by Sanders, Ed
1965
I was tasting a tad of renown. My magazine was very sought after; I was publishing many of my literary heroes. And articles were now being written about me. Since 1960 (when junkies kept breaking into my mail box at 266 East Fourth), I’d had Box 193 at Stuyvesant Station. The employees at Stuy were themselves pretty far out and tolerant, even when letters started coming into “Ed Sanders, Fuck You, Stuyvesant Station, New York” or “Fuck You, Peace Eye Books Store.” I never had a single complaint from them during those years. It made me proud of being in a free country and having a tolerant post office branch.
A supporter named Everett Gellert, who was a magazine publisher, bought me a groovy A. B. Dick electric mimeograph machine, which I almost immediately put to use as soon as it was installed in the second room of Peace Eye. I kept my original beautiful little Speed-o-Print mimeo in the Secret Location on Avenue A but soon donated it to a poet named John Keyes, who took it with him when he moved to England. I used the new A. B. Dick to print Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, volume 8, number 5, which came off the press in February.
Writing Songs
As for the band Tuli and I had agreed to found, our first duty was to create some songs. I already had four Blake poems, inspired by Allen Ginsberg, set to music. Two, “How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field” and “Ah, Sun-Flower, Weary of Time,” would appear on our first album. I had a Wollensak tape recorder already, by our bed in Miriam’s and my new pad on East Twenty-seventh, and on it I composed a bunch of tunes, “Comin’ Down,” for instance, and other ditties such as the falsetto “Toe Queen Love,” which, alas, never was recorded anywhere but in my mind.
Tuli created “Jack Off Blues,” “Hallucination Horrors,” “That’s Not My Department,” and “Ten Commandments.” I dashed off “Coca Cola Douche,” “Swinburne Stomp,” “The Gobble,” and “The I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock.”
One of Tuli’s most popular and lasting songs was “Nothing,” written to the melody of a Yiddish folksong. It may have had part of its origins in Louis Aragon’s Dada manifesto: “No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, enough of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.”
Some of Tuli’s songs were “out there,” such as “Caca Rocka” and “Hallucination Horrors,” but a good number would become “classics,” such as “The Ten Commandments,” “Kill for Peace,” “Morning Morning,” “CIA Man,” and “Supergirl.”
Once Tuli told me how he got the idea for “Kill for Peace.” He had spotted the sentence “Pray for Peace” on a letter and then, in his noggin, sprouted the idea for a modification, leading to a Fugs classic tune. We heard over the years that soldiers in Vietnam were known to sing it.
One night in Peace Eye Ken Weaver began jotting some lines for his “I Couldn’t Get High” in a notebook. We got excited, and I took over to continue putting some of his lines into a notebook.
As for the name, my main ideas, “The Freaks” or “The Yodeling Socialists,” were set aside when Tuli Kupferberg came up with “The Fugs,” named after Norman Mailer’s euphemism for “Fuck,” which he utilized in his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead.
Original note page for “I Couldn’t Get High,” composed at Peace Eye all in one swoosh.
Marijuana Newsletters
One project for the Committee to Legalize Marijuana was the Marijuana Newsletter, which I published at Peace Eye. I hand-drew on stencils and typed the two issues of the Marijuana Newsletter, one in January and another in March.
As in my magazine I ran humorous “ads” in the Marijuana Newsletter.
The Marijuana Newsletter created quite a stir and set in motion various currents in the nation for change. It showed that you could publish such a newsletter, and get away with it. It led to people such as d. a. levy in Cleveland and John Sinclair in Detroit publishing their own calls for legalization.
I ran a “Pot Market” report, and we had a “Best Stash” contest (which was won by the brilliant Ron Padgett). LeMar was supposed to pay the bard a $5 prize. Did we?
While writing this memoir, I finally mailed Padgett his long overdue fiver, forty-four years late.
Trouble with Jim Bishop
Randy Wicker, C. T. Smith, and Peter Orlovsky were arrested February 6 for selling the Marijuana Newsletter on the streets of the West Village. The ACLU agreed to handle the case.
After the first issue of the Marijuana Newsletter was published, an establishment columnist, Jim Bishop, wrote a hostile column about it, which was nationally syndicated. A sample paragraph trumpeted, “Its use produces prolonged sensation, thirst, hunger for sweets, delusions of grandeur, delusions of persecution, hilarity and delirium. The chronic use of marijuana induces mental dullness and insanity. . . . Pot is the first step on the narcotics ladder.”
Uh oh. The heat was on. “It is time for those of us who believe in law and order to tell our police departments that we stand beside them in their struggle.”
I published an “Open Letter to Jim Bishop” by William Burroughs in the March 15 issue. Burroughs wrote:Dear Mr. Bishop, I have been a fan of yours for about five or six years. Your column has always held my interest on the many occasions I’ve had to read it. On March 2, 1965, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Seattle’s Hearst outlet, printed your article entitled: “Marijuana Newsletter—a Shocking Revelation.”
As I read your column I was indeed shocked at what you wrote about marijuana. In your article you wrote that “The chronic use of marijuana induces mental dullness and insanity.”
This may surprise you, but I know a man who has smoked marijuana since he was thirteen years. He is now in his fifties, retired, and is neither mentally dull nor is he in any stretch of the imagination insane. . . .
You further stated in your article that, “Pot is the first step on the narcotics ladder,” and that those who smoke marijuana, “. . . can soon be moved to heroin.” Again you seem to disagree with Dr. deRopp who states in Drugs and the Mind that “the practice of marijuana smoking was not observed to lead to addiction.” Also the findings of Mayor LaGuardia’s committee that, “The instances are extremely rare where the habit of marijuana smoking is associated with addiction.”
Burroughs went on to challenge, because of the badly written quality of Bishop’s column, whether he had actually written the column himself.
In the same issue we also printed Bishop’s actual column from the New York Journal-American , a paper that would not survive the television age. I drew a couple of “ads” on stencils for the Bishop rebuttal issue.
From all this hirdum-dirdum over a mimeographed newsletter printed at the Peace Eye Bookstore came Pot Trouble to others, such as poets d. a. levy in Cleveland and John Sinclair in Detroit, who took up the LeMar call to set up chapters in other cities.
Orlovsky and a Break-In
On February 21, just three days before the opening celebration of Peace Eye, someone broke in to the store and stole Fugs equipment, including Ken Weaver’s groovy wide buffalo hide drum. To show what a good-souled person Peter Orlovsky was, he was passing Peace Eye that night at midnight and noticed that someone had broken in. He went inside, nailed the door shut, and left a note apologizing for not staying the night to ward off further robbery attempts: “12 AM. Seemed you were on verge of getting robbed—window glass broken—door closed but unlocked—desk chair overturned—& I don’t have yr home phone no. to call & tell you—Have nailed the door, and will leave by side entrance—you might be at work (at the cigar store on Times Square) will call you there—I hope I don’t regret not having spent the night here in case other robbers try to enter again. Love, Peter.” (This was written on the back of an issue of the Marijuana Newsletter.)
Throug
hout the 1960s and beyond owl-eyed Peter O. was always a cheerful helper. Once in Washington Square Park he showed up after having escaped from a ward at Bellevue Hospital. (He periodically went bonkers.) He sold me right off his back a pajama top sporting the logo of the hospital, for $4. I used to wear the top at early Fugs concerts. It’s true that Peter could get a bit freaky under the influence of amphetamine. Miriam recalls him once showing up at our apartment and proceeding to help clean in an A-amplified rush, swabbing with a toothbrush the coils on the back of our refrigerator.
He was a remarkable poet. His poem in Don Allen’s New American Poetry , “Second Poem,” written in Paris in 1957, was one that astounded my generation.
The First Fugs Concert
A Brillo box first appeared in a Warhol exhibit at the Stable Gallery in New York City in ’64. The ones I saw were made of plywood, with silkscreened Brillo images on the sides. They made an impact in the noggins of the Fuck You Generation.
When I founded The Fugs, I had an idea of using one of Warhol’s Brillo boxes as a drum. Ted and Sandy Berrigan had one in their apartment on East Ninth. Oh, I lusted for that Brillo box! I should have gone to Andy himself; I bet he would have given me a supply of Fugs Brillo box drums! Another opportunity for a Date with History slipped from our frantic grasp!
Ken Weaver certainly could have used a Warhol Brillo box as a drum for the first Fugs concert, held at the grand opening of the new location of Israel Young’s Folklore Center, on Sixth Avenue at West Third Street. Instead, when the junkies stole his buffalo hide drum from Peace Eye, he was forced to perform on a drum made from a Krasdale peach box!
Possible Fugs Brillo box drum. We could have attached a guitar pickup on Warhol’s Brillo and made world musical instrument history!!
Silkscreened Warhol Flowers
By 1964 Warhol had begun making startling and controversial movies. Meanwhile, his bold adventures in painting continued. He had completed work on the first Electric Chair paintings and on twenty images of a young woman spread on the dented roof of an auto, who had leaped off the Empire State Building, a work called “White.” In January the two-panel “Blue Electric Chair,” for instance, was exhibited in France to great acclaim.
While the Factory, Warhol’s studio, was being covered in aluminum foil, from January to April ’64, he started working on the painted wood Brillo boxes, an act of creativity razor-sharp in its controversy. The New York World’s Fair opened in the summer of 1964. Andy had been commissioned to do a mural for the American pavilion, so he prepared a 20’ x 20’ work in black and white called “The Thirteen Most Wanted Men,” which featured the police mug shots of criminals. It was installed, along with works by Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and others. The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was displeased with the work and ordered it removed. Rockefeller already was well known for such things—he had ordered a famous Diego Rivera mural in Rockefeller Center painted over during the 1930s, and during World War II Rockefeller had censored a government-sponsored movie by Orson Welles.
Ginsberg reading a magazine at Peace Eye, with Warhol flower on the wall in the background, 1965. Ed Sanders collection.
Warhol was instructed to remove or replace “Wanted Men” within twenty-four hours. When World’s Fair officials would not accept his idea for a substitution (a painting with panels of a public official named Robert Moses), Andy went out to the World’s Fair pavilion and had the work painted over in silver.
Andy’s friend Henry Geldzahler came along with him to the fair. Geldzahler suggested that Andy give up the “death and disaster” series he had been painting for a number of months. To show what he meant, Geldzahler pointed to some flowers in a magazine. The result was a great series of poppy flowers, truly glyphs of joy, based on a photo from Modern Photography magazine. The flowers were wildly successful and predicted the American flower power movement three years ahead of its time.
I asked Andy if he’d do some banners for the opening of Peace Eye. He said sure and suggested I go down to Orchard Street and get some colored cloths, which I brought up to his studio. Shortly thereafter he silkscreened three banners—red, yellow, and blue—of his poppies. I placed them on the walls of Peace Eye.
The Grand Opening of Peace Eye Bookstore
The Fugs began to rehearse at the Peace Eye Bookstore, and they became popular events as scads of friends began to show up to hang out during run-throughs. We hooked up with The Holy Modal Rounders, a duo consisting of Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel, who agreed to perform with us at the Grand Opening of the Peace Eye Bookstore on February 24. Also performing, in addition to me, Tuli, and Ken Weaver, was poet Bill Szabo, on “amphetamine flute.”
Official invitation to the Grand Opening of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the celebration of the third anniversary issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, and the world premiere performance of The Fugs.
The store was totally packed for the Opening. I affixed the three Andy Warhol silkscreened flower images to the walls of Peace Eye. Time magazine sent a team of reporters. A limousine arrived, depositing author James Michener in evening attire. He told me that Andy Warhol had urged him to attend.
I asked the crowd to stand back, and The Fugs set up. I made sure the performance was taped. We did about twenty minutes, with ditties such as “Nothing,” a tune called “Bull-Tongue Clit,” also “The Ten Commandments” and the “Swinburne Stomp,” featuring a few stanzas from A. C. Swinburne’s play Atalanta in Calydon. One of my professors from NYU, Frank Peters, was there. His favorite tune from The Fugs set that night, he told me, was “Swinburne Stomp.” William Burroughs asked me, “Which one is from Time?” I pointed out the reporter with the first name Chris. He stared at the guy and replied, “I thought so.” Burroughs disliked Time intensely. I think it had to do with Time’s coverage of Burroughs shooting his wife, Joan Vollmer, to death in September 1951.
Fuck You, volume 5, number 8, February 1965, Table of Contents.
I had boxes of Fuck You/s on hand. I waited until the place was filled up and then, with Peter Orlovsky’s help, started distributing the free copies to the crowd.
Andy Warhol cover, Fuck You.
One point of controversy was my publishing W. H. Auden’s great erotic poem, “The Platonic Blow,” in the third anniversary issue. As a fan of The Age of Anxiety, I was convinced it was Auden’s poem. It is a masterful work, worthy of Auden in rhyme, sound, and metric. Jason Epstein, a big-time editor at Random House, was on hand and skeptical. I had collected two copies of Auden’s poem, one originating from a person at the Morgan Library, which supplied the text I printed. Andy Warhol also prepared the cover for the third anniversary issue, a frame from his Couch movie.
The schedule was relentless. Three days later we performed at the Gallery 111:The Fugs will perform at the Gallery 111
at 111 St. Marks Place, Saturday
February 27, 1965, 4 p.m.
The performances kept coming, from now until the final concerts of the 1960s, in February ’69 with the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground in Pittsburgh, then at Rice University in Houston, and concluding at the Vulcan Gas Works in Austin.
The Hideous Rolling Thunder
The schedule for Lyndon Johnson also was relentless, as the United States began a hideous bombing campaign named “Rolling Thunder” less than a week after the Grand Opening of Peace Eye. Its targets were chosen at first for their psychological/political significance rather than for their military worth.
On an average day eight hundred tons of bombs were dropped. Think of it—eight hundred tons! Rolling Thunder was supposed to be an eight-week quickie, but the Fates wove else and the Thunder stretched timeward in a skein of grief and evil for three dread years.
The Viet Cong stood firm, against which then there was “graduated pressure”—that is, more slaughter from America. But as U.S. protesters sometimes chanted, “The people! united! can never be defeated!” And so ten years of American explosions floated past the looms o
f murder.
The First Selma March
There were 29,500 humans in Selma, Alabama, west of Montgomery, 15,100 of whom were black—that’s over 50 percent—yet only 1 percent of voters were black. For seven weeks that year the great Martin Luther King led hundreds of Selma’s citizens seeking to register.
Sheriff Jim Clark led his troops with billy-club bashes and the jolts of cattle prods as 2,000 were arrested. A black youth named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot in the stomach and died.
Martin King and 770 were arrested picketing the county courthouse in Selma. Sheriff Clark and his crack clutter of crackers continued with cattle prods and smashing clubs as they marched 165 children to a “makeshift” jail.
After the whites killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, Martin King inspired a march on March 6 from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery, fifty miles away. The purpose of the March 6 action was to get the vote for blacks. Attorney General of the United States Nicholas Katzenbach advised Martin King not to actually take part in the walk. Southern Christian Leadership Conference deputy Hosea Williams walked in King’s place.
Protesters marched out of the city of Selma, two abreast, toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. As they crossed the span, two hundred state police with whips, tear gas, and clubs assaulted them and knocked most to the ground.