by Sanders, Ed
I complained about the raid to the East Village Other, which wrote a brief piece in which I claimed that as soon as things loosened up a bit on the personal freedom front, I’d be in the neighborhood theaters with my epic Mongolian Cluster Fuck. Except that the fuzz now had all the footage of that, too.
There was no doubt that things were heating up. That same month, August, I received a letter from a guy in Sydney, Australia, who wrote, “I have been advised by the Customs Dept. that (Ed Sanders’) Catalogue No. 5 has been seized by them. . . . They are holding same pending whether these maybe a prohibited import or not.”
Demonstrations Against Federal Narcotics Agents
The Fugs and others held a benefit at the Broadway Central Hotel for defendants Jack Martin and Dale Wilbourne. Federal agents showed up outside the gig and harassed people! I’ll never forget the image of filmmaker Jack Smith, his face bloodied from a confrontation with the police outside the Broadway Central. He and others (but not The Fugs) were arrested at the benefit. So there had to be ANOTHER benefit, this one at Art D’Lu-goff’s Village Gate, on the afternoon of August 22, at which The Fugs again performed. “A benefit for Jack Smith, Jack Martin, Dale Wilbourne, Irene Noland, and Piero Heliczer—all crudely, illegally and violently treated by FEDERAL NARCOTICS agents. . . . Sunday! at the Village Gate, 3–7 p.m.”
Neal Cassady at Peace Eye
One afternoon early in September 1965 Neal Cassady pulled up on East Tenth Street outside Peace Eye in a beat-up old ’55 Studebaker station wagon that had only second gear! He wanted a joint, which as the world headquarters of the Committee to Legalize Marijuana, I was able to supply on the nonce. He also wanted some amphetamine. He proposed trading the Stude for an ounce. I walked him two and a half blocks over to Nelson Barr’s pad across the street from Stanley’s Bar and arranged for the swap.
The Fugs at the August 22, 1965, protest. Flier I printed at Peace Eye.
Studebaker, similar to the one Neal Cassady was driving.
Neal’s letters from those months indicate he was always trading in jalopies while On the Road. An auto junkyard was a roaming Beatnik’s best friend. A couple of months later Cassady drove me and Peter Orlovsky in a careening path down the Pacific Coast Highway in The Fugs’ VW van from San Francisco to Ken Kesey’s commune at La Honda.
The Thought of Going to California
There were big demonstrations scheduled in October at the Oakland Army Terminal, where soldiers were being shipped to Vietnam. The sponsoring group was called the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), which had put on very successful antiwar demonstrations earlier in 1965. The VDC planned a nationwide protest known as the International Days of Protest Against American Military Intervention, which was scheduled to take place on October 15 and October 16. I had the idea to lead The Fugs across country, doing antiwar concerts and demonstrations along the way, culminating in an appearance at the Oakland demonstrations. I began planning for the first Fugs Cross-Country Tour.
A Moment of Antiwar Glory at Carnegie Hall
There was a Sing-In for Peace on September 22 at Carnegie Hall to a capacity crowd of 2,800. Fanny Lou Hamer, cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, brought the house down. Joan Baez sang, among others, and so did The Fugs! We sang “Kill for Peace,” with just Weaver on conga and John Anderson on bass because Steve Weber, our guitarist, missed the gig.
Some in the audience booed the act before we were announced. Uh oh, I thought, as we stood at the mikes, but the crowd loved us! Some were even dancing in the aisles. In the next issue of the Village Voice Jack Newfield wrote a piece about the “Sing-In for Peace” in which he noted, “The politicos in the crowd laughed at and booed the Seven Sons, a long-haired electronic rock ’n’ roll quartet, but when The Fugs—the underground Rolling Stones—performed ‘Kill for Peace,’ several couples began to frug in the aisles of the cultural temple Isaac Stern saved from demolition.”
After we left to thunderous applause, Ken Weaver was backstage when he realized that he’d left his conga on the stage, so he went to retrieve it. Blocking his path was eminent folksinger Theodore Bikel. Twice Weaver tried to retrieve his drum; twice Bikel stopped him, threatening to call security. Weaver called him a fucking Nazi. Perhaps there was a bit of cross-class scrounge-analysis against our East-Side-elegant drummer on the part of the elegant Bikel.
Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs were wildly received, and the concert ended with the Chambers Brothers leading the packed throng in “Down by the Riverside.”
But the war went on for another nine and a half years.
Recording Some Tunes to Entice Verve/Folkways
We wanted to entice Jerry Schoenbaum, who was running a label called “Verve/Folkways,” into signing us. Verve/Folkways was the Blues Projects’ label. We prepared a sequence of songs and went uptown to a place called Sanders Sound studio for the second Fugs recording session, which occurred on September 22. Moe Asch paid for the session, but the masters were to be owned by me. He said all he wanted was to be paid back for the session if Verve/Folkways decided to put out the album.
Among The Fugs tunes we recorded at this session were Steve Weber’s new “Boobs-a-Lot,” plus another Weber tune, “An Empty Heart.” We also recorded my reworking of parts of Ginsberg’s “Howl “ into “The I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock” and an antiwar chant I wrote, “I Command the House of the Devil.” Weaver sang his “I Couldn’t Get High,” and we recorded his “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side.” To entice Verve/Folkways, we slurred the word “fuck” in the opening line of Tuli’s “Supergirl”: “I want a girl that can [slur] like an angel.”
Players for the Verve/Folkways session were Sanders, Weaver, Kupferberg, Anderson (on bass), Weber (on guitar), and Vinny Leary (on guitar).
Yes! Getting on Verve Folkways! I sent the new demo to Schoenbaum, but to our shock he decided not to sign The Fugs!
Preparing The Fugs First Album
To our lasting gratitude Moe Asch, after the Verve/Folkways turndown, agreed to put out The Fugs album on Folkways’ Broadside label. I figured out a sequence of tunes, listening to the original Cue Recording session and the Verve/Folkways session over and over on my aluminum-bodied Wollensak at our apartment on East Twenty-seventh.
I went up to Folkways with Harry Smith and edited The Fugs first album. Harry was all business as we sequenced the takes onto a reel. He would rock the reel back and forth across the playback head, getting a kind of growling sound, until he located the exact spot to cut for a perfect sequencing. He was very skilled at cutting the tape on a grooved metal block, then affixing a small length of splicing tape connecting the end of a tune to some leader tape, then cutting the leader tape (to have several seconds between songs), then finding, through the growling tape method, the exact location of the beginning of the next tune, and so forth.
I wrote some liner notes, which Moe Asch printed into a booklet, plus the song lyrics. Here are the songs in that album:
1. Slum Goddess Weaver
2. Ah, Sunflower Sanders, Blake
3. Supergirl Kupferberg
4. Swinburne Stomp Sanders, Swinburne
5. I Couldn’t Get High Weaver
6. How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field Sanders, Blake
7. Carpe Diem Kupferberg
8. My Baby Done Left Me Sanders
9. Boobs-a-Lot Weber
10. Nothing Kupferberg
I had no idea that we were making “history” and that the album would stay in print for the next flow of decades and beyond. All I felt was that that sequence of songs and performances represented the very best that The Fugs could do at that time. I was determined to take the music forward, onward, and upward. I wanted to do some albums that would Stay New for the ages. My youthful energy and bacchic defiance obscured the difficulties of that desire.
With The Fugs’ first album under way, I stepped up the sequence of gigs to try to raise money for the Protest Tour.
September 24
“Fugs leaving for the Cross Country Vietnam Protest Concert Tour—Two Big Shows,” East End Theater, 8 and 10 P.M. $1.50
September 26
“Fugathon. . . . benefit for the Fugs’ Cross Country Vietnam Protest Caravan” at the Bowery Poets Coop, 2 E. 2nd.
The Fugs outside the Peace Eye Bookstore, summer of ’65. Standing: Weber, Kupferberg, Stampfel; seated: Sanders, Weaver. Ed Sanders collection.
A Police Informant Trying Out for The Fugs
Meanwhile, I ran an ad in the Village Voice looking for a guitarist or a bass player to accompany us on the cross-country tour. I interviewed four. The first was Larry Coryell, not yet famous, with a very expensive guitar; we couldn’t afford him. The second was underage, so I turned him down.
The third turned out to be a police informant! I know this because George Plimpton called me at Peace Eye and told me that a famous crime reporter had brought to a party a police informant who had just tried out for The Fugs! Good thing I hadn’t been that impressed with the way he played the guitar.
The fourth one, whom I hired, was named Jon Sheldon, who later became a doctor.
In my notebook of preparations for the cross-country tour was the following notation: “Work on Three Part Harmony.” Always one of my chief concerns throughout the 1960s.
I published a two-page press release on the Peace Eye mimeo: “Announcing the Fugs Cross Country Vietnam Protest Caravan, October 8–28th.”
I also mentioned a midnight concert in the middle of the Great Salt Desert, in celebration of “Group Gropes and the American West.” We also intended to hold a graveside Fugs concert at James Dean’s stone.
Lee Crabtree, a friend of Ted Berrigan’s, volunteered to drive. We located a Volkswagen bus, which we rented by paying the past-due parking bill for the bus at writer Bill Brammer’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Brammer was a well-known writer from Texas, part of a group who called themselves the Mad Dogs and included my friend Bud Shrake, Dan Jenkins, and Larry L. King. Brammer had written a novel, The Gay Place, in 1961 and was a pal of Bill Beckman’s.
I turned over the key to Peace Eye to my comrade, poet Ted Berrigan, and left him in charge. Just before The Fugs departed on their cross-country tour, Ted sent a telegram to me at Peace Eye wishing us success on the voyage. He signed it “Bob Dylan.”
We took off in our packed microbus on October 8—five Fugs, Miriam, Deirdre (then just over a year old), plus a portable sound system, a guitar amp, some drums, and a few hundred copies of The Fugs Songbook.
Uh, oh, right away we discovered there was something wrong with the engine. It barely pulled us up the ramp to get on the New Jersey Turnpike. We limped onward, about thirty miles per hour, and there went my carefully calibrated set of events. We missed a gig at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.
Finally, we stopped a few days in Bloomington, Indiana, where we had a new engine put in the VW van. Tuli paid for it.
A Visit of Support for the Kinsey Institute
The Fugs had announced plans to hold a picket of support for the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington. When we showed up, we were invited to visit the Institute, where we met the staff, who volunteered to show us some of their pornographic art. They asked what country and time I was interested in. My mind flashed with ideas. Victorian erotomania? Should I request some eighteenth-century Norwegian teabag fetish art?
We performed a concert at the house of a guy named Frank Hoffman, who was affiliated at the time with the institute. Frank and I at night went to the Kinsey Institute to pick up some pornographic films to show at his house after our performance, which was taped, I guess, for the institute’s archives.
We had planned to do an outdoor concert at James Dean’s grave, and I had a call from CBS-TV, Channel 8 Indianapolis, which wanted to film it. But we were running so late, we barreled across the Midwest toward our appointments in the “Western Night.”
We surged onward, pausing at dawn at William Burroughs’s birthplace at 4664 Pershing, in St. Louis, where we trooped up on the porch to hold, on October 18, 1965, a silent vigil for a minute or two in honor of our mentor. I left a note on the porch:Thank you,
The Fugs
on
October 18, 1965
at 6:00 a.m.
held a silent
vigil
in honor of William
Burroughs’ birthplace
at 4664
Pershing,
St. Louis
The actual sign we knelt next to on William Burroughs’s St. Louis porch.
I filmed the dawn kowtow on the Burroughs porch, and then we sped onward.
The packed Fugs VW bus, with a sign on the side, “FUGS FOR PEACE,” pulled into the driveway of Terrence Williams; his wife, Nancy; and their three young sons, on Missouri Street in Lawrence, Kansas. Williams was a rare book librarian at Kansas University (KU) who had been given a grant by the university to purchase publications from the Mimeograph Revolution. He was a regular customer of the Peace Eye rare books catalogs.
I had set up the visit from the Peace Eye Bookstore. Terrence Williams recalled it: “One day Ed called me to say that the band was traveling to California in a VW bus to attend an anti–Vietnam War rally. They were driving first to the University of Indiana. He asked if we could put them up in Lawrence for a few days as they traveled west. Without asking my wife, I said, ‘Sure. When will you be here?’”
Williams further reported:Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Steve Weber and Ken Weaver brought the Lower East Side to our house. And these larger-than-life people from the foreign nation of New York did literally fill our house. My wife Nancy had lived for a time in Greenwich Village, and she was a welcoming and open-minded person. Like me, she held a firm anti-war position, but neither of us had taken our beliefs much past signing petitions and attending rallies. Her only concern about our houseful of musical war protesters was drugs.
Borrowing from James Brown, I had banned all pot from the cross-country tour. We were controversial enough, with copies of Fuck You and The Fugs Songbook aboard the bus. The only possible indication of “drugs,” as Terrence Williams noted, was when he spotted Steve Weber tardily and lengthily staring at the round window of the clothes dryer as it tumbled and tumbled a load of wash.
The Fugs performed a set at the home of KU English professor Ed Grier. (A few weeks later Grier would suggest I approach the ACLU for help after the police raid on Peace Eye Bookstore.) Lawrence had a well-developed underground scene. We met a young poet named George Kimball, who, out one night in town, ran into a man walking in William Blake nakedness. Kimball, later a well-known sports reporter, was arrested while picketing the Lawrence Draft Board with a sign “Fuck the Draft” and was soon off to New York City, where in early ’66 he drove Panna Grady and me up to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to visit bard Charles Olson.
During our two-day stay in Lawrence our bass player, Jon Sheldon, had had enough of the cramped VW van and he split. We were grateful for the additional floor space in the van. Steve Weber on guitar and Ken Weaver on conga were more than adequate music underneath our lyrics.
Then we sped across the prairies and mountains to the West Coast. In San Francisco all The Fugs stayed for the first few days of our visit at a two-story apartment owned by Judith Wehlau, a friend of Tuli’s, on Downey Street, just down the hill from Michael and Joanna McClure’s pad.
I was eager to scare up some paying gigs. We auditioned at the Matrix, a folk/jazz club at 3238 Fillmore, which was somehow associated with a new group I had heard about, the Jefferson Airplane. During our audition I noticed how wonderfully our quiet driver, Lee Crabtree, played the electric piano set up on stage! We didn’t get the gig, but Crabtree was soon a member of The Fugs.
We had money problems. I reached out to Panna Grady in New York, who graciously sent a check. Don Allen helped sell a full run of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, which covered more of our expenses.
I managed to get us a multiday gig at a coffeehouse a
t 1339 Upper Grant Avenue, in North Beach, called Coffee and Confusion, but after one set the owner fired us! A songwriter named Ivan Ulz ran the open mike at Coffee and Confusion and was upset at our firing. He organized a revolt by coffeehouse employees, who demanded that the owner bring us back, with the result that The Fugs, with our risqué, antiwar repertoire, finished the brief run. We made just a few dollars, but it paid for gas for the VW bus.
October 22
A gig with The Fugs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Krassner, and Allen Ginsberg at the Berkeley Community Theater, a benefit for the Vietnam Day Committee.
October 29
The Fugs at the Orb Theater, 1470 Washington, San Francisco. With a 50¢ “suggested donation” at the Orb, the influx of moolah was scant.
October 30
The League for Sexual Freedom held a “Legalize Cunnilingus” demonstration at Union Square in San Francisco. A few Fugs took part.
Down and Out
While we were in San Francisco, poet Charles Plymell sent me a note about a gallery a friend of his was opening on Halloween. It was called the “Raped & Strangled Art Gallery.” It was located at 883 Golden Gate Avenue. I gulped and allowed us to play.