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

  I insisted that we record again under the creative graces of Richard Alderson. I decided to record all future music projects, if at all possible, with Alderson. He had the touch and the skills to bring out the best in a session. We began recording what would be Tenderness Junction in the late fall, and we more or less kept recording constantly with Alderson, through It Crawled into My Hand, Honest, until the early fall of 1968. We did some research on why we had been thrown off Atlantic, and we were told by Albert Grossman that Warner Brothers was negotiating to purchase Atlantic and the pooh-bahs at Atlantic were afraid having The Fugs aboard would lower the selling price. Learning that, we surged forward and opened negotiations with Warner Brothers, and Reprise signed us! Heh Heh Heh. There was a slight consolation in being signed by the company that was purchasing the company that had tossed us.

  Mo Ostin, the goodwilled president of Reprise Records, told me that before Reprise could sign The Fugs, he played the Atlantic album tape to label founder Frank Sinatra. He, to our lasting gratitude, okayed the deal! He said, “I guess you know what you’re doing.” New York, New York!

  At last we were back on a major label, although our managers insisted we re-record the entire abandoned Atlantic album, so the final four months of’67 were a whirl.

  The CIA’s “Operation Chaos”

  Meanwhile, the underground press, including the East Village Other, three blocks down A from Miriam’s and my pad on the corner of Twelfth, was thriving across the nation. The underground newspapers were about to have a first gathering in DC just prior to the upcoming massive antiwar demonstrations and civil disobedience at the Pentagon on October 21, the one where The Fugs would help exorcise the Pentagon. The undergrounds were supporting the drive for massive social change, the use of psychedelics, the legalization of grass, and the giving of aid and comfort to the Black Panthers and antiwar groups. The insolence of the underground press movement! the energy! the treason! It was riling the minds of the military-industrial surrealists, and so in early August the CIA began an enormous and mostly still-secret program called Operation Chaos for spying on and looking for ways to stymie the antiwar left.

  A telegram was sent out to a slew of CIA field stations setting up a “Special Operations Group” to be run by counterintelligence head James Jesus Angle-ton. He selected a human named Richard Ober to lead what would not long ahead be called Chaos or Mhchaos. Because it was illegal for the CIA to try to destroy domestic newspapers such as the underground press, Chaos grew into one of the most secret of all secret programs. LBJ knew full well about Chaos because Ober’s reports were sent to his desk (and later to Nixon’s). Ober was given a staff of ten at first, and they all set out to “disrupt the enemy.”

  The CIA fed the National Security Agency a “watch list” of 1,700 dissident Americans in 1967 so that the NSA could monitor phone calls and other communications—a monitoring that went on until 1973. Thank You, O Twerps of Chaos.

  Abbie Hoffman

  I became aware of activist Abbie Hoffman, who had begun organizing in the Lower East Side. I was impressed with his zeal, creativity, and ability to think in the fun-filled realms of Guerrilla Theater, Street Action, and what had to be called the Performance Art of Immediate Social Change. For a few years in the time track Hoffman was the Jim Thorpe of social action—he never seemed to sleep; could engage in fifty projects at the same time; was an adroit writer, whether of leaflets or books; and had an uncanny ability to get the attention of the media.

  He was born November 30, 1936, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up there and then went to Brandeis, graduating in ’59 with a degree in psychology. That fall he entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. He began to demonstrate. On May 1, 1960, Abbie and others, including Shirley MacLaine and Marlon Brando, went to San Quentin for an overnight vigil prior to the morning execution of Caryl Chessman. On May 12 the same year the House Un-American Activities Committee opened hearings into putative subversive activities in the Bay area. There were demonstrations outside the federal building in downtown San Francisco. Police with waterhoses and Plexiglass visors attacked the protesters. There was a riot. The ’60s had begun.

  He married Sheila Karklin, and the couple had two children in the early 1960s. They lived in Worcester and became active in the Black freedom movement. Abbie went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964. He returned to Mississippi in the summer of ’65, teaching at a Freedom School in McComb. In 1966 Abbie started getting stores in New England to sell handcrafts made by the Poor People’s Corporation in Mississippi. PPC was a network of rural cooperatives making an assortment of leather and cloth items.

  That year Abbie and Sheila were divorced and Abbie moved to an apartment in the Lower East Side. He opened a double storefront in the West Village, which he named Liberty House, and operated on behalf of SNCC. Late that year and early in ’67, because of the rise of the Black Power movement, all whites were purged from SNCC. Stokely Carmichael and others advised Abbie to turn Liberty House over to black management and to spend his time organizing to end the war in Vietnam—advice Abbie took. By early ’67 Abbie had rented an apartment on St. Mark’s Place near Second Avenue with a woman, Anita Kushner, who worked at Liberty House. That June Abbie and Anita were married in an outdoor be-in-style wedding in Central Park, attended by 3,000 celebrants, which was featured in Time magazine.

  Abbie and the Burning of Money at the Stock Exchange

  On August 24 a group tossed money down at the New York Stock Exchange. Abbie and Jim Fouratt organized the action under the umbrella of an entity called the East Side Service Organization, which was just being incorporated. The group received permission to tour the Stock Exchange. Group members viewed themselves as Diggers espousing the Politics of Free.

  According to an article in the East Village Other by editor Walter Bowart, when Hoffman and Fouratt entered the visitors’ gallery, above the active trading floor, a “guard stopped the Diggers, saying ‘You’re hippies and you’ve come to burn money.’”

  Hoffman insisted, “That’s not true. I’m Jewish,” and Jim Fouratt shouted, “I’m a Catholic.”

  “The confused guard backed down and the Diggers were admitted

  Several went to the balcony and tomoney down on the busy trading floor. Bills floatedin the greed-spasm zone. Some stockies booed, but others grovon the floor like eels of greed to gather the cash.

  Guards tossed the flutter forces. Outside Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who had come from California to work on a big antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon upcoming in the fall, burned money.

  Abbie later gave me a half-burned dollar bill from the demonstration. It was a creative action that struck a nerve and became one of the most inspiring actions of the late 1960s.

  The Community Breast Concert for the Free Store

  The Community Breast concert at the Village Theater on Second Avenue on August 16 raised $1,000 for a Lower East Side version of the Digger’s San Francisco Free Store. The Fugs performed, as did Tiny Tim, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Paul Krassner, Hugh Romney (soon to become Wavy Gravy), and Timothy Leary’s sitarist, Peter Walker.

  The money raised indeed went to the establishment of a free store, set up on East Tenth, just around the corner from the offices of the East Village Other.

  Just a few days later The Fugs performed our annual free outdoor concert on the stage in Tompkins Square Park. It was the third free concert we did that summer, in addition to our regular full run Off Broadway at the Players Theatre.

  Poster for the Community Breast concert, Village Theater on Second Avenue.

  Quick ad in EVO for the August 22, 1967, annual free Fugs concert in Tompkins Square Park.

  The Rise and Sad Fall of the Digger Free Store

  The Free Store opened at 264 East Tenth, just off A, on September 21 with all the hope and energy that the era could summon. It represented the Spirit of Free and echoed the lines from Allen Ginsberg’s great poem “America”: “When can I go in
to the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?”

  Underground comic artist Spain Rodriguez made the groovy sign above the door at 264 East Tenth, a one-story building just down the street from the red-brick St. Nicholas Carpatho-Russian church on the corner at Avenue A.

  The Free Store grew out of a similar store created in San Francisco a few months earlier by Diggers. Two key San Francisco Diggers, Peter Berg and Emmet Grogan, visited the Lower East Side in the spring of 1967, where they inspired Abbie Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, Marty and Susan Carey, and others to organize one.

  It was another of the trend-setting ideas from the West Coast such as the be-in, forty-five-minute guitar breaks, Digger free food in Golden Gate Park, the Haight-Ashbury communes, indecipherable rock posters, head shops, fear of oil spills, anger against nuclear power, concern for the safety of sea lions, and necklaces for guys.

  The Free Store in its first florescence, with a love banner above the entrance. Photo by Bill Binzen.

  Everybody around the park was talking about the Free Store. In the summer The Fugs and other bands had done the Community Breast benefit that had raised over $1,000 for the Free Store. The LBJ administration had announced that poverty was to be banished in America, so a New York City antipoverty agency slipped the organizers of the Free Store another $1,000.

  The first few weeks of the Free Store were a time of bounty. The dailies wrote stories, and a wide assortment of poets, novelists, artists, radicals, anarchists, actors, nuns, and those sympathetic to socialism brought tons of clothing and household items down to Tenth and A. Soon the store was packed with Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Hippies mingling politely, trying on shoes and working through the bins and shelves. In addition to duds, they took home hundreds of useful kitchen utensils, toys, appliances, and things like reading lamps!

  There was a satiric sign, “If you break it, you take it.” Writer Paul Goodman worked as a volunteer sorting clothes. Writer and publisher Paul Krassner reportedly offered to pay a year’s rent for the store.

  The store seemed to attract trouble. It was a hyperagitated era, of course, not to mention the difficulty of setting up a Network of Free when so many were busy Staring at the Universe on psychedelics. There was also a fine line between burning out for the Social Good and just plain old burning.

  Right away owners of used Hippie clothing stores began plundering the Free Store, filling up their bags with largesse to stack on their own shelves. This caused a few freak scenes and confrontations, but there was no structure in the Free Store to deal with the concept of the spiritual parasite and the hip capitalist mooch.

  Somehow the baton of leadership for the Free Store passed from its original organizers to local Hippies to bikers. Motorcycle Ritchie, a biker who’d run the San Francisco Digger store assisted by a guy named Clyde, began running the Free Store. Both wore iron cross earrings and leather jackets. Ritchie worked on his motorcycle on the sidewalk outside the Free Store, with parts spread out here and there. Ritchie and pals spewed forth an “aura of violence.” Ross Wetzsteon, an editor and writer at the Village Voice, lived on Tenth near the Free Store and wrote an article that mentioned how the biker managing the store had smashed and beat up a kid on the block.

  Within a short time the Free Store’s image changed from Love to Threat. Part of it had to do with racism. In an eyewitness account of the Free Store, author Naomi Feigelson wrote of an angry guy named George who came into the store swinging a chain and complaining, “All these spades around here are just bad news. You see signs all over, ‘Wanted, ride to California.’ You don’t see anything in California about wanting a ride to New York.”

  I lived just three blocks from the Free Store, and the rumor at the time was that amphetamine–and methedrine-heads had brought aimless frenzy and “‘noia” to the store. (Methedrine, the trade name for methamphetamine hydrochloride, was always known just as “meth.”) Chattering, jittery methheads could really suffuse a project with excess confusion and fear.

  The Murder of Linda and Groovy

  It was Saturday, October 7, just after midnight. Linda Fitzpatrick and Groovy Hutchinson were together in a basement furnace room at 169 Avenue B, near the Annex bar, which had the words FREE LOVE written on the front of the door. There were dark blue halls in the building.

  Her black panties and clothes were neatly stacked in a corner, as was Groovy’s jacket, and they were on a mattress. During the night Linda was raped four times, according to Time magazine. They both were murdered by being smashed with a boiler brick.

  They were found at 9:00 AM by Fred Wright, “assistant superintendent” of the building, who slept on a cot in an adjoining room in the basement.

  Groovy, on the right, joking with his pal Galahad in Tompkins Square Park just a few hours before his murder behind the FREE LOVE door in a basement on Avenue B. Photo by Nathan Farb.

  He had been out all night and found the bodies. He was arrested on Monday, October 9, for raping and robbing a young woman in the cellar several hours before the murders.

  Monday, October 9, Donald Ramsey, twenty-five, was charged with the murders. He lived with his wife, Anaya, in a three-room pad upstairs from the FREE LOVE basement on Avenue B. The New York Times reported that a green sticker reading “Black Power” and a drawing of a black panther were affixed to Ramsey’s front door.

  His attorney told the judge, “He belongs to the Yoruba religion. He . . . wants permission not to shave or cut his hair because of his religious scruples.”

  Groovy helped people by the score find places to crash during the Summer of Love. He operated a crash pad with Galahad at 622 East Eleventh, but the police crushed it. Groovy told his friend Galahad a plan he had. He wanted to open a nonprofit café called the Thing Shop. Everyone would do their thing in the Thing Shop, whether they had the money to pay or not. It would be a restaurant.

  I needed to wall off the grief that was coursing through the Lower East Side. I was beginning to feel as old as Methuselah as I mourned for Groovy and Linda. The FREE LOVE basement was situated along the Sacred Via—Tenth to Twelfth, home of the Charles Theater, the Annex, and Stanley’s Bar. Right then—in a flash—Avenue B between Tenth and Twelfth went from Street of Glory to Via Terroris—waypath of terror and desolation.

  I felt a great amount of guilt that I had had to shut Groovy out of Peace Eye when my landlord complained about the karate lessons in the courtyard, the class in tightrope walking, the fifteen or twenty mattresses in the three rooms, plus the recruiting activities of Jade Companions of the Flowered Dance. In a better world Groovy Hutchinson, spreader of goodwill, warder off of Burns and Bad Acid, and finder of a sleeping space for the partisans of Love, might have gotten a Great Society job to help locate housing or temporary communes in the tenements.

  I never really got to mourn Groovy and Linda completely. The hits on the soul came without respite from ’67 on. Groovy, MLK, RFK, d. a. levy, Kerouac—ping ping ping, until early 1970, with the passing of Charles Olson. In the late 1960s death became quick calls and gossip, after which we moved on quickly, without respite, from scurry to hurry to worry.

  The Free Store love sign, which had turned to hate in just a few weeks. Photo by Bill Binzen.

  We were just about to start planning the Exorcism of the Pentagon. And then Carl Sandburg passed away the same month! and the CIA murdered Che Guevara in Bolivia. In mid-November Motorcycle Ritchie split from the Free Store back to California, after being invited to become a member of the Hells Angels. By December 16 the Free Store was closed, not even two months old.

  But the Spirit of Free was hard to rub out, as evinced by the Community Switchboards that were being set up around the nation, the Free Clinics here and there, the Free Stores in places like Woodstock, and, of course, the Great Free Food for 400,000 by the Hog Farm at the Woodstock Festival up ahead.

  Che

  Two days after Groovy and Linda were smashed to death behind the FREE LOVE door, Che Guevara was hunted down and
murdered by a pack of CIA operatives in Bolivia. His assassins lashed Che to the right skid of a helicopter at La Higuera. The CIA sleaze (Felix Rodriguez) who was in charge of hunting down Che stole Che’s Rolex watch as if the assassination were a mugging in a New York City alley. The CIA guy wrapped the tobacco from Che’s final pipe and stole that, too. Another CIA off-oid who helped kill Che stole a swatch of his hair, took pictures, and smeared Guevara’s fingerprints on some cards that forty years later he peddled for $100K.

  Somehow a photo of the face of the murdered Che was released. A horrified CIA endured a Jesus/Martyr image of him being placed on the walls of huts and houses around the world. It was a powerful image that not even millions of rubles from the Mar xist-Leninist-Black Panther-Left-Wing-Hippie-Conspiracy could have purchased.

  A Fugs Movie Project with Barbara Rubin and Shirley Clarke

  Films were in the wind. The Group Image, a well-known Lower East Side artist-musical collective, was, according to Time, shooting a “full-length psychedelic western titled Indian Givers,” in which Tim Leary was going to play a sheriff.

  I began talking with Barbara Rubin about a movie on The Fugs. We had discussed such a project as far back as ’65 when she took me to the Café Bizarre on West Third to see a throbbing new act called the Velvet Underground.