by Sanders, Ed
In one of our recent gigs we were in the midst of performing “Slum Goddess” and suddenly the uptempo feel of the guitar utterly vanished. I looked over at Weber, and he was seated in a chair with his head resting on the set list on his guitar. He was asleep! He was a bit difficult to travel with. We replaced him with Lee Crabtree on piano.
We did New Year’s Gig, January 1, at midnight, going into January 2, at the Bridge Theater. It was Saturday night. We were getting stronger! Slowly, through practice practice practice (what my hero William Blake urged artists to do), we were turning our untuned rawness into a kind of Raw Beauty.
1966
The Raid on Peace Eye
The Fugs gave a midnight concert at the Bridge Theater, Saturday into Sunday, January 1–2, after which I went home to our apartment on East Twenty-seventh Street and hit the hay. Then Zzzont Zzzzzunh! Zzzuht! Zzzuh! There was an insistent buzzing of the downstairs door around 4:30 AM. It was Tuli Kupferberg. He said there were policemen inside Peace Eye. We took a cab back down to 383 East Tenth.
The lights were on inside the store, and a window was broken. There were police cars outside, and there were a couple of police officers in the store. A few were also in the middle room where I kept the Fuck You Press mimeograph machine and piles of uncollated publications, such as The Toe-Queen Poems, the Marijuana Newsletter, The Fugs Songbook , Bugger (an Anthology of Buttockry), Auden’s “Platonic Blow,” and various issues of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. The officers were examining some pages.
The Peace Eye Bookstore front window, 1966. Ed Sanders collection.
From the author’s archives, this fragile sign on the lower right side of the Peace Eye front window, 1966.
I was wondering what it all meant as I grabbed a hammer and some wood and started boarding up the broken window and fixing the front door. A cop was stationed outside on the street. As I was hammering, he said, “I don’t care personally, but the sergeant is upset.”
In recent months I’d begun to get the attention of law enforcement. For one thing, an undercover police informant had auditioned for the band. So I couldn’t help but wonder, had the police deliberately smashed their way in?
It was not long before I became aware of Sergeant Charles Fetta, who was then assigned to the Ninth Precinct. Fetta did seem upset and appeared to have a case of phallophobia, commingled, I thought, with a splash of phallophilia because he seemed miffed about instances of exposed male genitalia in some of my publications. Maybe a bit too miffed.
He asked, “Are all these publications yours?”
I thought I should show some confusion and not really answer. My generation knew Lenny Bruce’s dictum—“deny deny deny”—to the walls of our being, so I thought maybe if I appeared vague, I could avoid legal trouble.
Next, the sergeant’s hand seemed to tremble as he thrust an issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts close to my face. “What about that?” he asked, as he pointed to the cover.
He was clutching the cover to volume 5, number 4, which showed a boy I had copied from a Danish tobacco package at the cigar store where I worked on Times Square. Next to the lad was an Egyptian deity with a peace sign on his head and a spurting phallus.
He wanted to know what the cover meant. Was the bird threatening the boy? What’s that bird going to do with that boy? The sergeant was so upset over the cover that I was later surprised when it did not show up as one of the exhibits in my trial the following year.
I was placed under arrest and the police carted away some valuable boxes of my publications. Tens of thousands of dollars worth, as measured in eBay wealth, say forty years ahead. I asked for a receipt (which they promised to supply but never did).
The Ninth Precinct headquarters was at 321 East Fifth. The Ninth covers all the Alphabet Part of the Lower East Side, Houston to Fourteenth, and Broadway east to the East River. We arrived at the polished wood-paneled front doors, which to me had a kind of medieval feel to them. We pushed through and inside. The officers within the precinct house seemed eager for my arrival.
The FY cover that so upset the sergeant.
Indeed, there was a marked contrast of facial expressions between the grumpy arresting officer and the policemen at the station house. For being such a serious matter—that is, the booking of a likely criminal, me—there certainly was a lot of mirth in the Ninth Precinct. “Hey, you’re Peace Eye!” one officer boomed. I nodded.
“Hello, Peace Eye!” another exclaimed. I nodded.
“Let me take a look!” another commented and smiled, and laughing officers passed magazines hand to hand.
In my press release issues several days later I described being driven to the precinct house: “I was taken to the 9th precinct where they spent several hours rolling on the floor screaming with glee as they contemplated the copies of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, Bugger, The Platonic Blow, The Marijuana Newsletter and other goodies they had scarfed from Peace Eye. During this time, however, several officers were carefully examining the New York State Penal Code to find a felony to place upon me. I steadily informed them that it was a misdemeanor. It was.”
All they could come up with to validate the sergeant’s trembles and shakes was a misdemeanor charge of possession of obscene literature with intent to sell.
I was asked to sit at a desk, where an officer asked me questions and typed on a nonelectric typewriter, peck peck peck.
Name, address, phone, age, height, weight, then he asked if I had any tattoos, to which I replied, “No.” Meanwhile, various officers kept on chuckling and chortling, reading through issues of Fuck You.
About a half hour later, my arresting office, Sergeant Fetta, along with another officer, came into the room where I was being questioned. Fetta said, “Okay, Sanders, get into that room and take off your clothes.”
“What’s up?” I replied. Then I noticed he was holding the very issue whose cover had so upset him back at Peace Eye.
“I thought you said you didn’t have any tattoos.” He was pointing to the “Notes on Contributors” page, where I often placed humorous and speculative comments about the poets in the issue.
In this particular issue I stated that Ed Sanders had “the Ankh symbol tattooed on his penis” and “the first 53 hieroglyphs of Akh-en-Aten’s Hymn to the Sun Disk on his nuts.”
I was escorted to the bathroom, where I was asked to lower my trousers. Then the two of them bent down fairly closely—I thought a bit too closely—to scope my pants-down groin area in a vain search for Akh-en-Aten’s “Hymn to the Sun Disk.” I was grateful they did not lean down so closely that I could feel the huffs of their agitated nostrils upon my privies.
In the press release I sent out upon my bust, I noted the historic aspect of the nut-gaze: “I am the only person in the history of American obscenity cases who has had his penis examined during station house questioning.” At least they didn’t try to touch it or otherwise look underneath, say, for hidden evidence of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. When they were satisfied I didn’t have Akh-en-Aten’s famous hymn written down there on the thrill farm, I was driven to the New York Criminal Court Building at 100 Centre Street, also known as the Tombs.
As we passed through the bowels of the Tombs, wending toward the courtroom, we paused along a rail. I said to Sergeant Fetta, “You know, I’m going to win this. I’ll fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. And when I win, I’m going to throw a big party, and invite you to come to it.”
The Note on Contributor that so upset the arresting officer.
Even so, I was not feeling spiritually uplifted. I was feeling the morning terror that the unjustly accused feel—sliding in through the robotic front doors of the Tombs/Criminal Court Building. It reminded me of some dirty electric shoebox.
Then I went before the judge.
On the one hand I felt upbeat and defiant; on the other I felt like a plate of lemur urine. It lifted my heart a bit to see friends in the courtroom. My bail was a mere $500. My sister and her husband came down from W
estchester County and put up a savings passbook to vouch that I would show up in court hearings.
Word spread quickly in the counterculture. Allen Ginsberg did a benefit poetry reading in LA at midnight on January 21 at the Cinema Theater. Friends and supporters sent donations for my defense, among them Norman Holmes Pearson, Frank O’Hara, George Plimpton, and John Ashbery. Artist Joe Brainard sent six ink drawings for me to sell to help pay legal expenses.
Ed Sanders, mug shot after Peace Eye bust.
Cover photo from the East Village Other. With the Warhol banner in the background, I’m trying to sort out the police chaos of my desk after getting out on bail.
I tried to get information on the arresting officer. I heard he was a go-getter, looking to become lieutenant or captain. I worked to get him moved out of the 9th Precinct. I asked friends to write to our liberal New York City mayor, John Lindsay, and complain about Fetta. These efforts seemed to bear results, though it was difficult to measure precisely. For whatever reason, by the time of my trial next year he had been reassigned to the 111th Precinct out in Bayside, Queens.
The United States was at a true crossroads on the issue of freedom to publish. Right at the moment that Sergeant Fetta was insisting on gazing at my private parts to determine whether some of Akh-en-Aten’s “Hymn to the Sun Disk” was tattooed thereupon, the Grove Press Naked Lunch case was before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court. A lower federal court had already ruled that Burroughs’s masterwork was obscene, and the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision declaring Burroughs’s novel not obscene would not be announced until July 7. Allen Ginsberg’s lengthy testimony in the Massachusetts Naked Lunch case back in 1965 was key in setting the trial record upon which Naked Lunch was freed. I was lucky to have Ginsberg on my side. Even so the issue of freedom to publish was very hot, very alive, and very much up in the air.
More than one friend suggested I get in touch with the ACLU, so one morning I brought a full run of all thirteen issues of Fuck You to the New York ACLU chapter, located at 156 Fifth Avenue, and had a chat. To my enormous gratitude, the lawyers agreed to take the case! Yay! And put a notice about the decision in the March ’66 ACLU newsletter.
Meanwhile, I kept trying to bring Charles Olson and Panna Grady together, as in this note to him on January 24, 1966:Dear O,
I suppose by now you have heard of my arrest on a F.Y./ porn charge. A.C.L.U. handling the case/ should have very little trouble on appeal, although It’ll be tied up in the courts for years.
Now: (a) what’s the scene re: Panna? I think John Wieners is freaking in there around this week & then will disappear after the semester break. Anytime you want to bop down, is fine with her. There’ll be a huge freak scene for Norman Mailer’s new book of essays on the 13th there, so you may or may not want to stomp in for that action. Her # TR 4–7481. 1 W. 72nd Street.
Wanting Supporters to Come to My Trial
I wanted to get as many supporters as possible to come to the trial. The problem was that it kept getting postponed! It seemed as if the trial would occur on March 26, so I sent out a press release and mailing to friends and supporters. I listed what some of the “evidence” of smut against me might be. To my chagrin, after my expert witnesses (such as John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch) and a bunch of friends showed up, the trial was postponed.
Invitation to a trial.
Meanwhile, 1966 was a big year for me. The Fugs First Album was getting praised, and we recorded our second album. We began to perform at several Off-Broadway theaters: the Astor Place Playhouse on Lafayette Street and the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street. All during the early triumph of The Fugs, the impending trial for the Peace Eye Bookstore raid loomed in dread in my mind. During the coming year I would spot my arresting officer here and there around the Lower East Side, even in bohemian bars such as the Annex.
My next hearing was April 6, but I decided not to try to pack the court. Instead, I opted not to upset the Success Cart, so I deemphasized my court travails, no longer trying to attract a crowd of people to court hearings. Instead it became my secret burden. For the ensuing almost year and a half I suffered through a series of court appearances every few weeks without calling on friends and supporters to show up. All in all it was about ten court dates. I was on a rock-and-roll time schedule and didn’t go to bed until around 4 AM. So I had to scrape myself up draggingly early, cab down to 100 Centre Street around 9:00 or 10:00, confer with my attorney, and then wait to see what happened.
I’d sent a press release about my possible trial to Cleveland poet and publisher d. a. levy, one of the marvels of the 1960s. He responded with a plea at a poetry reading at the Gate in Cleveland, then sent the cash to me with a note.
The Gate was the coffeehouse in the basement of Trinity Cathedral where d. a. was arrested for promoting smut. He granted an interview to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in January 1966, which was published on page one under the headline “BEATNIK LEADER WANTS MARIJUANA LEGALIZED IN AMERICA.”
Inspired by LeMar, d. a. had started publishing the Marrahwanna Quarterly. To say the least, it caused a stir in Cleveland. “I felt that someone had to come out in the open and challenge the hysterical arguments and myths spread by the police, the press and the government,” he told an interviewer at the time.
This was the year that the police put him on their list. Cops with body wires monitored the poetry readings levy attended. A few months after he had collected money for my defense at the Gate, police attended another reading there, looking for pot (and finding none) but secretly taped the reading, and voila! a poem was read with the word “cocksucker” in it. Shortly thereafter a grand jury indicted levy for obscenity.
(On December 1, 1966, narcotics officers raided Cleveland’s Asphodel Bookstore and seized nine crates of d. a.’s publications on the grounds that they advocated the legalization of hemp. Jim Lowell, the Asphodel’s owner, was arrested. Also seized, as if it were the era of Dostoevsky, was a mimeograph machine! When levy’s grand jury indictment was unsealed, the establishment Cleveland Press sported a headline: “Grand Jury Named Beatnik Poet in Secret Indictment on Filth.”)
Soon after my arrest Harvey Brown wrote from Cleveland with an offer of help. He was ready to publish a second edition of Peace Eye and inquired about publishing my translation of Hesiod’s Theogony. He was willing to help underwrite my court costs.
His Frontier Press was sailing along. Charles Olson had asked him to tell me he was sending in an essay for the upcoming prose issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts.
An Offer from a Record Company
At the end of 1965 Steve Weber had left The Fugs. We ran ads in the East Village Other and Village Voice for a replacement and found Pete Kearney, a guitarist who worked at the NYU bookstore. Pete Kearney had a gravelly, high-tenor harmony, which can be heard on “Coming Down” on The Fugs Second Album. He looked good on stage. We sometimes called him “Bomb Eyes” because they had a haunting combination of wastedness and wildness.
I met a human being named Bernard Stollman who owned a record company called ESP Disk, which his parents were bankrolling for him. We lunched at a vegetarian restaurant by Union Square and worked out a tentative deal to record for his company. The Fugs very badly wanted an Off-Broadway theater where we could set up scenery and lights to work our tunes and routines. ESP agreed to acquire us a theater. I was not very impressed with Stollman, but ESP did rent us a theater. However, all costs for it, and more, were slurped out of our pitiful royalty rate for the second album. It was only after I had learned more about music contracts that I realized what a hideous deal Stollman offered the acts he enticed to work for him. The oi is still oi-ing in the Oi over the ESP contract terms.
So again without any outside help, such as a lawyer or an agent, we signed a strange, shackling contract. We had signed a strange piece of paper with Folkways, and the deal with ESP was stranger. For example, the ESP royalty rate was 25¢ per album, regardless of the retail price, w
hich in 1966 was $5 per unit. The 25¢ included both publishing and recording royalties, so our royalty rate was less than 3 percent, one of the lower percentages in the history of Western civilization.
Opening at Astor Place Playhouse
While we were recording The Fugs Second Album, we began a run at the Astor Place Playhouse on Lafayette Street across from what is now the Papp Theater. Our opening night was January 21, and we performed at the Astor Place Playhouse for three months.
Artist Bill Beckman, on the staff of the East Village Other and author of a successful cartoon series, “Captain High,” designed The Fugs museum in the lobby of the Astor Place Playhouse. He also made the sign for the Peace Eye Bookstore. He lived with his wife, Deborah, on East Ninth, east of Tompkins Park. Deborah and my wife, Miriam, were close friends during the 1960s.
Bill Beckman, in Fugs sweatshirt, 1966. Photo courtesy of Deborah Beckman.
Using the Strobe Light
I rented a strobe light, with a dial to set the speed of the strobe. We pointed it at the audience at the end of “Nothing,” whereupon I switched it on during the musical freakout that we always entered during the end of the tune. I had read that about fifty-eight strobes per minute tended to give visual hallucinations. That was the setting on the strobe dial.
Deborah Beckman, Miriam Sanders, Tompkins Square Park, 1966. Photo courtesy of Deborah Beckman.