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

  Shards of God

  July 20

  Ten Years for Two Joints

  Sanders Truckstop

  Off to LA

  The Harsh Reality of Airplay

  Signing with Grove

  The Chicago 8 Trial

  The Passing of Kerouac

  Learning About the Manson Group

  Becoming a Clipper

  Olson’s Float-Away

  Final Recording Session of the 1960s

  An Award for “The Hairy Table”

  Then 1970

  Closing Peace Eye

  My Testimony at the Chicago 7 Trial

  The Chicago 7 Convicted

  The Invention of the Term “Punk Rock”

  Changing Directions

  Setting Aside Poetry to Study “The Family”

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated to the presidency of Robert Kennedy, to the spirit of the Great Be-In in Golden Gate Park, to the enjoyment of freedom, to the quick advance from four- to sixteen-track recording, to peace and love and sharing the largesse, to all those groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress, and to a Nation that could invent the wah wah pedal.

  Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

  —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 48

  It all coheres . . .

  —Sophocles, Women of Trachis, Pound translation

  but why tell all just because Tell tells you to tell

  —1968, A History in Verse, about being on William Buckley’s Firing Line with Jack Kerouac

  Of course, facts rarely work themselves into any kind of symmetry.

  —Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building

  These Fragments I have shored against my ruins

  —T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” l. 431

  When the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake.

  —Tuli Kupferberg adapted (and considerably improved) from Damon of Athens, ca. 460 B.C.

  I was trying with all my might to make of myself “a potent social force.”

  —Maxim Gorki, One Autumn Night

  “In America you can say anything you want —as long as it doesn’t have any effect.”

  —Paul Goodman

  THANKS

  The author wishes to give thanks for research help to Steve Clay of Granary Books for helping locate good copies of some of my publications. Also my gratitude to Steve Clay for reading through my archive material at NYU Fales Collection, and to Marvin Taylor, director, the Fales Library and Special Collections at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, for clean copies of the Marijuana Newsletter.

  Thanks to Michael Basinski, curator, the Poetry Collection, at the Library, University at Buffalo, SUNY, and to James Maynard, assistant curator, the Poetry Collection, for copies of my notebooks from the early 1960s and for information from the Harvey Brown archive. Thanks to Melissa Watterworth Batt, Curator of Literary, Natural History, and Rare Book Collections at the University of Connecticut Libraries, for helping the author’s research during a visit and for providing copies of items in the author’s archive in the Rare Book Collection.

  Thanks to old friends Duncan McNaughton and Tom Clark for outstanding recollections; to excellent artist Ann Leggett; to Jan Herman for archival material relating to the banning of “The Hairy Table” from the NEA anthology in 1970; to Mike Boughn for material on the life and times of Harvey Brown; to Richard Alderson for his recollections on the recording of The Fugs at Impact Sound in New York City, 1966–1968.

  My gratitude to Timothy D. Murray, librarian and head, Special Collections Department, University of Delaware Library, for good copies of the withdrawn edition of APO-33 by William S. Burroughs. Thanks to Beth Reineke for research help; to Terrence Williams for memories of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1965; to Bobby Louise Hawkins for The Fugs footage from Placitas; to Kim Spurlock for help on the Neal Cassady chronology; and to George Kimball, Jim Fitzgerald, and Ben Schafer.

  Thanks to the microfilm department at the Sojourner Truth Library at SUNY New Paltz, and at the library at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Thanks to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage for information on the early history of The Fugs.

  Thanks to Stan Cornyn, former VP of Reprise Records, and coauthor (with Paul Scanlon) of Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group, for going out back of his house to his archive barn and sharing some Fugs documents.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  As the years described in this book whizzed by, I believed most fervently that the roots of revolution were going to lift the concrete away from the field of truth, after which Bread and Roses and the utopian place I called Goof City would grow up afresh in a warless world—Goof City on the hill, Goof City in the Lower East Side, Goof City shining.

  I was raised in a little farm town called Blue Springs in western Missouri, which, when Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System connected it to greater Kansas City beginning in the late 1950s, saw most of its farms, forests, and orchards turned into bedroom subdivisions. After a year at Missouri University in Columbia, I hitchhiked to New York City in the summer of 1958 to attend New York University, where I had a vague concept at first of becoming a rocket scientist (it was the era of the Mercury Program), but switched to Greek and Latin after a couple of semesters.

  I soon was enmeshed in the culture of the Beats as found in Greenwich Village bookstores, in the poetry readings in coffeehouses on MacDougal Street, in New York City art and jazz, and in the milieu of pot and counterculture that was rising each month. There was the impact of the Happenings and of the moral fervor of the civil rights movement. Also of great allure was the underground movie scene traced by Jonas Mekas in his weekly columns in the Village Voice.

  I was very impressed with the images of ancient Egypt and began experiments in utilizing hieroglyphic-like elements in my own writing. The visual aspect of intelligence was increasing during the television and movie era; children born after World War II had higher visual intelligences. The Eye was in the ascendency, and the mode of the music, thanks to the rise of advances in music technology, was changing also.

  That fact would help lead me to joining the Mimeograph Revolution, studying Egyptian hieroglyphics, founding an avant-garde singing group called The Fugs, and helping to form another strange political group called the Yippies.

  The culture of the Lower East Side—with its very affordable, rent-controlled apartments—and the general affordability of the larger culture opened up great vistas of possibility. I realized that the Nation’s future was “up for grabs,” as if some Deity had tossed a cultural basketball up for many millions to seize and dribble toward their home hoop. Hence my adoption of the phrase “Total Assault on the Culture,” inspired by William Burroughs.

  The daily flow of news affected our art, and I have tried to bring some of the details of the broader political reality into the tapestry of recollection. Some could isolate themselves from it, but the news of the war in Southeast Asia, for instance, was an incessant drum beat jarring our concentration on Beauty and Creativity, beginning around the fall of 1963 and lasting through the decade and beyond. In many ways they were the Drums of Doom that prevented the Great Society from continuing from the great Medicare and Medicaid legislations of 1965, say, toward universal health care.

  But other events, too, blocked the rise of paradise—the Birmingham bombing, Freedom Summer, Selma, the use of napalm and defoliants in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, teach-ins, the Watts Riots, God Is Dead, the banning of LSD, and on and on. Then, in 1967, public discussion that the CIA had killed Kennedy—could that be true? Folk rock, Pop Art, Summer of Love, communes, the Revolution, sex forever, riots in Newark, the Tet Offensive, revolutions in theater and dance, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Chicago, Woodstock, Nixon, Chappaquiddick, the Moon Walk, the Moratoriums, Altamont, cults that kill, oh
Lord, like Poe’s “Sco-riac River that restlessly rolls.”

  In attempting to enact “Total Assault on the Culture,” I undoubtedly did some things and promoted some concepts about which I feel remorse and sometimes even shame. My regrets or memoirist anguish do not rise to the level of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge or those, say, of Thomas Carlyle. But I sure made some errors during my years that cannot be blamed on chromosome damage, erotomania, hunger for what they called in my Midwest youth “spermatum nirvanum,” vodka, pot, paraquat, psilocybin universe-wandering, anarcho-socialism, or excessive Protestant mean streak.

  There are many names associated with this story. During these years I met thousands of people while working on various projects, from antiwar demonstrations, benefits for lots of causes, The Fugs, the music scene, the art scene, the publishing scene, Chicago and the Yippies, and the byways of rock and roll, managers, agents, and perpetrators of all kinds. In this tracing of those years, I no doubt left out those who ultimately will be seen to have more importance to this tracing than I have indicated. My apologies that they have been underreported on these pages.

  Sequencing the time stream is sometimes difficult. I’m now in my seventy-first year of “quiet desperation,” and I apologize for the “gaps” in my recollections. The shopworn adage “If you lived fervently in the 1960s, how could you possibly remember them?” becomes an actual fact when trying to weave a tapestry of the past. Like, exactly what was the date that artist and filmmaker Harry Smith—the first night I met him—threw Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies into the tall porcelain urinal at Stanley’s Bar?

  Just as in my book-length biographical poem about my longtime friend, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, I chose to pass over some things in silence, not to be so judgmental, to let certain matters sleep unto the supernova of the sun. In addition, I have decided not to settle any scores in my recollections. I was sometimes imperfect in my behavior toward others, tending at times toward arrogance and egotistical smugness.

  I will not claim to have been an integral part of much of anything in the tale of these years—but I was an experimental participant. I know that I was convinced there’d be Vast Change as I sped through the Kennedy, Johnson, and early Nixon years. Accordingly, I surged through the decade on my own little missions, many of them of little importance now, but then I strutted through the time track, daring to be part of the history of the era.

  In this book of remembrances I decided not to drain to its dregs the urn of bitter memory, to paraphrase Shelley’s famous line. I have chosen to accentuate the energy, the wild fun, the joyful creativity, and the schemes of Better World derring-do and to consign as much bitterness and bad memories as possible to the halls of darkness.

  My parents raised me not to be a whiner, so I’ve done my best to avoid being a whining former rock and roller and countercultural icon whose “Total Assault on the Culture” turned out to be composed, at least in good part, of woof tickets. Even though a good number of our Dreams turned to ashes, these years still pulse in my psyche with their wonderment, fun, creativity, eros, visions of human betterment, and, yes, total assault on the culture.

  ED SANDERS

  Woodstock, New York

  The Glories of the Early ’60s

  In the fall of 1963 Allen Ginsberg mailed me a poem called “The Change,” which he’d just created while riding on the Kyoto-Tokyo express train in Japan. On the train he had broken down and wept while writing that he was on a new path now, that he had returned to his body after the ecstatic years following the 1948 vision (alluded to in “Howl”) in which he had heard the ghostly voice of William Blake chanting the poems from The Songs of Experience beginning, “Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick” and “Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time” in an apartment in Spanish Harlem. From 1948 through half of 1963 he had obeyed the implications of his Blake visions, searching for personal Illuminations and Ecstasy. But now, after a spiritual journey to India and Japan, he was determined to live in his own body, not seek Visions so much, and settle into a loving mammaldom with all other fellow suffering beings. I published “The Change” at once in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, an issue I printed just after the assassination of John Kennedy, a murder that was beginning to shriek in our minds and would keep shrieking for years to come.

  When Allen mailed me his visionary poem, I was in the midst of my final two semesters at New York University, studying Greek and Latin. In my spare time I studied Egyptian. On the benches of Washington Square Park, near the NYU main building, during the warm months I began to set two Blake poems, “The Sick Rose” and “Ah, Sun-Flower,” to melodies. I was inspired by Allen’s having heard Blake himself chanting those very poems in an apartment in Spanish Harlem, some fifteen years before. I also came up with a melody for “How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field,” one of Blake’s earliest works of genius, written as early as age eleven. These songs provided the kernel of identity for the founding, a year later, of The Fugs.

  The issue with Ginsberg’s “The Change”

  The year 1963 was an important one for me. City Lights published my Poem from Jail, written in 1961 after I had attempted to swim aboard a Polaris submarine during its commissioning in Groton, Connecticut, and conduct a peace vigil atop its missile hatches. I had a kind of rebel renown as the publisher of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, which I had begun in early ’62. In a “Secret Location in the Lower East Side,” I printed around five hundred copies of each issue on a mimeograph machine on colored paper and gave almost all of them away free.

  A Secret Location in the Lower East Side, number 1, February 1962.

  The Mimeograph Revolution

  There were other mimeograph presses around the country, and some were beginning to call it the Mimeograph Revolution. Out in Cleveland a young poet named d. a. levy began Renegade Press, utilizing a combination of mimeo and letterpress. By 1963 I believed in the spark, the iskra, that the revolutionaries of Russia early in the twentieth century talked about. I believed that the iskra could or would somehow burst out of a poetry café on Second Avenue or inspire a network of minds and sweep America to Great Change. Or even that a network of mimeographs steadily publishing, coast to coast, city to town to bookstore to rebel café, could help a nonviolent revolution to blossom forth in full bread and roses glory!!!

  The Founding of My Magazine

  I founded Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts in February 1962 after a bunch of us, mostly friends from the Catholic Worker, went to see Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees at the Charles Theater on Avenue B. I was there mainly because the ad for the film in the Village Voice stated that my hero Allen Ginsberg was in it. For years I had avidly read Jonas Mekas’s weekly Voice column, “Movie Journal,” which mainly focused on the struggles and delights of the world of underground films.

  I sensed from reading Mekas’s weekly columns that he was a person of great generosity and communality of spirit. That is, it wasn’t all Me! Me! Me! as in so much of the avant-garde. I thought he had a genuine will to help other filmmakers thrive and survive. I later learned that Mekas had paid for the printing of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures.

  Mekas had just founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and lived nearby on Twelfth Street, although I didn’t know that while I was watching Guns of the Trees. The Lower East Side in those years was a Do-It-Now zone, and you knew maybe only a snippet of someone’s history or scene, if anything at all. All I knew is that the first thing I read each week in the Voice was “Movie Journal.”

  I was particularly fascinated by the appearance of Allen Ginsberg as a narrator in the film. I had not yet met Ginsberg, although I had memorized “Howl” when I was still in Missouri in 1957, and I had seen him at Beat/New York School readings, such as one in November 1959 where he read at the Living Theater with Frank O’Hara. Wow. As I sat fascinated in the Charles Theater that February night with my pals, I never could have dreamed that the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” would become a close friend.

 
; Ad in the Village Voice for the screening of Guns of the Trees, February 14, 1962. Beat-up image from microfilm at Vassar Library.

  “All those groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress” dedication, early issue, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts

  At one point in Guns of the Trees Ginsberg chanted one of his poems with the sentence “I dreamt that J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hall of the Capitol.” It was a fragment that opened up such huge vistas of possibility in my mind! I transformed the fragment into the dedication for my soon-to-be-published magazine.

  Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

  Just as Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926 (and not near the Dniester River in Russia) because the pogroms in the Russian Pale, first in the 1880s and later around the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, drove his mother’s and father’s families to the American Dream, so, too, were Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, driven from Lithuania to the United States, this time in their case by the Nazis. In the early 1940s Jonas and Adolfas put out a mimeographed anti-Nazi newspaper, cutting stencils on a typewriter in a woodshed behind their house in Semeniskiai in Lithuania. Later they escaped from a German slave labor camp.