by Sanders, Ed
Ginsberg was at his apartment on East Tenth off Avenue C when one of Neal’s women friends telephoned. The great bard’s “Elegy for Neal Cassady” laid down beautifully the grief of someone who’d lost a soul buddy, with memories of discourse, Spirit to Spirit, as in these lines: I could talk to you forever,
The pleasure inexhaustible,
discourse of spirit to spirit,
O Spirit
Kootch’s Departure
Right around the time of the Avalon gigs our brilliant guitarist and violinist, Danny Kootch, master of the just-invented wah wah pedal, announced he was leaving The Fugs! It was another huge hole to fill. He told me he was going to join a newly forming LA-based band, The City. Our bass player, Charlie Larkey, also announced he was leaving, though he would stay on through our upcoming Scandinavian tour in the spring.
Kootch and Larkey were set to form a group with none other than famous songwriter Carole King! She had met her future husband Gerry Goffin at Queens College in New York, and beginning in the late ’50s they created hit tunes such as “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for the Shirelles, “Take Good Care of My Baby” for Bobby Vee, and the great Drifters recording, “Up on the Roof.” King by early 1968 had split with Gerry Goffin and would soon marry Charles Larkey, with whom she would have several children. King went on to write the huge hit for James Taylor “You’ve Got a Friend,” and then after The City she started her own sequence of albums, including her vast-sales-of-vinyl Tapestry.
Danny Kootch was very creative. He also played the violin (such as on “The Garden Is Open”). Not long before he departed The Fugs, Kootch sang for me a tune called “Steamroller” and suggested we place it on what would be called Tenderness Junction. It was the following set of lyrics that turned me off to the tune:Now, I’m a napalm bomb, baby
Just guaranteed to blow your mind
Yeah, I’m a napalm bomb for you, baby
Oh, guaranteed, just guaranteed to blow your mind
I was a bit horrified, knowing too well what napalm was doing to the scorched backs of Vietnamese villagers fleeing their villages, so I gently turned it down, without really explaining to Kootch. Just over a year later Kootch’s coplayer in the Flying Machine, James Taylor, put “Steamroller” on his megaselling album Sweet Baby James. Luckily for The Fugs, we already had a fine guitar player aboard—Ken Pine—so we could continue without any lineup lurch.
An Exorcism of Joseph McCarthy’s Grave
I took part in a panel discussion on the New Journalism at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in late ’67. On hand to discuss the new techniques of presenting information were Jack Newfield, Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau, and Paul Krassner. I told Newfield that The Fugs were going to give a concert in a few weeks in Appleton, Wisconsin, the hometown of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the famous right-wing Red-baiting politician who had wrecked careers through falsehoods. He was buried there. Jack Newfield suggested that we exorcise McCarthy’s grave. I thought it was a great idea and made preparations. Allen Ginsberg was also going to perform at the same venue in Appleton, and he agreed to help in the Exorcism.
Our concert February 19 with Ginsberg was held at the Cindarella (sic) Ballroom in Appleton. It went smoothly, except at the intermission an officer with the local sheriff’s department came up to me backstage. He wasn’t happy. He said, “I don’t care what you sing, but if you jack off that microphone one more time, I’m going to arrest you.”
That night, and early in the morning, I prepared the Exorcism. A serious one, because if my hero Allen Ginsberg actually thought he could lecture the ghost (or the summoned apparition) of the Red-baiting senator for his homophobia, who was I not to pour all my energy into the project? So I actually wrote out a ceremony of Exorcism and Summoning.
Sanders reading the Exorcism text at the grave of Joseph McCarthy, Appleton, Wisconsin, February 20, 1968. Ed Sanders collection.
The next morning The Fugs and Ginsberg, plus maybe fifty to seventy-five friends, gathered at Senator McCarthy’s grave on a chilly winter hillock and performed the Exorcism, which enraged right-wing commentators. I chanted a singsong conjuration of deities and power words, similar to what I had done at the Pentagon Exorcism. With Allen commenting on the Great Red-baiter’s homophobia, he led forth with an invocation to bisexual Greek and Indian gods. We tried to be dignified and respectful.
The Fugs exorcising Joseph McCarthy’s grave in Appleton, Wisconsin; top: Ken Weaver and friend; above: Ken Weaver, Ed, Allen Ginsberg with harmonium. Ed Sanders collection.
Allen recited a Hebrew prayer and an invocation to Shiva, and we recited the Prajnaparamita Sutra. Then the entire crowd sang, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and a few minutes of “Hare Krishna,” after which I chanted the final words of Plato’s Republic in Greek. A young woman agreed to array herself atop the senator’s stone as an offering.
We asked those present at the Exorcism to place a gift on McCarthy’s stone. I looked back as we left and saw a very interesting visual gestalt atop the granite: a bottle of Midol, a ticket to the movie The War Game, a Spring Mobilization Against the War leaflet, a stick of English Leather cologne, one stuffed parrot, one candy bar, a ChapStick, one dozen red roses, one dozen white geraniums, one dozen yellow geraniums, one “Get Fugged” button, some coins, sugar wafers, coat buttons, and two seeds of marijuana. “So long, Joe,” Tuli said as we walked down the hill.
Right-wing radio man Paul Harvey growled enormously about the Exorcism on his show, just as right-wing columnist Jim Bishop had railed against the Marijuana Newsletter from Peace Eye two years previous. These right-wing guys are always railing, wailing, and trailing after our scents.
Dawn Protest Concert at Stony Brook
We were barely off the road and back on the Lower East Side when we were called to perform at dawn outside the front gates of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, out on Long Island. It was a protest, sponsored by the just-founded Yippies, against a dawn raid by the police a few weeks previous to arrest marijuana smokers in the Stony Brook dorms.
So we set up our amps and microphones in the chilly dawn of February 27 and sang. Also performing were Country Joe and the Fish, the Pageant Players, and a group called Soft White Underbelly. The Daily News ran a picture of me from the demonstration, in my chilly long gray coat, and our guitarist, Ken Pine, while the New York Post noted that “Timothy Leary predicts that 100,000 dancing, joyous yippies will swarm over Chicago’s airports so the Presidential plane cannot land at convention time.”
The afternoon of the Stony Brook concert I signed a lease to take over the East Village Other office at 147 Avenue A, near Ninth Street, in order to move the Peace Eye Bookstore there from its prior location next to Tuli Kupferberg’s building on Tenth Street between B and C.
The Fugs at the Anderson Theater, March 6, 1968. Photo by Elliott Landy.
Meanwhile, More Benefits
On March 6, just a few days after the McCarthy Exorcism and the dawn concert at Stony Brook, The Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish, Bob Fass, Paul Krassner, and Light Show creators Joshua and Pablo did a benefit for the War Resisters League at the famous Anderson Theater, home to many a Yiddish production, at 66 Second Avenue. I wrote a new song for the concert, a country and western satire titled “I Cried When I Came in Your Best Friend’s Mouth.” I could hear the gasps from the front rows of the Anderson Theater as we sailed through the tune. It was the only ditty in the history of The Fugs that any band member objected to, so I dropped it from the repertoire.
A young rock photographer named Elliot Landy was just beginning his career. One of his first concerts was The Fugs/Country Joe gig at the Anderson. This Landy photo of The Fugs on the Anderson Theater stage captured marvelously the grooviness of the stage ambience during those times.
Time to Complete a Major Album
Meanwhile, we were recording what would be our triumphal album of the 1960s, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest. I worked very closely with Richar
d Alderson in producing it. It cost a fortune in 1960s money, around $25,000, with weeks and weeks of recording at Impact Studios on West Sixty-fifth (soon to be torn down to make the Lincoln Center parking garage). I created a lengthy “Magic Rite,” which we recorded. Ken Weaver wrote “Aztec Hymn,” which we also recorded. And I worked with jazz composer Burton Greene on another long work, “Beautyway,” based on a Navajo ceremony. We also recorded a song about poet William Blake walking naked with his wife, Catherine, while reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in their garden in 1793. None of these tunes would wind up on the album.
Before he left to join Carole King’s new group, Dan Kootch had strongly urged me to hire a second drummer, as Frank Zappa had done for the Mothers of Invention. This created considerable dissension with our original percussionist, Ken Weaver, though it freed him to come frontstage more often to sing and perform his famous routines.
Alderson brought us great singer and arranger Bob Dorough, who sang and arranged various tunes for It Crawled, such as “Marijuana,” “Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel,” “Ramses the 2nd Is Dead, My Love,” and “Life Is Strange.” Alderson also brought aboard Warren Smith to arrange “When the Mode of the Music Changes.”
Idea for Recording a Single During a Parachute Jump
I had an excellent idea early in 1968! We’d record a Fugs single during a group parachute jump from a plane. Richard Alderson would join us, holding a tape recorder, which would be connected to me, Ken, and Tuli, each outfitted with broadcast mikes. We’d be in communication with Alderson by means of headphones. He’d count it off, and then we’d record! Tuli balked, so another good idea hit the basket.
Moving Peace Eye to Avenue A
After the landlord forced me to take back Peace Eye from the Jade Companions of the Flowered Dance in the spring of ’67, I had left it fairly dormant, caught in the pleasant pincers of carousing, recording, and fame. I had reopened Peace Eye in the summer and fall of ’67 after winning my court case. But then I allowed it to close in late ’67 until the spring of ’68, when I was determined to bring the bookstore back to power. So the afternoon following the cold dawn concert at Stony Brook I signed a lease on Avenue A for the place that had once housed the East Village Other. I gave the Other owners $500 in key money and hired people to get the space ready—scraping, painting, putting in shelves.
Spain Rodriguez’s design for the Peace Eye Bookstore. Photo by Ed Sanders.
Artist Spain Rodriguez, who’d painted the groovy sign for the Digger Free Store around the corner, did the new Peace Eye sign—chrome yellow letters on red and a fine Eye of Horus.
I was determined to get Peace Eye, in its new location, on a better business footing, and I brought in Joe Arak, who had worked for The Fugs, to manage it. And then my thanks to the guys who worked there during the next two years, including Doug Hasting, John Matthews, Burt Kimmelman, Vince Aletti, and Jim Retherford.
Life During the Glory Years of the Great Society
Underneath the Goof, of course, lay the skree of weirdness, calamity, and secret police. The theremin fill, oo-oo-oo-oo in the Beach Boy’s “Good Vibrations” and the oo-ee-oo in Krzysztof Komeda’s soundtrack for Rosemary’s Baby were always there in the sounds of ’68 (along with the throb of tall stacks of amplifiers, the sizzle of napalm, and the sky-groaning vowels of lysergica).
The secret police were always there also, like puking drunks in a phone booth, hung up on manipulation, looking for evidence of rubles, racist, pretty much right wing and hating the left. Miriam’s mother would call Avenue A, and there’d be no ring. Then all of a sudden she could hear everything in the room. We were pitiably easy to monitor.
Miriam and Deirdre in 1968 on Ave A with the bugged phone. Photo by Larry Fink, used by permission of Marc Albert-Levin.
(Later, from reading my FBI files I realized how closely surveilled we were. I was shocked to learn that the FBI at least twice forwarded actual Fugs records to the U.S. attorney “for prosecutive decision,” to use the bureau’s own icy language.)
But the streets were safe. Miriam and Deirdre, then not quite four, could go out at 3:00 AM to the vegetable store called Three Guys from Brooklyn on First Avenue and do so without undue fear.
The heroin started arriving, and the violence, after Nixon took office in early 1969. It’s not clear if there was a connection, but we would notice it, and it would become a factor in Miriam’s and my deciding to depart from the Lower East Side.
A Mantram to Chant in Chicago
I had written Charles Olson in Gloucester for a mantram we could chant in Chicago to quell the violence. I also asked poets Ed Dorn and d. a. levy. My request came from the chanting The Fugs and the Diggers had done at the Pentagon, “Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out!” and the ceremony we had performed at Senator McCarthy’s grave. I figured it was worth a try to see if a great bard’s sung seed syllables could help end the war.
Backstage at the opening of the Fillmore East, March 8, 1968, with Janis Joplin and band. Ed on the left. Photo by Elliott Landy.
On March 14 Charles Olson called Avenue A and recited his mantram to Miriam:Plann’d in Creation, Arouse the Nation
Blood is the Food of
Those Gone Mad
Blood is the Food of
Those Gone Mad
Blood is all over already the Nation
Plann’d in Creation, Arouse the Nation
Blood is the Food of Those Gone Mad
Olson then mailed us the chant from Chicago on the way to deliver some lectures entitled “Poetry and Truth” at Beloit College.
Blown Away by Sly
The Fugs played in Detroit at the Grande Ballroom, with the MC5 and the Psychedelic Stooges on March 29–30. There was an opening act I’d never heard of, Sly and the Family Stone, who performed just before The Fugs. Sly and the Family Stone proceeded to arouse the audience to incredibly high ecstasy, leaving everyone limp. It was a Blowout by Sly so that when The Fugs went on, it was impossible for us to rouse the audience back to the Sly Frenzy. I vowed to try never to get caught in the “Blown away by Sly” mode ever again.
Martin Luther King
We knew that Martin Luther King was working on a huge Poor People’s Campaign that would bring tens of thousands to camp out in Washington, DC, for Peace, Justice, and Jobs. Then suddenly, on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4 he was gunned down. It was quickly reported that the putative rifleman was a guy named James Earl Ray.
I remembered so intensely standing beneath a big tall elm by the Lincoln Memorial that hot day in August ’63 to hear King give his “I Have a Dream” speech, and now I hated the guy who killed him, just as I hated the scampering men with swastika armbands I filmed that day on the edge of the huge crowd by the Memorial.
Bacchus, as ever, pushed into the Grief, and The Fugs flew the day after King’s death to Cincinnati for an arts festival. I remember how someone at Frank O’Hara’s funeral had asked if there was a party afterward. Sitting next to me on the plane was a pretty young woman who claimed she was returning from a tour as a courtesan for one of Ohio’s senators.
For a city that later persecuted photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, there was a glut of fun in Cincinnati. For instance, a party in our motel where a Fug (not I!) frolicked with a fan, after which they watched a Mexican vampire movie while his toe was moving gently in and out of the entrance of Venus.
Meanwhile, big riots began in DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and 125 other places, where 46 died, with over 20,000 arrested and 55,000 troops sent to quell the disorders. In Chicago, for instance, 5,000 federal troops and 6,700 Illinois National Guardsmen were dispatched to assist police. Mayor Richard Daley soon criticized the Chicago Police Department “for having failed to take more aggressive action when the riot started.”
On April 11 The Fugs flew to Denver to play a version of the Avalon Ballroom that had opened there. Then we flew the next day to San Francisco to play the main Avalon, April 12, 13, 14. Jim Morrison was back
stage one night in his snakeskin pants, swigging from a Jim Beam bottle. He was a bit too wasted to ask him to sing in Chicago. I had gone to Frank Zappa, and others including Janis, to try to get them to sing at the Festival of Life during the upcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago in August.
The Fugs at the Avalon Ballroom, April 1968.
We stayed in San Francisco until April 17, with a few extra days to party. My mentor Charles Olson was in town for two weeks (he had a gig to experiment with other poets in the new medium of video) and staying with editor/ publisher Don Allen on the pullout sofa in his apartment on Jones Street.
One morning I visited Janis Joplin. I told her the great poet Charles Olson was in town and would she like to meet him? I thought maybe Olson could write some songs for her, and, well, both were single and maybe there could be some eros between bard and blues.
We went to a restaurant in Chinatown, and because Don Allen was the famous editor of New American Poets and the Evergreen Review, the party was paid for by Grove Press! Afterward we crowded into a booth at Gino and Carlo’s in North Beach. Olson was talking about Sutter’s Mill, and the word “Donner Party” entered the quick flow of his words. Around then Janis went to the back to shoot pool, and my plans for a blues/bard romance were racked up on the green.