundreds participated on themes such as “Folk Rock Dissents” and “Avant Garde Musicians Dissent,” with compositions by Phil Corner, Morton Feldman, Earle Browne, Malcolm Goldstein, and others, at the Community Church; “Dancers Dissent”; a “Napalm Poetry Reading” at the Community Church, with Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, John Logan, and Robert Bly; “Photographers Dissent”; and many other events, all now evaporated into the mists of the past. Th
e Fugs took part in the “Folk Rock Dissents.”

  Then immediately after the Week of the Angry Arts there was further repression of artistic freedom. Charlotte Moorman was arrested for performing a bare-breasted cello piece at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque on February 9. She was scheduled to perform Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique , plus Max Matthews’s Lullaby, the latter played topless, with Moorman donning various masks and wearing a black skirt. She bowed the cello with items such as a bouquet of flowers. It was during Lullaby that plainclothes policemen interrupted the performance, tossed everybody out of the theater, and took her to jail, where she spent the night.

  What she did next is a sterling example of what an artist should do under attack. To show the judge in her trial what the Opera Sextronique was really about, Moorman re-created the first two movements, right after her arrest, in a studio as filmmaker Jud Yalkut filmed the performance. The judge ultimately refused to allow the restaged Opera Sextronique to be screened in court, but the Opera remains to this day a historical re-creation of a moment of New York City repression, 1967 style.

  Meanwhile, on January 25 The Fugs went up to Atlantic Records and signed a multialbum contract.

  Fugs signing with Atlantic Records, January 25, 1967: Tuli, Ed, Ken, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler.

  We did a demo recording at the Atlantic Studios. Jerry Wexler then suggested we record at Bob Gallo’s Talent Master Studio on Forty-second Street and Broadway. It was a block away from the cigar store where I had worked the night shift off and on from 1960 until 1965 when I opened the Peace Eye Bookstore.