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

  It had the leathery look of something un-American. The grainy footage was like a lurching underground movie but told a grainy groan of despicability on televisions around the world. It was an early example of footage-forged social change. The next day in Selma, James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten to death by crackers—a murder case still open.

  Selma Two

  MLK led another march, two days later, with 1,500 on hand, but the marchers turned back because Dr. King sensed that the local power structure was ready to spring a violent trap on the marchers just beyond the bridge leading from Selma.

  Selma Three

  On March 21 Martin Luther King began march number 3—fifty-four miles in five days—joined by luminaries such as Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Ralph Bunche Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Leonard Bernstein. Johnson sent federal marshals, 1,000 military police, and a slew (1,900) of “federalized” Alabama National Guardsmen to protect the legal march. “Segregation’s got to fall. . . . You never can jail us all,” the marchers chanted. Twenty-five thousand gathered in Montgomery on March 25 for the closing rally.

  We followed Selma in the Lower East Side. It seemed like something Great was happening.

  The Fugs at the American Theater for Poets

  On March 8 The Fugs, “the freakiest singing group in the history of Western civilization,” performed at the East End Theatre, located at 85 East Fourth Street, run by poets Diane di Prima and Alan Marlowe. The Fugs for this concert were Sanders, Kupferberg, Weber, Stampfel, Fowler, and Weaver.

  Hot off the Peace Eye mimeo, complete with forty-five-year-old masking tape to pin to Peace Eye wall.

  Al Fowler and Bill Szabo were early members of The Fugs. Both were hooked on heroin, which made it difficult for them to come to rehearsals or keep to an exact, non-sweaty schedule. So they soon went their ways.

  I’d met Diane di Prima and her husband, Alan Marlowe, at the Phoenix Bookshop on Cornelia Street. All of us had seen her famous photo sitting up on the piano at the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street—a Beat Generation image for the Ages.

  Diane typed a flier called “Special Events” for the American Theatre for Poets for the week of March 3–9. March 3 saw Brion Gysin’s “Permutations and Permutated Portraits,” plus Robert Filliou, “Street Fighting/Whispered Art History.” Then March 4, at midnight, Dick Higgins performed “Requiem for Wagner the Criminal Mayor.” On Monday, March 8 were The Fugs, “Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Kenneth Weaver in a new rock-and-roll program.” The next day, March 9, Allan Kaprow gave a talk called “The Techniques and New Goals of Happenings.” Tickets were $2; students, 99¢.

  A Three-Day Fug Festival

  On March 29–30 and April 5 there was the same lineup, but without Al Fowler. We couldn’t really have a junkie in a band that didn’t make a lot of money. He couldn’t take time to rehearse, for instance. “Admission: $2, students and grass-cadets 99¢.”

  I had learned from Allen Ginsberg to have a press list. For the rest of his life he kept feeding me lists of press contacts. During his later years his press list was at least twenty pages long! And I quickly learned techniques of hyperbole, as in “They’re here!! Back by popular demand, The Fugs, the most unbelievable singing group in the history of Western civilization!”

  Leaflet for the three-day Fug festival.

  The three-day Fug festival featured the world premiere of what we actually hoped might become an underground dance sensation: “The Gobble.” Unfortunately, it was about forty years ahead of its time.

  A Fugs Show Cost Me $250,000

  I sometimes wore the cloth flower banners Andy Warhol had made for the opening of Peace Eye as a kind of shawl, especially at Fugs shows. At the three-day festival Tuli wanted to sing a ditty he’d just written. It was not my favorite tune, so I had him sing it bent over, with his head near the floor. During his bent-over crooning, I draped the yellow Warhol Flower silkscreen over him. He crooned a cappella to the melody of the James Bond movie theme Goldfinger, his tune with the title “Pussy Galore.”

  It began:They call her Pussy Galore

  She’s a girl from the Eastern Shore

  And she flew out to fame

  And her name it is Pussy Galore

  A fink named Goldfinger

  Tried to play some stinkfinger

  With our Pussy but she wouldn’t give in

  to a coldfinger . . .

  et al.

  Later in the concert, during the freakout we always provided at the end of “Nothing,” when we rolled on the floor and broke things—I was always smashing up tambourines—that very night, perhaps in a pique of self-abnegation, I tore up the beautiful Warhol banner, the very one I had used to drape the bent-over Tuli during “Pussy Galore,” at the conclusion of “Nothing.” It was a very expensive tear-up.

  Another of the Warhol colored silk-screened flowers, the green one, I used as a rain cape and accidentally left in a deli near the Peace Eye Bookstore.

  The single red Warhol banner I managed to keep. Decades later Miriam and I sold it. It’s now called “The Peace Eye Diptych.” Not long ago I saw it in a Sotheby’s auction listing, where it sold for $250,000. That’s why I say a Fugs show in which I tore up a Warhol banner cost me $250,000, and if I count the time I left the Warhol flower screen in the deli, that places my loss at $500k!!

  APO-33 for Burroughs

  I was hanging out with William Burroughs quite a bit in the first half of 1965. He gave me a manuscript to publish! I was excited and designed it according to my usual up-Beat, bacchic-American, use-the-Bill-of-Rights design methods.

  The Peace Eye Diptych,” lately auctioned for $250,000.

  I decided to have a volunteer retype the manuscript onto mimeograph stencils, which turned out to be a mistake because then I had to photostat the numerous images in the text, cut each image out, and glue it into its appropriate position. I published the book, gluing the images onto the mimeographed text, then gave a few copies to Burroughs. I was willing to hand-glue the images into as many copies as could be sold. I felt proud and happy.

  Burroughs sent his buddy Brion Gysin up to see me during my shift at the cigar store. He told me that Bill didn’t like the edition. I had forgotten to tell the typist, my friend Elaine Solow, to keep the columns exactly as Burroughs had composed them so that the text would be absolutely accurate. The columns had gotten changed in the typing.

  I disagreed with Burroughs; I thought the edition was beautiful! My feelings were hurt, but I kept a tab on my lips. Burroughs was Burroughs, one of the Founding Beat Quartet (K, G, B, and Corso).

  Maybe only fifteen to twenty copies escaped out into the world. The rest I threw away. I bet that Burroughs collectors, and there are plenty, go nuts trying to buy the Fuck You Press edition of Health Bulletin: APO-33, a metabolic regulator.

  Spring Arts Festival in Buffalo

  I flew to Buffalo in early April to take part in the Spring Arts Festival, which included visiting Charles Olson’s classes and giving a poetry reading with Olson and John Wieners at the Student Union.

  APO-33 title page, with the usual F.Y./ Press glyphs, including a spurting Bell and Howell camera.

  Olson had invited Wieners, his student at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, to join him at the University of Buffalo, where Olson had an endowed chair. Wieners, born in Boston, had a degree from Boston University, and his book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, had made a big impression on the poets of my generation. His poetry was featured in Don Allen’s New American Poetry. I met him in 1962 when he worked at the 8th Street Bookshop, and I published him several times in Fuck You A Magazine of the Arts.

  At a bar we all frequented in Buffalo, Gregory Corso, who was on the University of Buffalo guest faculty, smoked pot openly. Charles Olson lit up some “Asthmador” brand cigarettes, containing stramonium and belladonna to relieve the effects of asthma, to mask Corso’s pot. Olson said it was to “keep Corso from blowing us out of Buffalo.”

  Like other faculty Co
rso was required to sign the so-called Feinberg certificate:

  From beat-up University of Buffalo student newspaper, April 9, 1965.

  Anyone who is a member of the Communist Party or of any organization that advocates the violent overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of New York or any political subdivision thereof cannot be employed by the State University. Anyone who was previously a member of the Communist Party or of any organization that advocates the violent overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of New York or any political subdivision thereof is directed to confer with the President before signing this certificate. . . . This is to certify that I have read the publication of the University of the State of New York, 1959, entitled Regents Rules on Subversive Activities together with the instructions set forth above and understand that these rules and regulations as well as the laws cited therein are part of the terms of my employment. I further certify that I am not now a member of the Communist Party and that if I have ever been a member of the Communist Party I have communicated that fact to the President of the State University of New York.

  Less than a month later Corso was fired because he refused to sign the loyalty oath. There was a picket organized by the Faculty-Student Committee for Academic Freedom, as reported in the University of Buffalo student newspaper.

  Peace Eye

  Peace Eye, poems, with the introduction by Charles Olson, was published in the spring of 1965.

  The First Fugs Session

  Since I’d met Harry Smith at Stanley’s Bar in the fall of ’62, I’d run into him at film screenings and at Stanley’s. I had no idea at first of his prominence as the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music. I knew him as an avant-garde filmmaker, artist, and occultist. I had visited his apartment up on West Sixty-five and marveled at the works on the wall, which included a mirror whose frame was adorned with lightning bolts and Smith-made designs. Harry came to a number of early Fugs performances. I usually called out to him from the stage. He liked it when I introduced, say, Tuli’s song “Nothing,” “In the key of Metaphysical Distress—Nothing!!”

  Then he told me he could arrange for a recording session for Folkways Records. I went to the Folkways office at 165 West Forty-sixth Street, where I met Moe Asch, the owner. He okayed Harry supervising a Fugs recording session. Harry had gotten a loan from Moe using as collateral some or perhaps all of the mythological string figures that Harry had glued onto boards. He had in mind a publication of them.

  He would come to Peace Eye and give me demonstrations of complex string games, which he would weave with his fingers, holding his hands apart while telling various stories associated with the particular string configuration just then stretched from fingers to fingers.

  Harry examined a list of tunes I had lying on the Peace Eye desk. He chuckled at a proposed Fugs tune (never recorded) “Whenever I’m in an Airplane Crash, I Reach for My Fly.”

  For that first afternoon Folkways session in April 1965 at Cue Recording on West Forty-sixth Street, The Fugs consisted of me, Tuli, Ken Weaver (on conga drum), Steve Weber (on guitar), and Peter Stampfel (on fiddle). I had prepared a sequence of twenty-two songs, in a certain order, and we recorded them in one long flow, then recorded them a second time. Steve and Peter also recorded some of their Holy Modal Rounder tunes during the session.

  At first we set up our positions—but seemed uncertain on how to proceed. “Just get going,” Harry Smith commanded from the control booth, and so we did just that. We arrayed ourselves in front of microphones and began recording the sequence of twenty-two.

  In the middle of the session a guy from Folkways showed up with a contract and modest cash for each player. The contract was for “The Fugs Jug Band.” I scratched out the words “Jug Band” on the contract.

  Harry, as far as I know, received no financial reward for the recording. He asked for a bottle of rum, which I bought. During the session, I think perhaps to spur us to greater motivity and energy, he came in from the recording booth to the room where we were singing and smashed the bottle of rum against the wall.

  We took no breaks (except to sign the contracts), and Harry instructed the recording engineer just to let the tape keep running to catch the patter between takes. Little did I know that the tunes from this initial quick, maybe three-hour session would stay in print through the rest of the century and beyond.

  On April 21, 1965, this picture was taken of me holding a “Pot Is Fun” sign at the Peace Eye Bookstore. In an interview that day I declared;Pot should be made legal the way alcohol is. The government should get the benefit of taxes on marijuana. The tobacco companies should be doing market research. Since more and more people are using it daily, and since it can’t really be put down—at least, not without spending more money than the space program is costing us—we think pot should be taken out of the hands of criminals. It should be controlled. And the only way to control it is to make it legal.

  Tape box for first Fugs recording session, Cue Recording, 117 West Forty-sixth Street; containing takes for “Defeated,”“Home Made Yodel,” “Nothing,”“Saran Wrap,”“Supergirl,”“Swinburne Stomp,” and “Kill for Peace”

  Ed Sanders inside Peace Eye. Ed Sanders archive.

  Another aim of Lemar is to get the people who use marijuana to stand up and agitate for its legalization. There are at least a quarter of a million potheads in New York City alone. Most of these aren’t what you’d call beatniks at all. They’re lawyers and newspapermen, writers, doctors, business executives—respectable professional people. If these people would break their silence and come out for the legalization of pot, our campaign would begin to make some headway.

  Such was the hope in the spring of 1965.

  War War War

  That same spring saw the rise of militancy on the part of both the military-industrial complex and the left. We’d already seen back in March the hideous Rolling Thunder attack by the U.S. military against Vietnam. A series of anti-war teach-ins had begun to raise people’s awareness of what was actually going on. Such information couldn’t be gotten from the New York dailies, only from the leaflets and brochures of the ever-increasing antiwar movement.

  In May 1965 Johnson sent troops to Santo Domingo, in a further disavowal of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy, which was already mostly in shreds because the CIA had been messing around in various Central American countries to get at Fidel Castro and overthrow him.

  When the military-industrial complex wants to put something over on a populace, it moves as quickly as a three-card monte player on a cardboard box in Washington Square Park, and as mysteriously. But rising up against the military-industrial surrealists was lonely. A Gallup Poll that summer showed 61 percent of the population backing the U.S. war in Vietnam and 24 percent saying no.

  I couldn’t figure it out! It was difficult roaming around the Lower East Side, standing in Stanley’s Bar, or riding the subway scanning the New York Times or I. F. Stone’s Weekly to get any kind of clarity about why a great nation was invading a small island democracy. The only answer I could think of is that Johnson was behaving evilly. We were all like overwhelmed animals spinning in cages. One answer would have been to do what Phil Ochs did: write songs that would raise the issues of the war and Santo Domingo as long as people listened to finely crafted melodies.

  Phil created a fine song in response to the hemic hands: “The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo.” Here’s a verse from it. Notice how elegantly and tightly he put together his lines:The fishermen sweat, they’re pausing at their nets, the day’s a-burning

  As the warships sway and thunder in the bay, loud in the morning.

  But the boy on the shore’s throwing pebbles no more, he runs a-warning

  That the Marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo.

  It raises what Johnson did to a height no reading of microfilm in later dusty years can match.

  The Mansfield Film at Cordier
& Ekstrom

  I was invited by filmmaker Willard Maas to do some filming, with others, on March 18 at an opening of Charles Henri Ford’s “Poem Posters” at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, located on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth. I’d met Ford, who had an apartment at the Dakota. I knew about his banned gay novel, Young & Evil, coauthored with his friend Parker Tyler in the 1930s. Maas would supply the film. I agreed and lugged my Bell and Howell to the opening, where I shot a couple of rolls of film as I followed actress Jayne Mansfield around.

  She was very beautiful, and very pregnant, and said yes when I asked if I could shoot her. In one memorable scene she was holding a small lapdog up to her full lips and they were licking each other. Others were also shooting film that night. The subsequent twenty-four-minute film, Poem Posters, has been described as “an invaluable historical document that shows Factory stars Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga cavorting with Beat legend William Burroughs, musician Ned Rorem, film critic Parker Tyler, literary enfants terribles Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, pop artists Jim Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, and many fabulous unknowns. Jayne Mansfield makes a show-stopping appearance—this is probably one of her last images.”