by Sanders, Ed
On April 17 The Fugs flew to Los Angeles and stayed once again at Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard, just a few blocksfrom the Troubador bar. During our two weeks in LA jukeboxes everywhere were singing out with the seething/soothing of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” We performed on April 19 and 20 at the Cheetah, a place built on piers at the beach in Venice.
It was like playing Coney Island. There seemed to be a glut of bikers backstage, some of them Straight Satans, who lived nearby. I had no idea that a couple of them would become involved in the Manson family at the Spahn Movie Ranch.
Janis came to one of the gigs and later visited one of The Fugs at the Tropicana. At 2:00 AM she decided to take a swim. She was topless, and at first the place was desolate, but then, in minutes, the poolsides came awake! As if it were daytime, a dog walker arrived and stood by the bougainvillea near the pool. People were holding drinks and chatting with vigor.
The front desk rang my room, “Mr. Sanders, I’m sorry, but The Fugs will have to leave if Miss Joplin continues to swim bare-breasted.”
A Possible Career Mistake
I used to take a cab over the powdered granite hills and down into the San Fernando Valley to Burbank to visit Warner/Reprise, The Fugs’ recording label. Fresh in my mind was all the work we did trying to do a film with Shirley Clarke and Barbara Rubin. And, of course, my career as an underground filmster even though my footage had been stolen by the police.
I’d talked with people at Reprise about a movie idea I had starring Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. They’d be marooned together on a Mississippi riverboat in a flood. They’d be romantically involved, as they say, and they’d sing together.
It was a good idea. Just the concept of Janis and Jimi singing together, even their harmonies woven together or maybe in call and response with Jimi’s genius guitar, would have been a marvel. I could hear her voice and his guitar and voice make hieroglyphics in my Egyptian-sensitive mind.
At the Warner Brothers complex I was introduced to Ted Ashley of the Ashley Famous Agency. I ran down my idea of a Hendrix/Joplin riverboat film project. I got a call when The Fugs returned to New York.
The agency wanted to sponsor it! I’d get my own office and secretary, but I’d have to move to LA. I probably should have done it, but, well, I was working hard on the new album at Alderson’s studio, plus I’d just reopened Peace Eye on Avenue A, so I reluctantly turned the offer down.
Photo Shoot
We had a memorable photo shoot for our album cover at the Warner Brothers movie lot in Burbank. We had our pick of costumes from the Warner Brothers wardrobe department. We ordered anything we wanted from movies we’d seen. Larkey, for example, perhaps under the influence of Carole King, ordered the attire of a nineteenth-century Viennese fop. Weaver was transformed into a horn-headed ninth-century berserker.
Ronald Reagan was then the right-wing governor of California (and we would have sneered and bet big money in the spring of ’68 that he’d never be president), so I ordered Reagan’s old Gipper #32 football uniform from the Knute Rockne Story, a tuxedo from a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie, and an Errol Flynn D’Artagnon Renaissance puff-sleeved outfit with a sword.
We went to some Warner Brothers sets. The place where the TV series F Troop was shot, with its famous falling tower, and the sets of Camelot, and, I think, the Alamo (the Mission church on the back cover of the album). Reprise supplied some limber-limbed damosels, who frolicked with us for the session, clad in scantness and breasts exposed in the F Troop air.
We learned that the week of April 22 had been designated “D for Decency Week” in Los Angeles by the LA County Board of Supervisors. We noted a groovy “Stamp Out Smut” poster.
We couldn’t let that pass by without some fun. We selected a supervisor named Warren Dorn for our focus. He had been particularly vehement against erotic literature. We were scheduled to play a large psychedelic club, with a rotating stage, called the Kaleidoscope the weekend of April 26–27. The press release from the Kaleidoscope was headlined:
FUGS PERFORM MAGIC RITE FOR WARREN DORN DURING DECENCY WEEK
. . . The Fugs will lead a gathering of gropers, chanters, lovers and toe freaks in a magic ceremony to be performed in a 1938 Dodge, the back seat of which is an important symbol of the American sexual revolution.
In the parking lot of the Kaleidoscope, where they are currently engaged, the Fugs will declare National Back Seat Boogie Week and will conduct a magic rite to sensually refreshen and testicularly juvenate Supervisor Warren Dorn.
The club had rented a searchlight the night of our rite, which beamed white tunnels of psychedelic allure up toward Aquarius. There was an anarcho-bacchic Goof Strut parade into the parking lot of the club behind a mint-condition ’38 Dodge (similar to a Kienholz work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
A woman volunteer in a green gown lay supine in the backseat holding a carrot, waiting to erotomotivate into the dreams and mind of Dorn and ball him. It had a kind of pizzazz—the visual of the woman in rustling green through the backseat window as we spread a line of cornmeal around the Dodge. Just as at the Pentagon and Senator McCarthy’s grave, I tried to give the rite my finest singsong C chord, chanting such sizzling lines as “I exorcise the circle in the name of the Divine Toe” and The green-gowned deva then suck-licked the carrot in oneirophalloerotic mimesis as she was “telechanted” into Dorn’s Decency Week dreams.
Arise ! Arise! Eye of Horus! Arise Toe Freaks!
Arise! Sir Francis Dashwood! Arise Tyrone Power!
Arise! Arise! Spirits of heaven! Arise William Blake!
Afterward I lead the crowd in a few minutes of “Ommmm,” and then we sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee” before retiring to the Tropicana to party. I was getting very tired of exorcisms and did no more after the carrot-licking woman in the green dress.
We flew up to Portland, Oregon, May 3 after our fun in LA for a gig there and the next day drove to Eugene, the very day protesting students were occupying the streets of Paris. We played at a club called the Lemon Tree, located next to a beaver pond. Before the performance I walked out to water’s edge, where I experienced a great transmission of Peace. I had to go back in my mind to the lakes of my Missouri youth or to Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Peace in the Valley,” which helped me through the grief from my mother’s death in ’57, to find such consolation as I had during those moments. The beaver pond by the Lemon Tree was the best time for me in ’68.
A Tour of Sweden and Denmark
The Fugs, accompanied by my wife, Miriam, went on a tour of Sweden and Denmark, May 6–13, where we performed with the bands Ten Years After and Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood, which later filled hockey arenas, was our opening act. Monday, May 6, we did a tour-opening press conference at Jazz House, Montmartre in Copenhagen. Tuesday, May 7, we put on two concerts at the Falkoner Centret Copenhagen. At the end of the shows the audience rhythmically clapped. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t realize people were clapping for encores!
Wednesday, May 8, there was another Fugs press conference, this time in Gothenberg. Then, that night, a concert that was shocking to me was given by Bill Haley and the Comets at the big city auditorium. The crowd chanted, “Ve want Beill Haley! Ve want Beill Haley!” I was amazed that Haley performed almost the SAME SET as when I had seen him at the Municipal Auditorium as a junior in high school in Kansas City in 1956! Rudy got up on his standup bass and rode it during “Rudy’s Rock,” just as he had in KC!
Thursday, May 9, we did two concerts at Liseberg, Gothenberg. On May 10 we flew to Stockholm for a TV show, plus a public meeting with American Draft resisters and two performances at Congress Hall. In Paris the same day the group known as Le 22 Mars invaded a class on Nietzsche and demanded participation in the General Strike. The faculty voted to strike, and demonstrators took over the Latin Quarter by midnight.
On May 11 The Fugs flew up near the Arctic Circle to Umea to sing at the university, and on May 12 we flew
south to Copenhagen for two gigs at the Studenterforeningen. The next day we took the hydrofoil across the harbor from Copenhagen to Lund, Sweden, for two concerts at the university and a visit to a famous pornographic art show. In France on May 13 there was a day and night of nationwide strike by hundreds of thousands, and on May 14 students occupied the Sorbonne as The Fugs boarded their SAS flight back to the United States.
Trying to Finish an Album
After the Scandinavian tour Charles Larkey was off to join Carole King and Kootch in Los Angeles. After an upcoming two-day gig at the Fillmore East, we replaced him with Bill Wolf, who brought us excellent playing, plus a fine harmony voice. For the final months of The Fugs’ 1960s incarnation we stayed the same: Pine, Mason, Wolf, Weaver, Kupferberg, and myself.
Right away I leaped back into sessions for the album. As usual I was making long lists of possible album titles. It got down to where the title was either Rapture of the Deep (Miriam’s idea) or It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
Producing the album was getting expensive. I didn’t like a number of the tunes we had recorded back in the early part of the year, and I had shifted directions toward more of a concept album. I wanted one whole side to run as a single flow without separations between numbers.
The Fugs at Fillmore East
We appeared at the Fillmore East with Moby Grape and Jeremy Steig on May 31–June 1. I decided to record the gigs for a live album, so we hired Warren Smith to conduct an ensemble consisting of the regular Fugs (Weaver, Wolf, Pine, Mason, Sanders, Kupferberg), with additional musicians, all of whom were conducted by Warren Smith. He was brilliantly arranging “When the Mode of the Music Changes” and other pieces on the soon-to-be-released album.
A few months later I carefully went through all the takes and selected the following flow of live tunes:Slum Goddess 3:10
Coca Cola Douche 2:50
How Sweet I Roamed 3:21
I Couldn’t Get High 4:08
Saran Wrap 3:45
I Want to Know 2:39
Homemade 5:18
Nothing 4:54
Supergirl 2:42
We recorded live at the Fillmore East, May 31 and June 1 :Ed Sanders: Vocals, routines
Ken Weaver: Drums, vocals
Tuli Kupferberg: Vocals, skits
Kenny Pine: Lead guitar, vocals
Bob Mason: Drums
Charles Larkey: Bass
Richard Tee: Organ
Howard Johnson: Tuba, saxophone
Carl Lynch: Guitar
Julius Watkins: French horn
Producer: Ed Sanders
Orchestra leader: Warren Smith
Warhol and Solanas
A writer named Valerie Solanas had visited me at Peace Eye with a twenty-one-page manuscript she asked me to publish called the S.C.U.M. Manifesto. SCUM was the Society to Cut Up Men. The manifesto began, “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
I’d had the manuscript a while. She’d stopped by Peace Eye a couple of times wanting to know if I were going to print it. Then she’d left a note in late May. She wanted the manuscript back. I got the impression from the store clerk that she was miffed.
Solanas had a part in Andy Warhol’s I, a Man. She’d submitted a film script that Andy had turned down and then somehow, building up toward June, came to believe he was stealing her intellectual property.
That spring Warhol had moved his famous Factory from Forty-seventh Street to a fourth-floor place at 33 Union Square on the north side of Union Square Park. Late Monday afternoon, June 3, Valerie Solanas took the elevator to the fourth floor. Warhol was there, as were Paul Morrissey, Fred Hughes, and Mario Amaya, the publisher of an English art magazine.
It may have been an error for Hughes to greet Solanas with “You still writing dirty books, Valerie?” The telephone rang, and Andy was on the phone with a writer known as Viva, star of Nude Restaurant and Chelsea Girls.
Solanas slid a .32 automatic out of her trench coat and aimed it at Warhol, who shouted, “Valerie! Don’t do it! No! No!” and she pinged him. She then chased Mario Amaya and shot him also. Amaya fled bleeding into the other room and held the door while Solanas shoved against it, apparently intent on further pinging.
The author of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto next sought to ping the young man named Hughes, who had punched the elevator button while she was trying to push open the door the wounded Amaya was holding shut. Hughes dropped to his knees and proclaimed his innocence, and he was still in a beseeching mode when the elevator opened and Solanas fled downward and away.
I learned of the shooting at home on Avenue A and became sorely alarmed about my own safety. I was afraid she might come to Peace Eye or, worse, to our apartment, with her smoking .32, demanding the return of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto. I hid behind the police lock at 196 Avenue A until she turned herself in to the police on Times Square a few hours later. Whew!
The Shooting of Robert Kennedy
I didn’t care what the Yippies thought about Robert Kennedy. I was a big fan. His words quoting Aeschylus just after hearing about Martin Luther King’s assassination had kept total despair at bay.
The success of Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency had caused the Yippies to scale back their plans for a huge festival of life in Chicago. Instead Jerry Rubin told me that the Yippies were planning a caravan of Keseyesque buses, based on the Hog Farm’s, to wend to Chicago. That was fine with me because I had my hands full, completing The Fugs record, overseeing the Peace Eye Bookstore, and spending time at home on Avenue A.
It was on Avenue A where we had watched Robert Kennedy’s triumphant June 5 speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. We still had the television lit when the gun by the ice machine fired in the dark hotel kitchen and Robert Kennedy fell, mortally wounded.
I was devastated. I remembered how just a few days before at The Fugs concert at the Fillmore East, Weaver had referred to RFK as an “amphetamine wolverine.” For a few days I thought seriously about changing my life, even going to law school and then putting myself into the service of the Public Good. I considered entering a Catholic Worker type of life. Part of me missed the spirit of the 4H, of the Future Farmers of America, and the Grange—the orderly rural life. But even when I grew up in Midwest farm country, I had become cut off from the earth. The farmers in the town where I was raised began, even when I was in high school, to sell off their land to commuter subdivisions in and around Kansas City until almost all of the orchards and farms were gone. And now I was stuck on gritty Avenue A. What to do? was very much on my mind in the post-RFK convulsions of grief.
A Hunger to Study
I recalled my experience with Al Fowler and the possible visits of Lee Harvey Oswald to Greenwich Village in late 1963. Then the Jim Garrison investigation into possible CIA involvement in the assassination of John Kennedy. Now it was June 1968, and something just didn’t seem right.
That one night by the ice machine in that hotel changed the direction of my life. It began to push me back to my scholarly roots, studying ancient languages. And to push me toward what I later termed “Scholar Activism,” toward studying every day, reading, reading, and reading, trying to understand the Real Story. What was really going on.
In Anton Chekhov’s story “Rothschild’s Fiddle” a dying coffin maker named Yakov plays a tune for Jewish musician Rothschild, who later performs the melody “so passionately sad and full of grief that the listeners weep.” All that night after RFK’s shooting the strings of Rothschild’s fiddle trembled my soul. It was the kind of night that made one want to join an intentional community.
Drear morn droned drear on a destiny day. I awakened in a pit of ashes, forlorn and bereft, out of sorts with America and wanting a different life when Jerry Rubin called around noon.
“Did you hear the good news?” he asked.
“What good news are you talking about?” I replied.
“About Bobby,” he said. “Now we can go to Chicago!”
I let what he said pass by in silence, though I felt more alienated than someone crawling for miles in a Samuel Beckett novel.
Jerry Rubin probably wasn’t the only one exulting over RFK’s death. Although there are no smoking stockings, of course, I picture J. Edgar Hoover rewarding himself with a little lipstick, some rouge, a wig perhaps, pulling his garter belt on his freshly shaved legs and maybe strutting in joy around his bedroom in spike heels to some records he’d gotten as gifts at an organized crime casino.
Still Recording The Fugs Album
Less than a week after the assassination of RFK The Fugs began seven long and exhausting days, June 10 to 16, recording at Richard Alderson’s Impact Sound on It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
I wanted the second side of the record to be like a long collage. I was working with composer Burton Green on a long piece, with words, called “Beautyway,” named after a Navajo ceremonial. We were recording the song, but it did not wind up on the album.
I abandoned the long, complicated “Magic Rite” that we had recorded early in the year because I was getting disgusted with the fake shortcuts promised by Mageia that substituted for real change. (I finally used a short snippet of it on the record—the “Irene (Peace)” section at the end of side two.)
