by Sanders, Ed
And I also gave up a tune called “The Vision of William Blake’s Garden” (a version of which can be heard on our CD Fugs Live from the Sixties, from our spring ’69 concert at Rice University). We’d planned to use Olson’s mantram “Plann’d in Creation / Arouse the Nation / Blood is the food of those gone Mad!” as a chanted preamble to “The Vision.”
Prague Spring
In Czechoslovakia there was the Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubček loosened the authoritarian grip on his nation but “remained a devoted communist” and wanted to keep in place single-party rule. Nevertheless during Prague Spring he allowed greater freedom of expression. Once humans escape a cage, it’s not that easy to get them back inside.
The Communist authorities allowed rock and roll over the state-run radio! The Beatles arrived! They were a huge influence! and had a vast impact on students and the young, creative generation. “All You Need Is Love”! “Sgt. Pepper”! “Norwegian Wood”! Records by the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and even The Fugs were allowed into the country during the Prague Spring. A group called the Plastic People of the Universe would soon form and actually perform Fugs songs!
Years later I helped raise money to smuggle musical instruments into Czechoslovakia. This was after the crackdown that began August 1968, with Soviet tanks invading Prague. This was not long before the military, with fixed bayonets, patrolled the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention.
World Poetry Conference
At the State University at Stony Brook (where we’d done the dawn concert early in the year), there was the World Poetry Conference, June 21–23, organized by Louis Simpson, Jim Harrison, and Herbert Weisinger. I was invited to deliver a statement at a panel discussion on politics. Some of my friends, including Anselm Hollo and George Kimball, were there, as were Donald Hall, Louis Simpson, Nicanor Parra, Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Guillevic, and many others.
There was a party on Saturday, June 22, at Louis Simpson’s house in Bell Terre, Long Island. It was a thronging, well-done event, both indoors and out. Donald Hall, that brilliant poet, was very drunk and in fact was about to pass out. I myself had drunk so much that my liver was feeling like a Rudi Stern neon.
Drunk as I was, I overheard a discussion between a male professor and the wife of another professor. He taunted her, “You’re nothing without your husband.”
I laughed at him and then began to taunt him that he was a nothing also. (After all, Tuli Kupferberg’s “Nothing” had become one of The Fugs’ most popular tunes.) A poet pal, George Kimball, came up from behind and broke a bottle of champagne over his head. The result was a broken glass-topped table on the outside patio.
Uh oh, what to do? Should we confess to the owner of the pad, Louis Simpson? It was then, noticing the zzz-zoned Donald Hall, future Poet Laureate of the United States, that we hatched a scheme to say that it was Hall, a good friend of Louis Simpson’s, who had broken the table. It was years before the gentle bard found out he hadn’t bacchus’d the broad glass table.
During the World Poetry Conference a number of us stayed in the dorms. I recall Anselm Hollo trying to toss a typewriter out a window, but the glass was too tough, whereupon he hurled it down some stairs, a piece of typed-on paper around the roller. It was a battered relic I couldn’t resist retrieving. I took it back to Avenue A and kept it for many years as a Literary Relic First Class. I wish I still had it.
The Summer of 1968
That summer I divided my time in slices of too many commitments: being in our pad on Avenue A, running the Peace Eye Bookstore, recording It Crawled, working on the Chicago demonstrations, and hanging out in the many bars of the counterculture: Rafiki’s and PeeWee’s on Avenue A and Stanley’s, the Annex, and Mazur’s on Avenue B, plus Slugs, the Old Reliable, the Cedar, and many West Village places (such as the Lion’s Head). What a toke of ruination for the liver! Dr. Nemhauser of Tompkins Square North told me to stop drinking, that my liver was enlarging. It was something I wouldn’t heed until 1973 after my sojourn writing my book on the Manson family.
A few times I helped soldiers fleeing the war. They arrived in their uniforms and slept in the back room at Peace Eye. They changed into civvies, and the next day I tossed away their uniforms here and there in the garbage cans of Tenth and Twelfth.
At Peace Eye I printed hundreds of leaflets and fliers free, including many for the Motherfuckers, even though they’d been mean to me, one of them accusing me at an early Yippie meeting of having a Swiss Bank account!
I strolled around the scene in my red boots or my white boots, attired in necklaces, striped pants, Tom Jones shirts, and lacy finery that helped rinse away what Kenneth Rexroth once called “the light from Plymouth Rock” from my Midwest Protestant roots.
Miriam and Didi went just about every day to the playgrounds at Tompkins Square Park. Didi had a little bell from the Psychedelicatessen she sometimes wore around her wrist. The park was where all the races, cultures, and factions came together. There was very little open strife, and the streets were safe enough, especially if you knew which part of which block—as all long-term residents did—had spots where it was not safe to stroll.
Working with Bob Dorough
On July 7 I took a bus from New York City to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where I was picked up by well-known composer Bob Dorough and went with him to his rural spread in Mt. Bethel. I brought with me my autoharp so that I could play some tunes I wanted him to arrange and perform on for the new Fugs album. Dorough back in ’62 had written a famous tune with Miles Davis called “Blue Xmas.” Richard Alderson had recommended him. Dorough had coproduced an album by Spanky and Our Gang at Impact Sound in ’67. Dorough also had a remarkable singing voice, which reminded me of when I was a kid in Missouri and saw Hoagy Carmichael sing “Buttermilk Skies” on television. Dorough prepared lead sheets and oversaw the recording of Tuli’s marvelous tune “Life Is Strange” and my “Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel.” I also had the idea to combine a poem Tuli had written that listed a good number of different names for hashish/marijuana with a kind of Gregorian chant on the word “marijuana.” Dorough jumped aboard this project with gusto.
Dorough sang lead while performing a magnificent piano part on “Life Is Strange,” and he did harmonies on “Johnny Pissoff.” On “Marijuana” Dorough outdid himself, leaving behind a deathless track.
Late July
The Fugs went back to the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston to sing and party from July 25 to July 27 as best the Chicago summer allowed. By late July/early August I was desperate to finish It Crawled into My Hand, Honest before the Chicago convention (because I thought I might be jailed, or worse) and before our upcoming European tour. I also was writing the liner notes and designing the foldout album.
Bob Dorough’s lead sheet for “Marijuana in Nobis-Pacem Eternam.”
Bob Dorough’s drummer’s lead sheet for “Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel.” Note the instruction “Angry” for the drummer’s lead-in to the tune.
We went to Cleveland to play Le Cave. We were there from July 30 to August 1. During the mornings of July 31 and August 1 I flew back to New York to mix the album at Alderson’s studio and then flew back later in the day to the gig in Cleveland.
Designing the Album
On Wednesday, July 31, I went to Ivanhoe drafting supplies to get a drafting board and t-square, which I carried back on the plane to cut and paste the inner foldout sleeve of It Crawled. I also drew an ink glyph to use in the liner notes.
Bard d. a. levy came to one of the gigs in Cleveland. I tried to interest him in coming to Chicago. (He was one I’d asked to send a mantram to chant in the streets.) He’d been publishing the Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle, a mix of his brilliant collages, his poems, and the usual look of a tabloid underground paper. He’d just printed his August issue, in which he announced he was giving the publication up because of no financial support from the community.
The glyph for I
t Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
August 2–3
From Cleveland we flew to Chicago to play a psychedelic auditorium called the Electric Factory. I rushed back to New York City to do the final sequencing for the album, and then, at last, it was done! The mixed master reels and the boards containing the design were airmailed to Reprise Records in Burbank.
On August 7 a bunch of us (myself, writer Richard Goldstein, Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin) flew to Chicago for a meeting with Al Bougher and David Stahl of Mayor Richard Daley’s office. I found myself paying for Rubin’s ticket. It was scorching hot. They didn’t dig Abbie smoking pot in the mayor’s office. We continued to beg for permits for our Festival of Life in Lincoln Park, but they kept up their balking at giving any permits whatsoever.
The staff at the underground newspaper the Chicago Seed, fearing bloodshed in the streets during the Convention, wanted the New Yorkers to cancel activities in Chicago and issued an editorial to that effect.
The Telegram
Chicago wasn’t Selma. I just couldn’t believe that the police, even with the help of provocateurs, would turn Chicago into pizza. Nor did I believe that Abbie and Jerry and their hard-core Yippie cohorts would actually stir up bloodshed. So when the Seed called for demonstrators not to come to Chicago, I sent an upset telegram in reply. I thought the Seed’s change of mind was more because of a dislike of Abbie’s and Jerry’s personalities and media tactics than any actual perceived danger to demonstrators coming to Lincoln and Grant parks.
The Fugs’ Tompkins Square Park Concert
It was our annual concert in the park. We had a new tune, which we performed with straw hats and canes and delivered in a kind of Al Jolson watery-mouthed vocal, “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” (borrowed from a famous Amiri Baraka poem). The tune also satirized the group called the Motherfuckers, whose leaflets I’d often printed gratis at Peace Eye, whose logo on their publications was UAW/MF. A young man named David Peel was in the audience. I don’t know for sure, but soon he was singing a song with a similar title, and it helped make him famous on an album for Elektra, later that very year, Have a Marijuana. Later Peel approached me to ask if he could put a medley of Fugs tunes on a recording or in his act. Didn’t say yes, didn’t say no. I wanted to hear first what he came up with.
Getting Ready for Chicago
The Fugs were in California during the several weeks leading to the Chicago demonstrations. The cab from LAX to the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard in those days cost $7.30.
The Fugs played Friday and Saturday, August 15 and 16, at the Bank in nearby Torrance, California. It was one of the few times I performed barefoot. I was continuing my experiments in rinsing my Puritan heritage out of me by being the first performer on Warner/Reprise to dance barefoot. I did this during “Kill for Peace,” wearing gold-flecked toenail polish, which Miriam had graciously painted on just before I got on the plane.
The Fugs in Torrance, California, just before the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Thursday, August 22
Early in the morning on August 22 two teenage hippies near Lincoln Park in Chicago (where we planned the following week to hold our Festival of Life) were stopped by the police. One was a Native American from South Dakota named Dean Johnson. Police officers said he pulled a gun, so they killed him with three shots.
It was on my mind when I arrived in Chicago from LA later that day to work on whatever music we could get together for the Festival. The Fugs had remained behind in Los Angeles while I looked for a safe place for them to stay. I checked into the Lincoln Hotel, located just off Lincoln Park. Miriam and Deirdre would soon fly to Chicago to join me.
Saturday, August 24
That afternoon there was a big planning meeting at the Free Theater at 1848 Wells near Lincoln Park. I learned that the police, not only were not going to allow protesters to camp out in the Park, but they also were going to toss people out at 11:00 PM.
The issue was, what to do? Abbie predicted “fifty or sixty people in a band going out from the park to loot and pillage if they close it up at 11.” I didn’t dig the L and P words, so I exploded, “I’m sick and tired of hearing people talk like that. I don’t want some kid who hasn’t been through it all and doesn’t know what it’s all about going to get his head busted. You’re urging people to go out and get killed for nothing. Man, that’s like murdering people.” We decided not to urge people to sleep in the park overnight, though clearly that what thousands were going to try to do.
After Saturday afternoon’s meeting wherever Miriam, Didi, and I went in Chicago we were followed by two plainclothes detectives. All the so-called demonstration leaders had surveillance teams. At the time I didn’t think much of it. I’m more angry about it now, decades later, than then. That night Miriam, Didi, and I walked from the Hotel Lincoln to a Mexican restaurant while the police followed us, then waited outside to save Western civilization.
Sunday, August 25: The Festival of Life
I’d found a safe place for The Fugs to stay during the Chicago demonstrations, but one of them phoned from his room at the Tropicana in LA. They were worried about violence in Chicago. He said they’d seen a report on TV that Country Joe had been punched out in a motel in Chicago by a member of a conservative Democratic delegation. They were hesitant to come.
I was upset, but I let them off the hook. Everybody flew back to New York, except Tuli Kupferberg, who showed up for the fun in Chicago.
Sunday was also the “Day of the Honey.” Abbie introduced me to a guy who was dipping into jars of hash-oiled honey with a spoon, which he would swirl on our tongues. It was very, very, very powerful, and shortly after getting my mouth of honey, I looked up through the tear-gas sonata of Lincoln Park, and the Universe from the edge of the Lake up across the wide Midwest sky was made up of pulsing, writhing mountains and vistas of spinach. It was literally that: spinach! Cooked spinach. It was as if I had awakened in one of my Kansas City aunts’ Thanksgiving dinner bowls!
I was not alone. Tuli had taken a tongue of the honey and immediately passed out. Paul Krassner was on his knees nearby holding on to the grass very tightly; he later wrote, “so that I wouldn’t fall up.”
I found my police surveillance team, told them I wasn’t feeling well (I did not mention the universal sea of Ultimate Spinach in which we were standing), and the officers helped me back to the Hotel Lincoln, where Miriam, just as she had done during my psilocybin trip with Charles Olson in Gloucester almost two years in the past, talked and soothed me back into normalcy.
That night the police drove out those who were trying to camp in Lincoln Park. I walked about with Allen Ginsberg, who was singing long “Oms,” singing along with him as we tried to lead the young people out of the park around the deadline of 11:00. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to disperse the campers.
The next day when Miriam and I tried to take Deirdre from the Hotel Lincoln across Lincoln Park to the zoo, the tear gas still lingered in the grass, and Deirdre, being very short, wept with the pain of it.
In our trip to the Lincoln Park zoo our plainclothes detectives kept on following us. That afternoon I went with Miriam and Didi to the sporting goods section at Marshall Field department store at North State Street at Randolph, where I was trying on football helmets. I wanted one with a face guard in case my police escort should wax face-bashy. I was wearing a football helmet when a tall plainclothes guy approached. He said, “Mr. Sanders, we’ve been following you for twelve hours, and the next shift is scheduled to take our place. I’ve called them. They’ll be here in a few minutes. If we miss them, it could be another six hours before we’re relieved.”
I chuckled and told him we’d wait. Early in the evening I went back into Lincoln Park, and noticed, with a shudder, that my police escorts were lifting billy clubs out of their unmarked car.
That night when the Yippies tried to march on the Loop from Lincoln Park, a line of army troops stopped them after a fe
w blocks with an armored vehicle wrapped in barbed wire. Barricades were built in Lincoln Park to defend the right to sleep there. At 12:30 AM the police clubbed and attacked the barricades.
Famous French writer Jean Genet was in the park! He had no visa and had sneaked in from Canada. Allen Ginsberg was acting as his interpreter. Genet had an assignment for Esquire magazine (along with Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern) to cover the convention. All four had press passes to attend.
It was just about time for the invasion of the fuzz. Tonight they marched behind a street sweeper truck whose water tanks apparently had been converted to hold tear gas! I’ll never forget the sight of Jean Genet, dressed in leather, peering into the paranoid darkness of the park just before the tear-gas truck began spraying. He strode into the darkness and was gassed himself.
Allen and I left the park to return to the Hotel Lincoln, but there were snout-nozzled cops there lobbing tear-gas grenades that plomfed near our feet. We crouched down and dashed through the hostile molecules, heads low, knees high, as if we were halfbacks on a junior high football team, toward the lobby.
