Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side
Page 29
The Gash Cow drawing on the title page was a riff on one of my favorite Egyptian images‚ my version of Hathor, the Divine Cow, which is found in gold on Tut-Ankh-Amun’s famous burial shrine.
Accounting statement for publication of Cantos 110–116.
We sold one hundred copies to the Gotham Bookmart for $6 each. And then we gave a hundred or so free to friends. Tom Clark and I split the money 50/50, after mimeo paper and stencils, so that each of us made $245.50, as the accounting sheet I jotted back in early November indicated.
The book caused a bit of a stir in literary circles. My Gash Cow edition seemed to spur the powers that be into action and caused James Laughlin, owner of New Directions, to publish all the known “Cantos.” I agreed to meet Laughlin at the Russian Tea Room several months later to discuss the publication. Laughlin seemed worried about control of the copyright, and I assured him I had no intention of publishing any further writings of Pound.
I had already responded to a huffy letter from an attorney from Cov-ington and Burling, a big wheel DC law firm, stating the firm was to leave me alone or I would summon a Green Toad to appear in the letter writer’s dreams and ejaculate in his throat. No further inquiries arrived after my response.
A Robbery on Avenue A
Miriam and Deirdre had been invited to visit old friend Bill Szabo and his mate Marianne at their pad down the street. When Miriam and Deirdre returned home, they surprised robbers in the house, who fled out the back. I returned shortly thereafter to find the house a shambles and a box of our possessions resting on the sill of an open window that led out on the rear fire escape.
I searched nearby stairwells and found my typewriter on the window behind the stairwell on Twelfth Street around the corner. But some important items were missing. They’d ripped off Miriam’s wedding ring, which she had left by the kitchen sink. (It had been a gold band with golden orchids, but when we went over to the wedding ring store on Eighth Street near the 8th Street Bookshop, it no longer carried the orchids ring, so we purchased one featuring roses, which she still has over four decades later.)
The burglars also had taken my sacred Bell and Howell 16 mm camera! Veteran of many an underground session, even though all of my footage had been stolen by the police in a raid over a year before. I remember watching Jimi Hendrix filming backstage in San Francisco; if only I had also filmed during 1968 and 1969! But I was disheartened after the police had raided my Secret Location and taken every piece of my films! And now my beloved Bell and Howell was stolen!
It was devastating. I immediately closed off our gritty second-floor porch and patio with a heavy iron gate and put in a police lock on the front door. I’d thought we’d have dinners and soirées out there in warmer weather, but now it had to be blocked with a junkie-warding metal gate.
So long to the moving image. I always felt that The Fugs WERE their sounds. They were their audios. After my camera was stolen from our Avenue A apartment, I knew that I could take care of Sound. The Fugs were their Sound. Words, melody, poetry, tape recordings, and my hand-drawn designs I called glyphs: These were to be the items of my art for the rest of my career.
Completing Tenderness Junction
I turned to ultracreative Richard Alderson to save The Fugs’ recording career from careening down into atonal masochism, angst, metaphysical distress, and failure. I adjusted the band that fall, adding a young bass player from New Jersey, Charles Larkey, who had been in the Myddle Class, a band managed by writer Al Aronowitz. Also joining The Fugs was a brilliant guitarist named Ken Pine, also from New Jersey, who had been a member of The Ragamuffins, a band led by singer/songwriter Tom Pacheco. It was a lineup that played well together—very well. Weaver, Sanders, Kupferberg, Kootch, Larkey, and now Pine.
As I indicated, our managers wanted me to record the entire album over—something about threats from the earlier engineer, Huston, to sue over production rights. I resisted redoing the album entirely new but compromised. I added and subtracted. I kept “Aphrodite Mass,” “Knock Knock,” “Hare Krishna,” “Wet Dream,” “Dover Beach,” and “Fingers of the Sun.” And I added a bunch of new material, such as “War Song,” which we created in the studio, to make the Reprise album substantially different from the Atlantic one. The great Bob Fass of WBAI gave us a copy of “Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon,” to which we overdubbed chants of “Out, demons, out.” In addition we added Tuli’s excellent tune, “The Garden Is Open,” while taking out “Coca Cola Douche,” “Carpe Diem,” and “Nameless Voices Crying for Kindness.” It was a good album. Too bad it couldn’t have come out in the spring of 1967.
The Atlantic Album The Reprise Album
1. Knock Knock Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
2. Wet Dream Knock Knock
3. Wide Wide River The Garden Is Open
4. Dover Beach Wet Dream
5. Aphrodite Mass Hare Krishna
6. Carpe Diem Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon Oct 21 1967
7. Hare Krishna
8. Fingers of the Sun War Song
9. Nameless Voices Crying for Kindness Dover Beach
Fingers of the Sun
10. Turn On/Tune In/ Drop Out Aphrodite Mass (in 5 sections):
I—Litany of the Street Grope
11. Coca Cola Douche II—Genuflection at the Temple of Squack
III—Petals in the Sea
IV—Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite
V—Homage to Throb Thrills
Ed Sanders: Percussion, vocals
Tuli Kupferberg: Percussion, vocals
Ken Weaver: Drums, vocals
Danny Kortchmar: Guitar
Charles Larkey: Bass
Ken Pine: Guitars, vocals
Allan Jacobs: Sitar (“Hare Krishna”)
Allen Ginsberg: Vocals (“Hare Krishna”)
Maretta Greer: Vocals (“Hare Krishna”)
Gregory Corso: Harmonium (“Hare Krishna”)
Producer: Ed Sanders
We had lost a crucial year; we should have had an album out in the Year of Love to join Sgt. Pepper, Light My Fire, Somebody to Love, and all the other melodies of be-in. Our second album had made it onto the charts, and there was no reason the next album couldn’t have done so if it had come out, say, a few weeks after I was on the cover of Life magazine. It was the year in which we were the hottest. In rock-and-rock chronology it was about ten years!
I wanted to do a great album. I felt we had it in us. And so almost immediately we started work on the album that would become It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
Richard Avedon Overseeing Design of The Fugs Album
I asked my friend famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon to design the album package for Tenderness Junction and to take pictures of Tuli, Ken, and me for the cover. He agreed, and we went to his studio for a photo session. He assigned the actual album design to a guy named Marvin Israel.
Richard Avedon gave me a series of sheets from his photo shoot of The Fugs.
Meantime, we kept going out to do gigs.
Tenderness Junction, front and back covers. Photos by Richard Avedon.
Richard Avedon proof sheets, September 25, 1967. Ed Sanders collection.
The Fugs in Cleveland
We traveled to a club called Le Cave in Cleveland, where Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys used to perform, for gigs on November 3 and 4. It was our first visit back to d. a. levy’s home city since the benefit for him, with Allen Ginsberg, back in May. Le Cave was packed; every table was filled. levy attended one of the concerts.
Backstage at Le Cave Ken Weaver offered a reporter covering the gig for a local newspaper a hit on his rum and coke. “Have some,” he said. “Drink it in remembrance of me.” The reporter lifted the glass to his lips, and, as he reported, everybody in the back room cheered. “You’ve just consumed 2000 micrograms of LSD,” Weaver informed me.
Fugs co-founder Ed Sanders didn’t offer much help when I asked him, in desperation, how an acid-user could avoid h
aving a “bad trip.”
“My advice is always carry in your billfold polaroid pictures of those with whom you copulate.”
Before I could establish to my satisfaction whether or not these psychedelic song-wailers had really impregnated my mind with a hallucinogenic, they ran off to begin their second set.
The reporter sat and listened to our singing. He noted:A thousand colors began to flash. The music sounded distorted. My skin was getting wet and clammy. Then I caught sight of someone manipulating switches in a light booth, discovered that I was sitting on a beer-soaked chair, and that the music—that god-awful wild music—was SUPPOSED to be that way. As an electric guitar squealed and groaned at the hands of a musical sadist, d. a. levy appeared out of nowhere and nudged me in the arm.
“‘Great, huh?’ he said, nodding his approval.
I nodded back. Who needs LSD, I thought, when you’ve got the Fugs?
No doubt we felt it hilarious to josh and kid the reporter about LSD in his rum and coke. I wouldn’t think it so funny at a gig at the same club in 1968 when bikers actually did spike my backstage drink with STP.
The following week we did a gig at Cornell University in Ithaca.
The Fugs in Detroit
We flew to Detroit just after Thanksgiving—Ken Pine, Danny Kootch, Charles Larkey, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver—to play two days, November 24 and 25, at the beautiful Grande Ballroom, a huge place able to hold over 1,500 humans. It was located at 8952 Grand River Avenue, in Detroit, an old theater but elegant, built in 1909.
Praise for Tenderness Junction from Robert Shelton
Eminent New York Times music critic Robert Shelton listened to Tenderness Junction, comparing it to the extremely successful Hair, which had opened back in late October at the Public Theater:We are predictably entering a new era in which the challenging cynicism that American youth had exercised toward all Establishment products and life-styles will be turned toward the popular-culture scene. When that day arrives, “Hair” will get trimmed and The Fugs will be philosopher-kings. The musical show has simply borrowed the external trappings of The Fugs’ super-hippie outrages at convention and dull normality and turned it into a commercially acceptable cliché of musical and social inconsequence.
The work of The Fugs is by no means of an even consistency. Heaven help the protest poets if they ever do get to be polished. But their latest album, Tenderness Junction (Reprise 6280), is their most musical work yet. After some false starts on Broadside and ESP, The Fugs are ready here to do battle in the commercial marketplace with their anticommercial rants, their satirical slashes that draw blood, their Lenny Bruce–isms that hit the conventional middle-class right between its myopic, suburban eyes. The contrasts and comparisons between “Hair” and The Fugs could make a long article but this is a record column merely calling attention to the sextet’s hymnology to an American cultural revolution on its best album yet.
Late 1967
The Fugs went back to the Players Theatre on MacDougal for our final run in December 1967. We recorded the final two nights, thanks to Richard Alderson, who brought in and set up recording equipment. We did our final performance at the Players Theatre on New Year’s Eve and closed a run of a year and a half (with time off for touring) and around seven hundred performances.
Still Searching for the Perfect Band
As good as the current Fugs lineup was, Frank Zappa suggested we add to our lineup a young woman he’d dubbed Uncle Meat. He said she was very talented. She not only was performing with the Mothers of Invention at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street that year but also Frank Zappa let her open for them, performing her own songs accompanied by the piano. Her real name was Sandy Hurwitz. I met her and thought seriously about adding her to the band, but in my mind the current lineup was very strong, so I decided against it. That decision may have been a mistake; it would have been good to get a woman’s fine voice into the mix and to open up the variety of song themes for The Fugs. Meanwhile, I was busy recording the tunes that would become It Crawled into My Hand, Honest at Richard Alderson’s Impact Sound up on West Sixty-fifth Street.
The year had passed like one of those whip-you-around carnival rides, and now it was 1968. From the Year of Love we rushed into the year during which the War Culture would win the struggle, at least for the next few years. We could not have known that on New Year’s Eve when The Fugs performed their final concert at the Players Theatre. This I did know: We had to confront not only the war but also the War Party. So I was ready to spend more time struggling against the Democratic Party and against the war that would not end.
1968
The Indictment of Dr. Spock and Others
In the fall of 1967 and into 1968 a fairly powerful Resistance movement against the military Draft arose. The government didn’t dig the Resistance, didn’t dig it at all. The day before the Exorcism of the Pentagon, there was a demonstration outside the Justice Department against the military Draft and then four Americans activists took inside what their later indictment called a “fabricoid briefcase” packed with Draft cards (which all Draft-age young men were required to carry with them at all times) and handed them back to the war machine.
The military and the CIA did not dig the well-planned turn-ins of Draft cards around the States that October. The four, not long thereafter indicted, were Yale theologian William Sloan Coffin, writer Mitchell Goodman, famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock, and Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies. I viewed them as heroes in the struggle against evil. There was a candlelight vigil in honor of the just-indicted Dr. Spock in New York City in early January 1968.
The Fugs played the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston the weekend of January 20. (It’s a place long since gone; it’s now, I’m told, a biomedical research facility for Boston University—in a way, it was a research facility in early ’68 also.) That same weekend in London (on January 20) actress Sharon Tate wed director Roman Polanski. They were there for the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby and soon returned to LA, where they stayed for a while in a fourth-floor apartment at the Chateau Marmont Hotel.
Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg, candlelight vigil for Dr. Spock. Ed Sanders collection.
From January 22 to 27 The Fugs were in Montreal at a club called the New Penelope. I asked Jake Jacobs to rejoin us for the gigs. He had a beautiful voice. Few things are as thrilling as singingwith another person whose voice interweaves with yours to form that mantram-seed cloth so cherished by the Muses of Singing. The Fugs drove to farmland outside Montreal in their psychedelic garb, rented snowmobiles, and raced crazily through the Montreal snow, howling and growling, in long curving arcs, for a couple of hours of peace.
On January 28 The Fugs played a club called the Trauma in Philadelphia, always a good party town. The place was so packed with half-clothed bodies we could barely get on stage. We returned to the Lower East Side in time for the Tet Offensive on January 30.
The Viet Cong planned the Tet Offensive from a huge tunnel complex northwest of Saigon containing 150 miles of tunnels on three levels, about two feet wide and two feet high dug during the decades of struggle. There were even underground rooms that served as hospitals for wounded VC. On January 31 the Viet Cong entered the presidential palace and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, holding it for six hours.
Watching Tet unfold on television, we realized that the war was far from over and in fact might soon be “lost.” It was time to announce a “festival of life.”
A Festival of Life in Chicago
In early February I helped write a press release signed by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, and myself for the birth of the Yippies (dubbed the Youth International Party by Rubin) and a festival of life to be held in Chicago during the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August. Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe and the Fish, The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg were so far the biggest draws, but the idea was to get The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan to sign on.
At first it was a triumpha
nt idea—a festival of life in a city where LBJ was coming for his crown—to rouse up a six-day festival where be-in and love-in turned left. The spirit of the Digger Free Store would suffuse it—free food, free music, free pot, and loitering love.
I liked it. We planned a daily newspaper. There’d be a night where 100,000 people would burn their Draft cards, with the words “Beat Army” written in flame. “We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!” our leaflets shouted. “Rise up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball!”—though it was a tactical error, analyzed in retrospect, to announce up front that 500,000 people were going to make love in Chicago parks. Most Americans didn’t want kids balling in the streets.
On February 3 The Fugs flew to San Francisco to play the Avalon Ballroom with Electric Flag, Mad River, and a band called 13th Floor Elevator. Poster artist Victor Moscoso drew the flier.
Poster, The Fugs at the Avalon Ballroom.
The Death of Neal Cassady
On February 4, the very day we were playing the Avalon in San Francisco, oh no! Beat hero Neal Cassady passed away in Mexico! Cassady had gone to a wedding in San Miguel de Allende. He’d left his bag at a railroad station a few miles away, and after he left the party drunk and high, he died on the tracks walking back. He was the first of the Beat Generation pentad (Burroughs/Ginsberg/Huncke/Corso/Cassady) to pass.