by Sanders, Ed
The Pranksters had placed the flag on the couch deliberately, in a reference to Kerouac’s character Sal in On The Road, who as part of his duties working as a guard in a military barracks accidentally puts an American flag upside down on a sixty-foot pole. “Do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag upside down on a government pole?” a fellow guard warned him. Sal replied, “‘Upside down?’ I was horrified; of course I hadn’t realized it.”
What to do about the flag?—an archetypal ’60s question.
Locating Peace Eye
Right around the time that Kerouac was folding the American flag in a swank Park Avenue apartment, I was busy looking for a storefront to rent in the Lower East Side. I wanted to open the Peace Eye Bookstore. I was a new father, had family obligations, and needed to have a source of income beyond weekends at the Times Square cigar store, plus whatever my rare book catalogs engendered. Selling books and literary relics was remunerative enough that I decided to open a bookstore and “scrounge lounge.” I could put my mimeograph machine there and create a cultural facility as well.
I found a perfect store at 383 East Tenth Street, between Avenues B and C, just a few hundred feet away from my favorite bars, the Annex and Stanley’s. It had been a Kosher meat market. I signed a two-year lease for Peace Eye on November 10, 1964. The first year the rent was $50 a month, which went to $60 for the second year. The owner was something called “The Sixth Street Investing Corporation.” I went to its offices at 405 Lexington Avenue to sign the lease. I must say, the owner rarely intervened, however controversial the Peace Eye Bookstore became during its two years on East Tenth.
Tuli Kupferberg, Beat hero, lived next door, above the Lifschutz Wholesale Egg Store, with his longtime mate (later wife), Sylvia Topp.
Tuli Kupferberg
I met Tuli Kupferberg outside the Charles Theater on Avenue B back in 1962. He was selling his magazine Birth to those who were attending the screening. He offered to let me publish a poem. I’d seen his picture in a number of books. I learned a little bit later that he was the guy who’d “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge,” as described in Howl. (It was actually the Manhattan Bridge.) I later asked him why. He replied, “I wasn’t being loving enough.”
He didn’t like to talk about the jump. Later he commented in the book called the Annotated Howl:In the Spring of 1945 at the age of 21, full of youthful angst, depression over the war and other insanities and at the end of a disastrous love affair, I went over the side of the Manhattan Bridge.
I was picked up tenderly by the crew of a passing tug and taken to Gou-veneur Hospital. My injuries were relatively slight (fracture of a transverse spinal process) but enough to put me in a body cast.
In the hospital wards I met other suicide attempters less fortunate than me: one who wd walk on crutches and one who wd never walk again.
Throughout the years I have been annoyed many times by “O did you really jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?” as if that was a great accomplishment. Remember I was a failure at the attempt.
“Had I succeeded there wd have been 3 less wonderful beings (my children) in the world, no Fugs, and a few missing good poems & songs, & some people (including some lovely women, hey!) who might have missed my company.
We were very glad he failed at the jump. The world would have missed such poetic classics as “Nothing,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Morning Morning,” “CIA Man,” “Einstein Never Wore Socks,” and “ When the Mode of the Music Changes.”
Bard Ted Berrigan wrote something profound about Tuli for a reading Tuli gave at Israel Young’s Folklore Center:An Appreciation
Despite the fact that he is very wise, and in
spite of his sweet and Saintly nature, Tuli
Kupferberg is a truly marvelous poet. He is
probably the first and last of a disappearing
breed of Wandering Hebrew minstrels, a street
singer who shambles sadly through the slums of
the world dispensing love, joy and jokes
indiscriminately. That’s what I call true
poetry.
Tuli was born on September 28, 1923, on Cannon Street, in the far-down-there Lower East Side (a street mostly torn down later to make room for one of those big housing projects). Tuli recounted his heritage:Both of my parents came from Galicia, which was a province in northeastern Ostertreich-Hungary—Austria-Hungary before World War I. They were both Galicianas. My mother came from the Ukrainian section and he came from the Polish section. They met here. They are all Hasidim. So the Hasidic movement was all over Poland and Russia and Hungary. So, they were brought up in Hasidic households, but both of them broke, eventually, once they came to America. They met here. One must have come in 1905 and one in 1909, I’m not sure.
His father ran a sequence of luggage shops in New York City, and Yiddish was spoken at home. “My father wanted, like a lot of his other relatives, wanted to open a store or a little factory. One of my uncles had a luggage factory. So my father opened luggage stores in three places during the Depression, and failed three times.”
Later in life Tuli’s dad, as Tuli recalled,became a clothing machine operator, in men’s clothing. The union eventually became the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. And he was involved in the early strikes; something that he didn’t even know I would be interested in, but I found out later—the bosses were Jews, and the workers were Jews, and it was sweatshop. The way American clothing is now produced all over the world, that was done here, you worked under terrible (conditions). And the bosses also hired thugs to break up union meetings, and so on. My father got arrested and beaten up a few times.
As a child Tuli liked the music he heard at his parents’ social club: They had klezmer music at these things. I would go as a little kid, that high maybe [motions with his hand]. Five years old, I remember. I remember the music, and I would stand watching the musicians, that was the best part of the wedding. There would be, like, one every week. The music really fascinated me. They were mostly dance melodies. There was a huge—there was Yiddish radio that I listened to up until my early 20s, which came on every Sunday, which had a wide variety; like the Jewish Daily Forward had these Jewish intellectuals analyzing—they had an intellectual program, they would analyze the news, then there were advertisements, and then [laughs] there was a clothing store—I remember some of the advertisements on it. I’ll sing one of them for you.
He sang:Joe and Paul Estora Bargain Niggen
Joe and Pal Minkenna Bargain kriegen
A Suit A Coat A Gabardine
Bringt deine kleinen zing
Then there was one that went:
Marshak’s Malted Milk, it’s good for kleine kinder
Planters peanut oil it good for backen cake.
He claimed to have received his sense of fun and joy from his mother. “I realize that my father was a very isolated, stern person; not a happy camper; he was one of 16 children. But my mother was a very lively woman; had a lot of humor, and she loved country things, and she loved society. And I realize this is a kind of Russian-Ukrainian characteristic, so whatever I have of conviviality, I think, came from her.”
He graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and got a degree from Brooklyn College. At Brooklyn College “I belonged to the jazz club, and I saw Charlie Christian play with a battery operated guitar, at some black bar near Brownsville.” He wrote poems and short stories and later moved to Greenwich Village, where, in the 1950s, he met Sylvia Topp.
I originally knew of Tuli from his appearance in Beat Generation anthologies, such as The Beats, and from his poetry published in the Village Voice. During the last few years we had become friends.
The Physicality of Peace Eye
Peace Eye had three rooms, a courtyard in the back, and a basement that featured huge waterbugs on the posts. The walls were white, and the metal ceiling I painted red. Peace Eye’s back room, with a door leading to the rear courtyard, had a bathroom and sink, plus a gas-
fueled burning device next to the sink. I think the device was used to singe chicken feathers because there was a convex mound of something on the floor that was hardened to the point that I had just covered it over with black floor paint when I first rented the store. I thought it might be congealed chicken grease. I had put a couch back there for the occasional guest.
My friend artist Bill Beckman made a sign made out of the glass door of a library bookcase, which I hung on the inside of the front window. It had the words “Peace Eye Bookstore.” On each side of the words was an Eye of Horus . The outer window already had the words “Strictly” and the Hebrew letters for “Kosher.” I decided to leave both in place. I moved my mimeograph from the Secret Location in the back building on Avenue A to the freshly painted Peace Eye Bookstore.
Bugger—An Anthology
As the first publication in the new store, I gathered together an anthology titled Bugger—An Anthology in November, with poems by myself, Bill Szabo, Allen Ginsberg (“This Form of Life Needs Sex”), Ted Berrigan, John Harriman, Ron Padgett, Al Fowler, John Keys, and Harry Fainlight. Some of the Howlean “Best Minds” of 1964.
Meanwhile, after the poetry readings at Café Le Metro poets began to congregate at Stanley Tolkin’s dance bar, called the Dom, located in the basement of the Polish National Home building on St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third Avenues.
I thought of a line dance called “The Bugger” right around the time of the anthology and tried to create a B Line at the Dom. Stanley came rushing out to stop the line just as it had successfully formed on a jukebox blast of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
This was the year of “Oh, Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison; the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”; “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-las; and the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” had spent seven weeks at the number one position on the charts.
When I was in high school, I followed rock-and-roll and country and western tunes as if they were sacred chants, but by ’64 I was more attuned to civil rights songs and jazz. Inspired by poets dancing at the Dom, I began paying attention to jukeboxes for the first time since the mid-1950s and wondering about fusing poetry and this new generation of pop tunes. I was getting the urge to form a band.
Also in November ’64 I published, for Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, a limited edition of Claude Pelieu’s Automatic Pilot, translated by Mary Beach.
The cover of Bugger—An Anthology, a book that Gary Snyder dubbed “A Child’s Garden of PerVerse.”
Ed Sanders’s hand-drawn cover for Automatic Pilot, November ’64.
The Founding of The Fugs
During those years we all sang together a lot. There was often a guitar in apartments in the Lower East Side, along with a water pipe and collections of folk music and jazz LPs in milk crate storage boxes. Singing together was one of the glories of my youth. One of my favorite lines on civil rights marches was “I’ve got a home in Glory Land / that outshines the sun!” We sang “Down by the Riverside” when members of the Klan surrounded our church in Tennessee and began pelting it with rocks during the Nashville-Washington Walk for Peace back in the spring of 1962.
One night after a poetry reading at Café Le Metro, Tuli Kupferberg and I visited the Dom, where we watched poets such as Robert Creeley and Amiri Baraka (then still known as LeRoi Jones) dancing to the jukebox. Then Tuli and I retired to another bar on St. Mark’s, where I suggested we form a musical group. “We’ll set poetry to music,” I proclaimed. Tuli was all in favor of it.
We drew inspiration for The Fugs from a long and varied tradition going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the “Theory of the Spectacle” in Aristotle’s Poetics and moving forward to the famous premiere performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1896, to the poèmes simultanés of the Dadaists in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker’s seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, to the songs of the civil rights movement, and to our belief that there were oodles of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution that were not being used.
At first we didn’t have a name. An early one I came up with was “The Yodeling Socialists.” Tuli was too anarcho for that, and even though I am the only Beatnik who can yodel, he wasn’t into the Great Yod. Another early name for The Fugs was “The Freaks.” Tuli and I immediately began writing a bunch of songs. In a notebook in late 1964, I jotted:
Songs for the Freaks:1. Banana
2. Little Mary Bell (Blake’s poem)
3. I Love to Tell the Story (Christian hymn from my youth)
4. How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field (Blake)
5. Take Me Away to That Land of Peace
On the next page of the notebook were some possible lyrics to number 5:Take me
take take
away
way way
to that land
of peace
come o come with me
to that land of peace
where we meet
all rainy
under the
ashen tree
peace o peace
come stomp me on!
Wish I had finished it and put it on the first Fugs album.
Tuli and I decided to invite a young man named Ken Weaver to join us in our new rock-and-roll/poetry adventure. (The term “folk rock” had not yet been invented.) Weaver had been a drummer with the El Campo, Texas, Rice Birds marching band when in high school, and he owned a large buffalo hide drum. He had been tossed out of the air force for smoking pot, and he proudly displayed his discharge papers on the wall of his pad. He had been a volunteer typist for various Fuck You Press projects and, with his drumming skill, was soon an eager participant in the unnamed group with the very tentative title “The Freaks.”
I told the Folklore Center’s Israel Young about my plans to form a band. His advice was “Don’t do it.”
The Founding of LeMar
I talked it over with Allen Ginsberg, and we decided to form the Committee to Legalize Marijuana (LeMar). Joining us was a guy named Randy Wicker, a gay activist who not long after ran one of the first Protest Button stores on the East Side. We soon organized probably the first demonstrations to legalize grass in American history.
This history-making two-hour stroll around Tompkins Square Park advocated three main points, valid right up to the early years of the twenty-first century:1. Legalize the use of Marihuana
2. Legalize the sale & transport of pot
3. Free all prisoners.
First legalize grass demonstration in U.S. history (I think), Tompkins Square, December 27, 1964. Flier printed at the newly opened Peace Eye Bookstore.
The Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement at the University of California was total music to the mind when it arrived in late ’64, at the close of a year of clampdown in New York City. The Ping-Pong ball bounced from the West: the Free Speech Movement! Yay!
Freedom Summer had energized the colleges. A student at UC Berkeley named Mario Savio had been down in Mississippi that summer working with SNCC, and he returned to UC Berkeley to witness and help lead the resistance to administration attempts to stop civil rights activism among Berkeley’s students, especially by SNCC and CORE.
I followed the Free Speech Movement as best I could from articles in the Village Voice and sometimes the New York Times. Savio had been a patient of Miriam’s father, a doctor with a practice in Glen Oaks, Queens, on Union Turnpike.
On October 19 a young man named Jack Weinberg was arrested at a CORE fund-raising table on campus and hundreds of students sat down around a police car when officers tried to take him away. After a thirty-six-hour sit-down Weinberg was released and the Free Speech Movement began. It practiced the civil rights tactics of sit-ins, nonviolent confrontations, and use of the media.
Within days there was a big student strike whose banners wer
e seen around the world. According to the movement’s analysis, colleges were slave units for training dutiful drudges for corporations. Protesters demanded student participation in how universities were run.
On December 5 there was a large rally and occupation of Sproul Hall in protest against the suspension of Savio and other students. The frostocrats called in the police and National Guard to arrest those sitting in, which resulted in a student strike and a walkout of faculty.
On December 7 Mario Savio was dragged from the mike before an audience of 13,000 at the Berkeley campus. In the end, however, the university acceded to the demands of the Free Speech Movement for campus political freedom.
It was welcome and inspirational news in the Lower East Side and the Village, as the words “Free Speech” made their mark. Thus 1964 came to a close in the rapid ointment of Time.
A few weeks later in the Village Voice I spotted an ad for a “Free Speech Hoot,” featuring the Danny Kalb Quartet, John Hammond, and Judy Roderick at a hotel up on Sixty-third Street. Kalb would go on to found the Blues Project.
Free Speech, part of the Great Bill of Rights—use it or lose it.