by Sanders, Ed
A basket labeled Free Money. No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash-register. A salesman in a free store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept a problem as a turn-on.
By early 1967 the Diggers had established a Free Store in the middle of the Haight-Ashbury district, with a sign outside, the “Free Frame of Reference.” Inside were piles of old clothes and other free items. Each day at 4 PM the Diggers gave out free food on the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park.
They acquired their name from the “Christian communist group in early Cromwellian England that took over the fields, tilled them, and then gave away the surplus food,” as an article in the February 16 Village Voice succinctly described it. The Diggers made a big impression in the Lower East Side, especially in the minds of activists such as Abbie Hoffman and me.
Jade Companions of the Flowered Dance
Inspired by the example of the Diggers, in late February I joined with other psychedelic communards, including Peter Stafford, Linn House, and several others, to form a corporation to establish a group called “Jade Companions of the Flowered Dance.” It was an umbrella group in whose name I was about to turn over operation of the Peace Eye Bookstore to the community.
The Jade Companions had membership cards. A fine example of 1967 Visit-the-Universe florescence on the front and what appear to be Mayan hieroglyphs on the back. By the way, this card belonged to Barry Rosenberg. Barry, I have your card.
Thus I followed, in my own way, the San Francisco Diggers’ concept of the Free Store.
University of Buffalo Spring Arts Festival
The Fugs played two completely packed concerts at the University of Buffalo gymnasium on March 9. We were told that the school lost $5 million in endowments after Fugs lyrics were published in the student newspaper.
LeMar had been successfully brought to the university by Michael Aldrich and even received funding as an official university-sanctioned organization, with famous writer Leslie Fiedler as its faculty advisor. (This was in distinction to what happened to two other attempts to start LeMar chapters—the first by poet d. a. levy in Cleveland and the second by John Sinclair in Detroit, both of which resulted in harassment by local authorities.)
A Possible Album Cover
Jerry Wexler sent The Fugs to Joel Brodsky’s studio for a photo shoot. I had an idea for a cover image: a young model attired in a bikini, posed with her legs jutting upward and widely spread, with the three Fugs standing just behind the legs, holding knives and forks. The title would then be The Fugs Eat It.
I decided to allow the Village Voice to run in its March 23 issue this picture from the Joel Brodsky shoot and a story on how The Fugs had completed their new album on Atlantic. It was probably a dumb thing to do. I typed a list of credits before turning the mixed tapes over to Atlantic Records.
I worked with composer Gary Elton on a long work called “Aphrodite Mass.” A feature of the “Mass” was my setting, in Greek, of a section of Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite,” plus the only instance in music of the Latin words necesse in via struprare, or, “It’s necessary to ball in the streets,” occurring in the history of Western music. I went to a lecture by Timothy Leary, and thus his exhortation “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” became the hook line of the opening song on the Atlantic album. The album was completed by early April, and the future looked bright indeed for The Fugs.
The prospective cover photo for the first Fugs Atlantic release, The Fugs Eat It.
Typed list of credits for Atlantic album.
On April 20 I sent a letter to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. I was feeling good! On top of it! Sailing upward! Triumph for The Fugs was just a few weeks ahead! An album out maybe as soon as the summer solstice of 1967, to join the great albums of the Summer of Love. Wow!
“Dear Jerry,” my letter began.
This is to acquaint you with the Fugs album which we have been working on for the last few weeks. We have created what we feel to be a balanced package of messages of satire, protest, tenderness and love. The album contains songs in all four categories. We have drawn strength for the album from rock, Indian, electronic and even gospel music, making sure all the while that the album has a literary and measured artistic flavor. . . .
We are headed today for Santa Monica and Berkeley and you can be sure I am going to advertise the album at our press conference and at the concerts.
I concluded the letter by asking for a meeting in the near future “concerning a Fugs single. Maybe,” I continued, “you’d be interested in producing it.”
A Jerry Wexler Fugs single! Just the thought of it was a thrill because of his history of hits such as suggesting “The Tennessee Waltz” to Patti Page in the late 1940s! The Drifters brilliant “Money Honey” in ’53, Ray Charles’s ’54 “I’ve Got a Woman,” and Wilson Pickett’s recent smashes, “In the Midnight Hour” and “Mustang Sally.” The fifty-year-old Wexler, I thought, could have helped morph The Fugs, through a single, into a nationally powerful act in spite of the eros, the antiwar fervor, and our natural tendencies to offend.
The Fugs poster for the Berkeley Community Theater, April 22, 1967.
Off to San Francisco
Our concert at Santa Monica Civic the night of April 21 was nearly sold out. We were told that there were some right-wing nurses picketing the show outside. Eileen Kaufman, the supportive wife of Out There Beat poet Bob Kaufman, threw a party for us in LA after the gig, but we had a late night flight to San Francisco and had to miss it. Dang!
We stayed in San Francisco for a few days, after performing at the Berkeley Community Theater on April 22.
The Haight-Ashbury, just noodling toward the Summer of Love, was an eye-opener. We did a free concert with Country Joe and the Fish at the Panhandle Park for the Diggers. I’ve often wondered if Charles Manson, just out of jail and living in the area, was there.
I went to see the Grateful Dead and, for the first time, a Full Light Show. I’ve wondered if this particular Grateful Dead show was the one in which Manson, tripping on LSD, experienced the Stations of the Cross.
I stopped by Janis Joplin’s house. She was excited about a packet of flower seeds Richard Brautigan had given her, with a poem glued to the side.
Editor Don Allen drove me out to the bohemian community of Bolinas, veering quite wildly along the Pacific Coast Highway. We were discussing a collection of my poetry for Grove Press.
”Good Production Job, Ed”
After returning from the West Coast concerts, I went to Atlantic Records for a meeting with the owners. I played the album for them as they sat around a long table in a conference room. At the end one of them said, “Good production job, Ed.”
A couple of days after the meeting Jerry Wexler called me at home on Avenue A and said Atlantic was not going to release the album. Not only that, we were being tossed off the label. It was a brief, stunning call. It looked for several months as if our career among major labels as over. I heard that one of the Ertegun brothers’ spouses had not really dug our beautiful rendition of “Coca Cola Douche,” the idea for which I came up with after reading an article in Newsweek.
Nevertheless, getting unfairly tossed off Atlantic after we were encouraged to make whatever album we wanted left us without an album to greet the Summer of Love. It prevented The Fugs from putting out an album in the Glory year of 1967 to join Sgt. Pepper, Big Brother and the Holding Company , Alice’s Restaurant, Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, and “All You Need Is Love.” In fact, The Fugs were prevented from putting out a studio album for a whole crucial year.
All my plans for living on Art, creating a thriving band that toured and sold records, seemed to crash into the dirty sidewalk outside Peace Eye. In any case my heart in its polka-dotted jacket was all brok’d up.
CIA Scandal
Just two weeks after the Great Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park came very bad news from Ramparts magazine about the CIA and very soon after that further accusations by Dist
rict Attorney Jim Garrison of New Orleans, a brave and patriotic American, about the CIA and the shooting of President Kennedy. The center-left magazine Ramparts was just about the most influential American magazine of its era in its vehement and ethical advocacy. Ramparts ran large ads in the Washington Post and New York Times on February 14 to announce an article in its March issue: “The CIA has infiltrated and subverted the country’s student leadership. It has used students to spy. It has used students to pressure international student organizations into Cold War positions, and it has interfered in a most shocking manner in the internal workings of the nation’s oldest and largest student organization.”
The CIA went tweedily bonkers. It naturally wanted to know how much Ramparts had learned of the inner workings of the agency. It flipped together some detailed files on Ramparts backers and sicced the IRS on as many as possible. For instance, on February 15, after a CIA request, the IRS forked over copies of Ramparts’s tax returns to Richard Ober, the CIA counterintelligence officer looking to harm Ramparts. Not long after a right-wing break-in man (hired as well by right-wing California grape-growers to steal César Chávez’s supporter list in an attempt to break the national grape boycott) stole the Ramparts CIA files in California. They were brought to DC, where two CIA officers took a look at them.
Meanwhile March 1, at the Abbey Road studio in London, The Beatles recorded John Lennon’s era-stirring tune “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My friend Barry Miles, a confidant of The Beatles, would send me letters now and then on the recording of this great album, including word about a marvelous tune about a “yellow submarine.”
The very day of “Lucy in the Sky” was the day that District Attorney Jim Garrison announced the arrest of fifty-four-year-old Clay Shaw, formerly the head of the big International Trade Mart in the Crescent City, on charges of having conspired to kill John Kennedy. On March 17 a three-judge panel ordered Shaw to stand trial. (Shaw would be acquitted in early’69, though books such as Deadly Secrets by Warren Hinckle [one of the founders of Ramparts] and his coauthor William Turner would pretty much successfully argue that Shaw had connections with Lee Harvey Oswald. It was later revealed that at the time of Shaw’s trial, CIA director Richard Helms had ordered his top assistants to “do all we can to help Shaw.” Jim Garrison’s 1970 book, A Heritage of Stone, offered a taste of historic truth. Perhaps Garrison will one day receive his proper due for helping to lay out the assassination for what it was: a coup d’état.)
At the time I followed Garrison’s investigations in underground presses such as the Los Angeles Free Press. Garrison’s work, which aroused the ire of the military-industrial-surrealist complex, and Mark Lane’s 1966 book, Rush to Judgement, made us wonder who was really running the so-called American democracy.
The Peace Eye Bookstore in the Hands of the Community
I had turned Peace Eye over to the “community.” I decided to let it reform itself according to the needs of the Be-In Generation. When I came back to the Lower East Side from touring, I noted that there were lots of books in the garbage cans out front. I was told they needed the wall space for psychedelic designs.
There were mattresses in all three rooms, and the place was packed at night with young people, and a few not-so-young people, sleeping in what I called the Mattress Meadow. What the community needed was space to crash.
The Young Man Named Groovy
His name throughout the Lower East Side was “Groovy.” When I turned the Peace Eye Bookstore over to the community, Groovy was in charge of the Mattress Meadow. Once I counted sixteen mattresses in the three rooms of the store. Groovy oversaw the operation of the Mattress Meadow, and I came to admire him.
Groovy spent some of his time finding safe crashes for the swarms of kids arriving on the Lower East Side. He was a legend in those streets, even though he’d been there for only a few months. Few knew his real name, but everybody within flashback distance of Tompkins Park had a Groovy anecdote to tell.
Groovy preached the message that a person could both serve AND stay high and party while trying to do good. Groovy would spend countless hours listening to the cracked home lives of runaways or soothing them out of bad trips. He was lanky, calm, cool, tall, and stubborn, and he wore a harmonica on a wire holder around his neck. He had a moody face, jutting jawbones, slender shoulders, and a tattoo, “Bourbon Street,” on his left forearm. He was a genuine hero to the Hippies who set up their primary color zone in the Lower East Side that summer.
Groovy helped put the Spirit of Goof back into the picture of a better world. Groovy dealt a little grass now and then and acted as a kind of Better Business Bureau to instill honesty in the trade. He tried to intervene against drug burners. Among grass and acid dealers he was a fearless ethics officer and had numerous sharp-voiced confrontations with burners and short counters.
And Then Touring
In my life as a poet I returned to the University at Buffalo on May 3.
The poster for the reading listed me as an “Egyptologist.” While I was in Buffalo, I went to a café with Robert Creeley, and we talked about the sometimes-cruel exigencies of existence. He wrote out a recent poem on a paper napkin and handed it to me.
Good advice from the bard.
Meanwhile, The Fugs were doing some more touring. It cost $6 on May 12 to take a cab from the Lower East Side to JFK airport for a flight to Madison, Wisconsin, for a gig with Allen Ginsberg. The Fugs at that moment consisted of Sanders, Weaver, Kupferberg, Jake Jacobs on guitar, and Geoff Outlaw on bass.
That evening with Allen Ginsberg we performed at the University of Wisconsin Stock Pavilion to 1,700 attendees, almost a full house. “Judging from the wild applause,” wrote a reporter for the Capital Times,uproarious laughter and spellbound stares, the audience was an appreciative one. Much to the horror of anyone who expected a big Haight-Ashbury pot party, the audience was not entirely made up of hippies. There was a fair sprinkling of respectable academics, well-coifed sorority girls, and middle-aged housewives. The Fugs, probably the only act in the world who could follow Allen Ginsberg, make the Rolling Stones look like Little Lord Fauntleroys. As the Lower East Side of New York’s gift to folk culture, the six sang such “golden gassers” as “I Am, Therefore You Aren’t” [a number from our fifteenth album with words by St. Thomas Aquinas], “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side,” and “Kill for Peace.” The last number is a savage satire on our military efforts in Vietnam, and is evidence, if all their other songs were to be forgotten, of the “redeeming social importance” of the Fugs—which elevates them from the level of the raucously obscene.
We took part in a be-in, with flowers and burning wands of incense, in Madison before flying onward to Cleveland the next day.
While The Fugs were in Madison, I received a call from the Peace Eye Bookstore landlord. He was very disturbed over my turning over the running of the bookstore to the community. There was a guy, he told me, who was giving karate instructions in the back courtyard; plus someone had strung a tightrope in the courtyard, apparently between the buildings, and was conducting a wirewalking workshop! All this had to stop, or I’d have to close Peace Eye.
So one chore when I got back off the road was to take the bookstore back from the community. I was especially sad to be forced to toss out Groovy, who was the maître’d of the Peace Eye crash pad and Mattress Meadow. Groovy went forth to a shaky future during the upcoming Summer of Love, where he continued to try helping runaways find crash pads.
Benefit for d. a. levy
On May 13 The Fugs and Allen Ginsberg flew to Cleveland from Madison, where we did a benefit reading for d. a. levy and book dealer James Lowell at Strosacker Hall on Case Western Reserve’s campus. levy had become one of the nation’s first Pot Martyrs, a Martyr of the Mimeograph Revolution, and a Martyr for the Right to Read Erotic Verse.
It all began with the Marijuana Newsletter. I sent a copy to d. a. On April 19, 1965, he sent a post card to LeMar: �
��Please put me on your mailing list & I will sign petitions . . . wd distribute the Marijuana Report if I could afford.” d. a. jumped to the cause with the same tenacity that had glued him to the letterpress. He thought he’d bring the legalization campaign to Cleveland, and he started the Marrahwanna Newsletter (later the Marrahwanna Quarterly), after which he became one of the first of the 1960s Pot Martyrs—joining Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, John Sinclair, and many others. The police put him on its list. The first issue of Marrahwanna Newsletter from Cleveland came out in early ’66, price 10¢. The second issue came out in the summer, with part five of d. a.’s North American Book of the Dead.
The publication d. a. continued as the Marrahwanna Quarterly, with an emphasis on poetry and d. a.’s comments on the Cleveland police and psychedelic scene (acid had just been made a federal crime). It was the eerie drone of the police state that began to unnerve him. Cops with body wires monitored the poetry readings levy attended. They hated the Marrahwanna Quarterly.
Not long after a reading at the Gate, on November 16, 1966, which police taped and which included an obscenity in a poem (not one of levy’s), d. a. was indicted for obscenity. On December 1 narcotics officers raided the Asphodel Bookstore, seizing nine crates of d. a.’s publications on the grounds that they advocated the legalization of hemp and a mimeograph machine. Jim Lowell, the Asphodel’s owner, was arrested. On January 9, 1967, the establishment Cleveland Press blurted a headline, “Grand Jury Names Beatnik Poet in Secret Indictment on Filth.” The Press wrote that levy “is a widely known figure around University Circle beatnik haunts.” (The squares had no idea that in just a few weeks the word “Hippie” would blow the word “Beatnik” away as a pejorative in the pejoracracy.)