Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side
Page 20
Recording The Fugs Second Album
One good thing happened as a result of The Fugs relationship with ESP—we met engineer/producer Richard Alderson, who owned (with Harry Belafonte) RLA/Impact Sound Studios at 225 West Sixty-fifth Street, a building later torn down when Lincoln Center was constructed. Alderson had built his own studio to experiment with electronic music.
The Fugs on stage at Astor Place Playhouse, 1966, Bill Beckman’s stage design in the background; left to right: Pete Kearney, Vinny Leary, Ken Weaver, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Lee Crabtree. Ed Sanders collection.
Alderson came to New York City in the early 1960s from Ohio. Alderson had fixed up an old Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder acquired from Frank Sinatra’s music publisher in the Brill Building. The Ampex had been injured in a fire, but Alderson used it to record Nina Simone live at Carnegie Hall. He also recorded a Charlie Parker Memorial, featuring Bud Powell, at Carnegie. In ’62 or ’63 Alderson recorded Bob Dylan at the Gaslight Café on MacDougal with a Nagra tape recorder.
By 1965–early 1966 Alderson was doing live sound for a living. His first big live gig had been going on the road with Harry Belafonte to do the sound. He did live sound for Albert Grossman’s act, Peter, Paul, and Mary. Grossman wanted him to build a sound system for Dylan’s world tour in’65–’66, which Alderson did. He went out on the tour, which ended in early’66, to record gigs and run the sound system. Alderson was barely off the Dylan world tour when Belafonte wanted to go on the road immediately. Alderson didn’t want to do it. Instead he stayed behind, thank goodness, to do The Fugs Second Album.
Alderson originally had an investor in his recording studio named Tamara Safford, who put in around $7,000 or $8,000. Belafonte then invested a considerable amount of money in RLA, around $80,000, and its name was changed to Impact Sound. The studio, awaiting being torn down for the Lincoln Center Parking Garage, had egg carton sound baffling on the ceiling, with Alderson himself exposing a raw brick wall and putting in a partition so that he could live in the back. Chip Monck, then the lighting designer for the Village Gate, had offices upstairs in the same building. Even though condemned, the building lasted for around seven years.
RLA Studios/Impact Sound had a four-track Ampex recorder and a two-track, which was state of the art for 1966; even The Beatles recorded four-track. So The Second Fugs Album involved many four-track to two-track to four-track bounces to free up tracks for overdubs. Richard Alderson wasn’t one of those “don’t touch the console” technobots, so we were able to learn the art of recording while we cut the tunes. He had good ears and good ideas, and he brought precision to our recording.
The First Fugs Album had taken two approximately three-hour sessions; for the second album we spent about four weeks in Alderson’s studio. We wanted to do some good electronic rock and roll. We sensed the truth of the adage “Tapes don’t lie,” and we wanted to get beyond tribal primitive in our recording techniques, believing that if we could “get our brains on tape,” we’d arrive as recording artists.
For the second album the musicians consisted of me, Kupferberg, Weaver, brilliant keyboardist Lee Crabtree, Vinny Leary on guitar, Pete Kearney on guitar, and Jon Anderson on bass. We quickly formed a fairly tight recording unit.
With our newfound renown we acquired some equipment. Ampeg gave us some amplifiers in exchange for our “endorsement,” and Ken Weaver advanced from congas to a full set of rock-and-roll drums. John Anderson stenciled his red, white, and blue Fugs logo on the bass drum head.
I had an idea for an extended piece that would involve spontaneous music, dialogue, poetry. I sketched it out for the band. Lee Crabtree thought of the name for it, “Virgin Forest.” We felt like we were entering new ground. Alderson dubbed in exciting frog sounds. Vinny Leary made his guitar into an electronic music instrument of greatness.
We stitched together “Virgin Forest”—picking the best sections of takes, mixing together fragments. “Out of the foam” (for which there were five takes), for instance, we spliced the beginning out of take four and the rest out of take five. For “Me Want Woman,” we did the same thing, using, out of four takes, the beginning from take three and the “Me Want Woman” section from take one.
I’ve heard that “Virgin Forest” impressed The Beatles when they heard it, and it seems to have helped give them some ideas to create extended pieces, such as “A Day in the Life” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Betsy Klein, an early Fugs supporter (we cooked the spaghetti for the “Fugs Spaghetti Death” at her apartment), sang harmony on “Morning Morning” and sang a duet with Ken Weaver on “Virgin Forest.” We’d heard that Peter, Paul, and Mary had taken over one hundred takes to get a basic track for one of their tunes, so we weren’t worried about something like seventy-one takes for “Morning Morning.”
Our harmonies still lacked the polish of the Beach Boys, but just as we did in our first sessions back in ’65, we stood in front of Alderson’s microphones and gave forth all the totally attentive energy and genius the Fates and our genetic codes would allow us to summon. Some of the songs on our second album are not what is currently known as PC, or politically correct, and we might not now write them in quite the same way, but they were true to the testosterone-crazed era in which they were created.
In addition to genius Ted Berrigan, other poets and songwriters submitted songs to The Fugs. One was a young man, born in the Bronx, named Lionel Goldbart, who used to hang out at the Peace Eye Bookstore. He submitted a few tunes, two of which we recorded. The first was a satire called “Dirty Old Man,” which wound up on our new album; the second was “River of Shit,” which we recorded the following year for our Reprise album, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest. In another submission poets Jack Micheline and Al Fowler approached me all excited on Avenue B, near Stanley’s Bar at Twelfth Street. They were laughing as they thrust into my hands some notes for a song called “Sugar Shit.” SS is heroin cut with sugar. It was a tune The Fugs never recorded. There were additional “out-there” submissions from various lyricists over the years.
Life becomes a frenzy when you’re on the edge of “stardom,” writing songs, drinking too much, nursing hashovers at the crack of noon, dealing with fans hanging outside your apartment, signing autographs on Avenue A, listening to gossip-mongers churning and writhing, running a bookstore and press, worrying about the Fuck You/ bust, recording, doing concerts, both striving for and cringing from fame.
Everything is a writing surface in the mania of Sudden Fame. While I was waiting for a bus on Second Avenue, some lines from Charles Olson’s great poem “Maximus from Dogtown—I” came to mind:We drink
or break open
our veins solely
to know . . .
I began to sing it, and within a few minutes, on the bus, I wrote “I Want to Know,” which we immediately recorded for the second album.
We suffered a mild greed spasm. Ted Berrigan told us an anecdote about short story writer Damon Runyon, who reportedly had a sign above his desk, “Get the Money.” Inspired by that, we formed a company called G.T.M. Enterprises to market T-shirts, Fugs underwear, and buttons.
For the first few months of 1966 my old friend Nelson Barr served as manager of The Fugs. At the same time we hired a publicist named Tim Boxer, who brought in gluts of ink for us. One of the publicity events Tim lined up for The Fugs was at a car dealership.
Fugs at auto dealership, early 1966, arranged by Fugs publicist Tim Boxer; left to right: Ed, Lee, John, Pete, Vinny, Ken. Ed Sanders collection.
Release party for The Fugs Second Album , March 31, 1966.
The Fugs Second Album cover.
Catered macrobiotic food was served at the official opening of The Fugs Museum, designed by artist Bill Beckman, and the release of The Fugs Second Album. Tim Leary showed up, and a fun time was had by all.
Here’s the lineup of songs for the album:
1. Frenzy 2:04 Ed Sanders
2. I Want to Know 2:00 Ed
Sanders, Charles Olson
3. Skin Flowers 2:20 Ed Sanders, Pete Kearney
4. Group Grope 3:40 Ed Sanders
5. Coming Down 3:46 Ed Sanders
6. Dirty Old Man 2:49 Lionel Goldbart
7. Kill for Peace 2:07 Tuli Kupferberg
8. Morning Morning 2:07 Tuli Kupferberg
9. Doin’ All Right 2:37 Ted Berrigan, Lee Crabtree, Vinny Leary
10. Virgin Forest 11:17 Ed Sanders, Richard Alderson, Lee Crabtree
Allen Ginsberg wrote liner notes for the album.
Allen Ginsberg’s liner notes, The Fugs Second Album.
The Fugs shared the Astor Place Playhouse with other ESP acts, such as Albert Ayler, and every Wednesday night featured Jeanne Lee, 1964 Downbeat Poll winner, and pianist Ran Blake, at 8:30 (admission just $1.50).
Jan Kerouac
I first heard of Jan, the daughter of Jack and Joan Kerouac, when I was attending the University of Missouri in 1957–1958 and drank at a place called the Italian Village near the campus. Joan Kerouac and her very young daughter were living nearby, in Columbia, with an artist who used to drink at the Italian Village. He would show us letters from Jack Kerouac to Joan.
Back then I did not know about “The Big Scroll” of April 1951. For three weeks that April Jack Kerouac hardly left his pad on West Twentieth Street for a moment: He was typing out a 120-foot scroll that rolled on the floor. It was the basic manuscript for On the Road.
Joan was pregnant at the time and made the scroll flow possible through the grace of her servitude. “I was growing in my mother’s stomach while she brought him plates of food,” Jan Kerouac later wrote.
The fourteen-year-old daughter of Jack Kerouac began to hang out in The Fugs milieu. She looked older than her years and drank heavily in bars such as the Annex, just around the corner from Peace Eye.
She was very sexually active. One friend who made it with her described how she pulled on her nipples while they were balling. The manager of the Astor Place Playhouse late at night encountered Jan and a Fugs guitarist making out atop the drum riser on stage in the gloom.
She was everywhere around the Lower East Side during 1966. Years later she showed herself a fine writer, publishing her first novel, Baby Driver, in 1981 and a second one, Train Song, in 1988.
Trouble Trouble Trouble
One evening just as we were getting ready to perform at the Astor Place Playhouse, I learned that an assistant district attorney was in the audience. I vowed not to alter the show a whit, and we didn’t. Soon thereafter the district attorney’s office filtered the word to us that it had decided against pressing charges.
On another evening a man who identified himself as the vice president of the Coca Cola Company attended a show and was offended by our ditty “Coca Cola Douche.” He came up to me backstage and threatened to sue.
“Go ahead and sue us!” I begged. “Please, please, sue us!” I was thinking of the enormous publicity that would accrue in such a case.
Burning a Flag of the Lower East Side
Our shows were very controversial for their day, though they were nothing when measured against what would be allowed, on television for instance, in the year 2011. Lenny Bruce had been prosecuted not long before by an overzealous hater of personal freedom. And so naturally we were nervous when more representatives of the New York District Attorney’s Office attended a show at the Astor Place Playhouse. We decided not to confront them and did not alter a single wiggle, erotic expletive, or complaint about the Vietnam War in our show. Only years later, after we got our FBI files, did we realize that there was a full-fledged investigation by the government of The Fugs.
At the Bridge Theater, however, an antiwar group had burned an American flag, which is always controversial in America. As a result there were front-page news stories and police and fire inspectors at all the East Village theaters.
We decided to burn a flag representing something we held very, very dear to make the point that it’s just a flag and you could still love a book even if you burned its cover. So we painted a flag that said “Lower East Side,” and on stage at the Astor Place Playhouse we torched it. Well-known columnist Sidney Zion misreported in an article read by New York City officials that The Fugs had burned an AMERICAN flag during a concert. (I had told him we had burned a “flag of the Lower East Side.”) The NYC establishment assumed it had been a U.S. flag, so the theater was right away visited by fire inspectors and building inspectors, and soon The Fugs had to leave the Astor Place Playhouse, after a run of almost four months.
Here’s some of the April 19, 1966, article by Sid Zion that got The Fugs snuffed out of the Astor Place Playhouse:An artists and writers committee, led by Allen Ginsberg, the poet, charged yesterday that “petty officials” in the Lindsay administration were conducting a campaign of harassment to drive avant garde artistic endeavors out of the city.
Fugs concert, Astor Place Playhouse, just minutes before we burned the Lower East Side flag, 1966. Ed Sanders collection.
“The current drive against the avant garde arts, against the consciousness-expanding drugs, the clean-up of Greenwich Village and 42d Street, and many, many other cases can be explained only as a desperate gathering of evil or sick forces to delay the development of man,” Jonas Mekas, film critic and filmmaker said in a statement adopted by the committee yesterday at a press conference in the Bridge Theater at 2 St. Mark’s Place.
The group charged that The Fugs, a politically oriented rock ’n’ roll singing group, was being harassed by the License Department. According to the committee, personnel of the License Department had warned the owner of the Astor Place Playhouse, where The Fugs have been performing, that unless the group “toned down” its show, the license for the theater would be revoked. As a result, the committee said, the owner, Mrs. Muriel Morse, has shut off the box office telephone. Mrs. Morse could not be reached for comment, but the telephone is “temporarily disconnected.”
Assistant License Commissioner Walter Kirshenbaum “categorically” denied the charges yesterday. And Ed Sanders, leader of The Fugs, said he believed “the pressure is off.” In fact, Mr. Sanders said that his group burned an American flag at a performance last Saturday night and that nothing had happened as a result.
Section of Chappaqua Filmed at Astor Place Playhouse
Before we were tossed out of the Astor Place Playhouse, we had time to appear in Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua, for which we performed some songs. Robert Frank was the cinematographer. I recall groveling on the stage of Astor Place while Paula Prentice in long leather boots stomped on mock LSD-suffused sugar cubes.
The War the War the War
Ken Weaver, Ed Sanders on a march down Fifth Avenue, 1966. Ed Sanders collection.
A headline in Le Monde for April 13:
For the rest of the decade and beyond it loomed above our lives like the ancient curse of Agamemnon—those B-52s above the North.
The New York City Department of Licenses
In the April 28 Village Voice Stephanie Harrington wrote an investigative piece titled “City’s Censorship Role Is Being Questioned.” The New York City Department of Licenses, “because of its zealousness,” she wrote, “may be in the process of putting itself out of business as the . . . censor of the avant garde.” Artists and theaters and coffee shops had raised their voices against these overzealous censors.
The Department of Licenses had issued summonses to the 41st Street Theater, where the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque had shown films, because the films displayed “sexual immorality, lewdness, perversity, and homosexuality.” The license creeps had issued summonses to the Bridge Theater with respect to a program in which an American flag had been burned to protest Johnson’s unexpected increase in troops and in bombing of the north in the war in Vietnam.
The license officials had issued summonses to a member of the Artists and Writers Protest Committee for putatively operating a dance hall and selling liquor without a license at an anti–Vietnam War party.
Artist Leon Golub was one of the organizers of the committee. The Department of Licenses raided the party.
The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had agreed already to handle my Peace Eye raid case, was considering suing in court over the License Department’s authority to ooze into a theater, sit in seats, look at the films, performances, plays, etc., being shown, then on its own decide to revoke the theater’s license or refuse to renew the license. (It will be recalled that an ex-CIA agent, working for the Department of Licenses, had testified against Lenny Bruce in the Cafe Au Go Go case back in 1964.)
As Stephanie Harrington accurately reported, “Private parties at which liquor is served with the hope that the guests will make donations are a common method of fund-raising among church groups and political candidates.” I recall a LeRoi Jones rent party I had once attended that had plenty of booze, wild dancing, pot, and gluts of Fun.
Mayor Lindsay requested the department’s commissioner, Joel Tyler, to meet on May 4 with members of the New York Eternal Committee for Conservation of Freedom in the Arts, whose steering group included Allen Ginsberg and Jonas Mekas. It took a fresh young mayor ultimately to call off the hounds of the License Department.
The Ghastly Attention of the FBI and the Justice Department