by Sanders, Ed
The CIA of course denies it directly carried out the proposal. Instead the FBI did it. In January ’69 the San Francisco office of the bureau wrote to headquarters that Columbia Records, by advertising in the underground, “appears to be giving active aid and comfort to enemies of the United States.”
The memo suggested the FBI persuade Columbia Records to stop advertising in the underground press. It worked. By the end of the next year many record company ads had been pulled and a number of under-grounders had folded.
The great Allen Ginsberg sniffed this crackdown out and spent years researching it, finally supervising a book, based on his research, for the PEN American Center called The Campaign Against the Underground Press.
The FBI on Avenue A
On September 24 two FBI agents visited our house on Avenue A. I allowed them to enter but restricted the questions. Later when I got my files, I saw what they wrote: “Outside of his personal belongings the only items he took with him to Chicago were five dozen daisies and a gas mask.”
Press release complaining of suppression of Fug/Pigasus footage.
Perhaps they were looking for the origins of the psychedelic honey, or maybe they felt I would break down sobbing and admit I had hauled in a crate of bazookas packed in grease from a Black Panther camp in the mountains of Cuba.
My FBI files indicate bureau awareness that The Fugs were thinking of trying to visit Prague. A single entry remaining on a page otherwise totally censored, dated September 25, 1968, to Director, FBI from SAC, New York: “Ed Sanders hoped to leave for Prague, Czechoslovakia, on 9/18/68.”
Heavily censored FBI report, September 25, 1968.
Perhaps they felt I might be going to pick up my rubles from the KGB.
A Visit to Europe, with Pigasus
And so Miriam and I and The Fugs flew to Europe for the second time this year, first to the Essen Song Festival, September 25–29, with Frank Zappa and the Mothers and many others. Once again we held a press conference with Pigasus, this one in the central square of Essen. The Fugs did a concert or two, appeared on a political panel, and then did what we hungered to do: tried to sneak into Czechoslovakia.
We rented a car and drove toward Czechoslovakia—Ken Weaver, Miriam, myself, and Peter Edmiston, of Edmiston-Rothschild Management. We couldn’t go through East Germany, so we drove southwest into Bavaria to the Czech border. In a restaurant in Bavaria I wrote much of a song called “Jimmy Joe the Hippybilly Boy” which I later recorded for my solo album Sanders Truckstop.
It was potato-harvesting season, and we spotted big carts of potatoes in distant fields right at the border. We heard that at harvest farmworkers cross back and forth across the border along farm roads, so we thought we might be able to sneak along a potato lane, then streak to Prague.
We had some vague concept of shooting an album cover lying down in front of the Soviet tanks and visiting the house of Franz Kafka, whose texts seemed keys to quelling the fear at the end of an endless year.
We tried going in by one of the paved roads. Border guards were stopping even the milk trucks. While we waited, Miriam walked out into a field to pick some small light yellow wild violas next to the border guard. We pressed some little blue harebells, clover, and a few violas in a poetry book. The harebell-viola glyph is still resting in a bound copy of my book Peace Eye.
Flowers Miriam picked at the Czechoslovakian border.
Then we drove along the potato wagon border looking for a guardless path to Czechoslovakia. We thought
we had found one. A few more yards and we’d have been on the way to Prague, but then we spotted a single guard with a machine gun hanging down his back off a shoulder strap.
“Halten sie!” he shouted, holding out his weapon, and then gave forth a stream of German ending with “demonstrazionen.”
Miriam was asleep beneath a blanket in our rented BMW, and the guard, when he pulled away the blanket, thought we were trying to smuggle her in! Thus came to closure our search for an album cover with Soviet tanks, and we drove back to Essen.
On Monday, September 30, The Fugs flew to England for television and some concerts. That day we had a press reception at the Arts Laboratory on Drury Lane. Tuesday, October 1, we were on the BBC TV show Twenty Four Hours at Lime Grove Shepherds Bush. Before filming, I received a note that the BBC producer was fairly eager to discuss our “programme content.”
Friday, October 4, The Fugs did a live show on the BBC TV show How It Is and then did a gig at the Roundhouse in London. It was the new theater of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and a good place to play. The Doors and Jefferson Airplane had been there not long before; our opening act was the Hare Krishna singers.
Ken Weaver, Ed. All three photos in the Ed Sanders collection.
Stonehenge in ’68.
Miriam at Stonehenge.
It was the last time I saw poet Harry Fainlight, who came to the gig. The next day we rented a double-decker bus for a trip to Stonehenge. We packed it full of friends and were ready to head for that remarkable circle of stones, but there was a bit of a delay because a poet friend, Michael Horowitz, had a toothache, so we took the bus to his dentist until Michael was repaired.
We flew back to New York and then almost at once to Toronto for an October 7 concert at Massey Hall, one of the best Fugs concerts of ’68, but I’ve never seen a tape of it in the bootleg catalogs. We were guests at the Rochdale Commune. It was the last time in the ’60s that I wasn’t unhappy or dissatisfied after a Fugs gig.
An Underground Comic Show
I began gathering original art from some underground comic artists whose work I admired for a show at Peace Eye, which opened November 7. I think it was the first underground comic art show. The walls were packed with great works—pages from R. Crumb’s notebooks and original strips by Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Bill Beckman, and Spain Rodriguez (who drew the invitation).
I sent out a press release that included this text:These comic strip plexi are high energy spew-grids which at their best discharge intense power & beauty in to the brain as the eye slurps across their surface. The jolt of such immediate energy creates in the beholder profound sensations of mirth, anarch, poetry, sodomy-froth, Hideum apparitions and somehow, faith. It’s not easy. These artists live & work together, constantly comparing a million ideas and anecdotes, cackling & chortling over the pushy violence of the world, annotating with their tense disciplined rapidographs the terror in the wall.
Invitation drawn by Spain Rodriguez.
Peace Eye was packed that night—even Robert Frank showed up!—and so were the fine-drawn walls.
Ed Sanders standing in Peace Eye with the comic art on the wall.
A Book Party for Revolution for the Hell of It
The phone always rang. Abbie told me he had conditioned himself to be fully awake and ready to discuss anything the moment he picked up the phone at 4:00 AM. I was impressed how in one weekend after Chicago he’d slaved around the clock to finish his book called Revolution for the Hell of It. I thought the title told a great deal about his psyche, but I was under the sway of his brilliance, so I worked with Dial Press and threw a publication party November 22, the anniversary of JFK’s death, at the Peace Eye Bookstore.
Abbie signed a copy for me on a bookplate tree whose roots clutched a book:To Ed Sanders
There are
but few that get
to fuck the world
Abbie
(There was another Abbie signature from around that time that helped set his legend: Movie rights to Revolution for the Hell of It were bought by MGM with an initial payment of $25,000. Abbie signed the check and gave it to the Black Panther bail fund.) During Abbie’s party at Peace Eye I went down the street to get more wine. There’d been a stickup and a shooting at the liquor store just a hundred feet from the party. It was one of those 400 Blows moments, a frozen image of an elevated heap of burbly blood on the pavement, reminding me of the mound of chicken fat by the feather sizzler in Peace Eye
when I first opened it and was painting the floors. I stepped over the burble on Avenue A to get into the store to purchase some Bacchus.
November 22 was also the day The Beatles’ double White Album was released. In Death Valley, in a lonely old dry upper desert ranch, the Manson group listened to the White Double on a record player powered by a gasoline-generator and began to believe the words of black-white war were hidden in the vinyl grooves.
d. a. levy’s Suicide
And then on November 24 came a dreadful telephone call notifying me that my friend d. a. levy had shot himself in the third eye while sitting lotus on a mattress in a nearly empty pad in Cleveland using his childhood .22 and triggering the shot with his toe. Since we’d talked during The Fugs gig in Cleveland in August, he’d begun to give away his things and he’d broken up with his wife. In the fall he’d gone to Madison to be the poet in residence at the Free University.
He taught a course in telepathy at the Free U, which he did not attend, though the class met anyway and focused on levy from afar. He made some brilliant collages in Madison, and then in November he returned to Cleveland.
He wrote a final lengthy poem, with its haunting lines:i don’t know
poetry seemed like such
a good idea
a way to communicate
pretty pictures
or to see things that exist now. But the people want blood.
I had heard he was moving to the West Coast. I think he hated to be driven from Cleveland, but the poverty that had haunted Hart Crane smashed levy without mercy. The issues of economic justice, LeMar, and personal freedom that wore out the good bard levy have not yet been addressed in America so that a shyer and less-pushy genius can flourish a proper span.
This was the year Lord Byron finally got his plaque in the Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey. It sometimes takes centuries to sort out a poet, and so it maybe for darryl allan levy of Cleveland.
On November 27 Eldridge Cleaver fled to Europe on the day he was to surrender for parole violation. The CIA followed him as a fascinating threat to national security. The Fugs played the Kaleidoscope Theater at 4445 Main Street in Philadelphia for $2,700 on November 29–30. The place was outfitted with hundreds of sofas upon which the audience toked and erotically disported during our gig.
Photo of d. a. levy atop a later ad in a Cleveland paper.
December 15
Ted Berrigan wrote me from his job teaching poetry at the University of Iowa in Iowa City:Dear Ed,
thanks for the poem, and the records, and papers. The
new album is inspirational. Sandy likes Crystal Liaison
best, not knowing it’s RC . . . and I
like all of it, especially Ramses II is daid and
the last cut on side one whose name I don’t recall.
There’s a real feeling for quietness, sepulchralness
(is that a word) and death throughout. A kind of awful
hush filled with song that’s fitting and so saying the
critic took another pull on his stogie and then nodded
out
Levy’s suicide was a kick in the gut. A terrible
disappointment, tho not in him of course . . . what’s it
all about . . . is what it released in my heart awfully. . . .
If you do his book, you might try to get some of his collages
The few I’ve seen were quite nice and
and quite beautiful in some ways.
Another Visit to the Galactic Spinach: Miriam Once Again Helps Me to Land Softly
Just as during the hashish honey experience during the Chicago riots, when my police surveillants helped me back to the Hotel Lincoln and Miriam’s uncanny ability to talk me down, once again I telephoned in the middle of the night as if she were the Avenue A Control Tower. It began the day after Christmas when The Fugs flew to Cleveland for a three-day gig at Le Cave.
Some bikers came backstage at Le Cave and spiked our drinks, maybe with STP. Whatever it was, it was another one of those Ultimate Spinach trips, which I had to experience in an orange-and-green-hued Howard Johnson motel. I called Miriam to have her talk me down from the spinach.
Things didn’t turn out as well for our bass player, who was almost paralyzed the next day when we had to take the train to Chicago because a snowstorm had closed the airport. At the Chicago gig we told him just to hold his bass and not to try to play. (A few days later he was hauled in at JFK, trying to get back to London, convinced he was Paul McCartney! He had a beautiful voice, and he soon returned from the Visionary Other and stayed with us for the remaining months of the 1960s Fugs.)
Our gig in Chicago was at the Aragon Ballroom with Wilson Pickett! We couldn’t wait to hear him sing his hits “In the Midnight Hour” and “Mustang Sally.” Unfortunately Pickett was kept by the snow from coming to Chicago, and The Fugs, one of our players in a stupor, faced a rather upset audience, whose members not only were told the lead act wasn’t there, but also they weren’t getting their money back.
It was in this context that when I called Mayor Richard Daley a motherfucker, the restless crowd of 5,000 didn’t take it well. A woman directly in front of me tossed a container of Coca-Cola in my face, and we fled to our hotel, the fancy Astor Towers, to party.
Next we hopped up to Detroit to play the Grande Ballroom once again, December 30, and the next day flew to LaGuardia and back to 196 Avenue A, in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve with Miriam at Pee Wee’s Bar, just up the street from our house.
Becoming a Social Democrat
One thing seemed increasingly clear—no set of groups or combinations of individuals working even more-or-less together in ’68 had the strength, the time to commit, the grit and drive, the genius, the Vision to open the doors of the United States to the structure of sharing. Even so I came to the realization that I was a democratic socialist or a European-style social democrat. In the years just before World War I there were 70 socialist mayors in 24 states and 1,200 socialist officeholders in 340 cities. And socialist Meyer London was in the House of Representatives working on behalf of the very apartment where Miriam, Didi, and I were living! Eugene Debs in 1912 got 6 percent of the vote for prez. My mentor Allen Ginsberg had once sought to become a labor lawyer, and there were even a few good overtly socialist poets, including Carl Sandburg, and so I joined the not-that-large cadre of the democratic left. What that would mean in the upcoming decades was checking in to Heartbreak Hotel each election night when the votes were counted.
1969
The Fugs were becoming a huge and, to me, overwhelming burden. It was just too much to do. The Peace Eye Bookstore was my exit. It was a popular destination for literary tourists. The location on Avenue A near Ninth was perfect. It had a groovy past as the home of the East Village Other. One reason I had kept it open was that, in a crunch, I could run it myself and make more than enough for Miriam, Deirdre, and me to live on.
Maretta Greer Barefoot in the Snow
It was a snowy January day. I was at Peace Eye. All of a sudden a cab stopped, and Maretta Greer stepped out, fresh from JFK airport. There she was, barefoot in the snow, the cab speeding away. She’d been deported from India. She was trembling with excitement, quite beautiful. The same woman who had helped sing “Hare Krishna” with Allen Ginsberg on finger cymbals, Jake Jacobs on sitar, and Gregory Corso on harmonium for Tenderness Junction at Bob Gallo’s Talent Masters recording studio. The same woman sitting on stage, January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park with Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg as Gary Snyder blew through a ram’s horn to begin the Great Human Be-In.
She was trembling and distraught. I invited her into the store. She was hallucinating. She pointed at the store desk and said, “They are caught in the Transylvanian Transvestite Time Trap!” It was a line I used a few months later in “Are You a Vampire, Melvin Laird?” a song against the antiballistic missile system that Nixon and his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, were hotly proposing. The ditty wound up on my solo a
lbum, Sanders Truckstop.
Allen and Maretta at one point were a love couple. It was rumored they might be seeking to have a baby together. I recalled that when Allen took me to various literary parties in 1964 after he returned from India, he would point out various women he had made it with. He said that they liked it that he never lost his erection, even after coming. I called Allen on Tenth Street, and he came to retrieve Maretta and took her back to his pad.
Miriam recalls me telling her that Maretta told Allen she was pregnant with his baby, but it was not true. Allen then told Peter that he and Maretta would be a couple. Distraught that he was no longer the wife, Peter cut his long hair in anguish.
