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

  ADA Moyna replied, “The People’s case . . . rests exclusively on that section of Section 1141, which proscribes the advertisement of hard-core pornography. It’s our contention that those parts of these magazines that were submitted to Your Honor’s consideration, constitute such advertisement, and in that light we conceded, only for the purpose of this prosecution, that we stand mute, actually, on the remaining portions of the magazine.”

  Judge Ringel then denied the motion to dismiss.

  Next, Ernst Rosenberger approached me for a private conference. He had a suggestion. He felt that the ADA and the testimony of Fetta had not really presented much of a case. Rosenberger’s proposed that we rest our case without testimony. I thought about it for a few moments, then agreed.

  It was a gamble. Rosenberger then addressed the Panel of Three Dour Gents: “If Your Honor pleases, at the conclusion of the People’s case, the People having rested, the defendant rests Your honor, and the defendant moves for a judgement of acquittal on the ground that the People have failed to establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  Then Ringel, for the panel of three, granted the motion to dismiss!

  Ringel asserted, “The motion to dismiss is granted, the Court has a doubt with respect to the proof required under 1141, particularly, Subdivision 1 and in connection with Subdivision 4 with respect to the presumption. This is not to be interpreted as the Court’s condoning or approving the language, and, at least, one of the photographs that appears in the ( Jack Smith) exhibit here, they’re a little sophomoric to put it mildly and certainly one of them is—may well be considered pornographic. However, on the question of law, of the violations of the statute as to the distribution and as to ownership of the alleged People’s Exhibit #1 and #2 which are the advertising material, that has not been established. Under all of the circumstances, the motion is granted.”

  Ringel wasn’t so kind to Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie two years later, ruling it obscene. But I had had the historic ACLU behind me, with all its strength and genius, plus a prosecution that pronounced lascivious “láshivous” and relied too heavily on the salacious power of the Lady Dickhead Advertising Company.

  The dismissal was so sudden that instead of twirling and jumping for joy, I just stood there, drained from nineteen months of secret dread and plodding tired into a robotic courtroom so many times. I looked around for Fetta to invite him to the victory party at the Peace Eye Bookstore, but he was already gone.

  There was a bit more colloquy from the judges, and then I went my way.

  It was time to party. I painted the Peace Eye floors and cleaned up the mess remaining from when I had turned it over to the community and it had thrown away many of the books. I prepared an art show featuring all issues of my magazine and the artwork of friends, including Spain Rodriguez and even Gregory Corso. I sent the invitation to Sergeant Charles Fetta.

  It was a packed party on a hot summer night, including Allen Ginsberg and many friends. Ernst Rosenberger brought an assistant district attorney (not Moyna) to the celebration. During the celebration some neighborhood kids began to toss firecrackers through the open door. Allen Ginsberg and I went outside to the sidewalk to cool them out. One young man was brandishing a wide-tipped hunting arrow. It was another flashlight into Allen’s personality as he sank to his knees on the sidewalk in front of the wide-eyed youth and made his hands together in the shape of a mudra. The young man raised his arm back high over head, the arrow trembling, and I was very afraid he was going to hurl it into the bard’s neck, but Allen’s calm words at last caused him to put it down to his side. It was another emblem of conduct by a great poet.

  Bill Binzen’s photo of the Peace Eye Victory Party, June 27, 1967; from left to right: Tom and Angelica Clark, Ed Sanders, Julius Orlovsky.

  Spain Rodriguez’s fine poster for the Community Defense Fund benefit, June 28, 1967.

  The day after the Grand Reopening of Peace Eye, The Fugs did a concert with the Mothers of Invention, Allen Ginsberg, and others at the Village Theater to raise money for the “Community Defense Fund.” Spain Rodriquez did a fine poster.

  Flaming Creatures Resurfacing in DC

  In mid-1967 LBJ nominated Abe Fortas for chief justice of the Supreme Court. Right-wing nuts were able to attack the nomination because of Justice Fortas’s liberal views on erotic art.

  A print of Flaming Creatures had been seized by the fuzz in Ann Arbor, and Senator Strom Thurmond had it flown to DC, where copies were shown to fellow senators. One U.S. senator said he couldn’t even get aroused by Flaming Creatures, “it was so sick.”

  The Trouble over Virgin Fugs

  When the owner of ESP-Disk basically bootlegged a sequence of tunes from the first two Fugs sessions and called it Virgin Fugs, it went against my principles of Apt Artistic Flow—that an artist should be able to select what created items get to be placed before the world. Allen Ginsberg didn’t like the use of “Howl” lines in the song “The I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock.” I didn’t like it. And the bootlegger stole all the income derived. Stole Stole Stole. Because of our being dumped by Atlantic Records, Virgin Fugs became the only Fugs album to appear during the crucial Year of Love.

  The Summer of Love in the Lower East Side

  The 1967 clampdown in the Lower East Side had similarities to the 1964–1965 clampdown on movies, theaters, and cof feehouses. This one was more about stomping down the urban and rural commune movement and the so-called problem of runaways than art and words.

  All summer long just as soon as Groovy and his cohorts, such as a young man named Galahad, would set up a commune, the police would kick in the doors and shut it down. There was a centuries-old dislike of even the concept of communes on the part of the square überculture. Everybody— the police, the city government, the churches, social workers, the media, and puritanical socialists—all wanted to stomp down communes. The media tended to view communal sleeping zones of current youth from the perspective of the ideal middle-class family.

  One such crash pad/commune was set up by Galahad at 622 East Eleventh. He was determined to keep it alive in spite of continued police harassment during the Spring and Summer of Love. The East Village Other covered the clampdown under the headline “Cops Crush Communes,” citing invasions by the police, over and over during the late spring of 1967, as the Ninth Precinct sought to squash the network of crash pads set up to accommodate the roaming youth who came to the Lower East Side in search of a New American Dream.

  The era of the protest button, well under way by ’67.

  The Psychedelicatessen

  An archetypal business located on Avenue A, not far from where Miriam, I, and Deirdre lived, was the Psychedelicatessen. It flourished for about two years, 1966–1968. The Psychedelicatessen provided employment and fit in well with the Lower East Side community. The place DID serve as a deli for the psychedelic community. You could pick up an extra hash screen for a pipe or get a new tube for a water pipe. If the peacock feather in a vase in the living room accidentally broke, a Lower East Sider could head for the Psychedelicatessen to get an inexpensive replacement. We regularly stopped by to check out its displays of incense, body lotions, body-revealing gowns, black lights, ever-burning candles, cases of love beads and moiré patches, standing close to fellow visitors sporting pantaloons, early tie-dyes, and Afghan vests.

  The Psychedelicatessen helped bring burning incense to the Lower East Side streets as barefoot Hippessas from Brooklyn or the Heartland bought sandalwood wands, lit them, and then carried them down to Tompkins Park to listen to free concerts by The Fugs, the Grateful Dead, the Blues Project, and other bands performing on the hard-won outdoor stage. There was plenty of cultural conflict on the Lower East Side during those years. When the deli was busted for psychedelic drugs in late June ’68, it was thriving. The owners were adding a “Trip Room” and a room for free rock shows and jams. The two rivers of commerce, that of pot and acid and that of incense, power sticks, and flavored candles
, were a bit too commingled at the Psychedelicatessen for it to survive, even in 1968, so it faded into the flow of history.

  The Riots of July

  While the streets of the Lower East Side were strutting with people holding burning incense sticks in their hands and leaving them burning in the cracks of the sidewalks, there were riots in various parts of the nation. The armored scenery of a long, hot summer clanked into place. The uprisings began in late June in Buffalo and then ignited in Newark July 13–16, where 26 died, 1,500 were injured, and 1,000 were arrested (in the dry statistics of printed insurrections). Then Detroit caught fire on July 23 in a surge of destruction that killed 43 and left many blocks destroyed for the rest of the century and beyond.

  On July 24 LBJ ordered 4,700 troops to Detroit, and for two days soldiers and uprisers traded gunfire. The battle had the taste of Vietnam, with headlines such as “Tank Crews Blast Away at Entrenched Snipers with 50-Caliber Machine Guns” splattered across newspapers until the riots were quelled.

  On July 27 Johnson spoke to the nation to announce the formation of the National Advisory Commission on Urban Disorders, to be headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois and Mayor John Lindsay of New York City (who had been instrumental, I’m sure, in suppressing the oppression of artists and filmmakers in the city). (The commission’s 1,400-page report, issued a few months later, attributed the uprising of blacks to white racism. The United States, it said, was at risk of becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate but inequal.” It seemed clear what was causing the unrest: poor housing, hostility from surrounding white communities, inferior schools, unemployment, lack of money . . . . Boom!)

  The FBI and Army Intelligence Not Buying It

  The U.S. military viewed the situation with alarm. U.S. Army Intelligence tallied riots and looting in one hundred cities that summer. The FBI thought that commies and other “subversives” were helping to create the riots. So did the U.S. Army.

  The head of U.S. Army Intelligence in ’67 and much of ’68 was a human named Major General William P. Yarborough, who was a counterintelligence and psychological warfare specialist. Yarborough thought that rioters were “insurgents” manipulated by the Communist Party. When Detroit began to boil that summer, General Yarborough announced to his staff, “Men, get out your counterinsurgency manuals. We have an insurgency on our hands.”

  The Questioning of Black Men in Detroit

  Agents of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Group, in civilian attire (in conjunction with something called the Behavior Research Institute of Detroit), brought 496 black males arrested for firing weapons during the Detroit riot to a warehouse to the north of Detroit and asked each black man dozens of questions.

  Of the 496, 363 gave astounding answers to the question “Who is your favorite Negro leader?” Was it Stokely Carmichael? No. Was it Huey Newton? No. Was it H. Rap Brown? No. It was Martin Luther King Jr.!!!

  Linda and Groovy

  Late in the Summer of Love Groovy began to hang out with a young woman from Connecticut named Linda Fitzpatrick. Linda came from wealth in the suburbs—a thirty-room house with nine bathrooms and ten fireplaces, where she had her own painting studio. She’d saved money from the hundreds of days—birthdays, name days, play days, holidays, days her field hockey team had won at boarding school. She even owned enough stock that she could have lived on the dividends. Her mother sent her a monthly check, and fresh-cut flowers were put in her painting studio each morning at the mansion.

  During the early weeks of the Summer of Love Linda commuted back and forth between the mansion and the Village. There were many things unspoken. Her family didn’t pry, and she even went through a few family-soothing moves toward preparing for college. She plunked down money for sweaters, pleated skirts, a trunk, a bookcase—as if she were headed for the ivy. Dad didn’t dig her long hair and kept asking her to chop it. Finally in August she went to Saks Fifth Avenue for a Sassoon snip.

  Then, returning from New York in early September, she told mom she wasn’t going to college. She wanted to be a painter. Mom and Dad groaned but gave their permission, and Linda left for Groovy’s world of the Lower East Side the next day. A search for art was something her liberal family would not squash. Her mother understood her restlessness and hunger for renown. She had wanted to be a dancer when young and was a well-known model. Somehow from mother to daughter had passed this cloudlike hunger for performance, for runway lights and fascinated stares, for the smells of a painter’s studio, for drifts of powder across rows of dressing room lights, for the devotion of gallery-goers, and, now during a year of Love, for thrills and forbidden fun. She told mom she would be rooming at a hotel off Washington Square with a secretary friend named Ronna, a twenty-two-year-old from an acceptable family who would be Linda’s guide in the weirdness zone. Ronna, it turned out, was really Ron, and she began to hang out with her newfound love, Groovy.

  Groovy and Linda—phantoms of the Summer of Love.

  Zip Gun Cisco

  Meanwhile, a young neighborhood kid began to hang out at Peace Eye. I called him Zip Gun Cisco. His face reminded me of Desi Arnaz. He would get angry with me for refusing to let him use my tools to work on his homemade pistols. Occasionally he would come into the store and point a crooked zip gun at me with a thick rubber band as part of the firing mechanism and a metal barrel, plus a wooden handle that looked as if it had been carved from a chunk of two by four.

  Cisco was a fairly good drummer, and he had formed a band with some neighborhood kids. I arranged with Manny Roth at the Café Wha for Cisco’s band to play one weeknight. Band members were very eager to succeed. One of their tunes stood out; it was The Beatles’ “I’m Down.” They sang that tune with fervor.

  I probably should have helped them record, but it was a time when The Fugs were themselves without a label, and we ourselves were groveling in the abyss of possible failure.

  The Fugs at the Players Theatre

  I was still aiming at putting together a perfect band, to make a landmark album, fresh with The Fugs’ vision of poetry, satire, and antiwar fervor. We had a very good band, even though the excellent musician and singer Jake Jacobs left The Fugs in the summer. We replaced him with Danny Kootch (Kortchmar), who had been in a band with childhood friend James Taylor called the Flying Machine. The Flying Machine was breaking up; I caught one of their final gigs at the Night Owl, and Kootch had talent! Dan Kootch was soon doing great work on guitar and violin. Maybe I should have also tried to hire James Taylor, who was soon off to England. A young man named Geoff Outlaw was our bass player. Later he appeared in the Arlo Guthrie/Arthur Penn movie Alice’s Restaurant.

  Semisatiric rules for performances at the Players Theatre, 1967.

  The Fugs, Players Theater, MacDougal Street, 1967; left to right: Ed Sanders, Geoff Outlaw, Jake Jacobs, Dan Kootch, Ken Weaver. Photo by Lanny Kenfield.

  Theater in Boston

  The Fugs took the week of July 17–24 from the Players Theatre to perform at the Back Bay Theater in Boston. It was an exhilarating week until it came time to receive our final $2,000 due ($2,000 had been paid in advance) at the end of the engagement. When our managers asked for the money, they were greeted with “How’d you like your legs broken?”

  After the week in Boston we returned to the Players Theatre. Country Joe and the Fish came to town at the end of July. Joe wanted a place to rehearse, so I turned over The Fugs set at the Players Theatre for the band, as it prepared for a week’s run, August 1–6, at the Cafe Au Go Go.

  Signing with Reprise Records

  Thanks to the outreach of our managers, Charles Rothschild and Peter Edmiston, The Fugs had offers that summer from two prestigious record labels: Elektra Records, home of The Doors, and Reprise, home of Jimi Hendrix. I was, for the first time in months, feeling as if a giant minus sign WAS NOT following me around in my polka dot sports jacket.

  The manager of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, and Peter, Paul and Mary—Albert Grossman�
��recommended signing with Jac Holzman’s record label, Elektra. I met with Paul Rothschild, producer of The Doors and later Janis Joplin. He’d liked “Morning Morning” on the second album and suggested I give him the songs we had already written and recorded—some demos, plus the Atlantic material—to listen to.

  Instead I decided to go with Reprise. I felt it was a better, more liberal fit for a controversial band with raw material. The contract was signed on September 1. As Tom Clark once noted, I ran a tight ship, and I wanted control of the production. Unfortunately our managers demanded to sign their own production deal with Reprise, so that The Fugs (Tuli, myself, and Ken) signed with our managers’ production company. Unlike earlier, when Gene Brooks, Allen Ginsberg’s brother, advised us on our original management contract with Charles Rothschild and Peter Edmiston, I did not get an attorney. I still don’t know to this day what sort of contract was signed with Reprise, nor have I ever seen a royalty statement.