by Sanders, Ed
Tuesday, August 27
At dawn on August 27 Ginsberg came back to the park, singing various mantrams for several hours until his voice became hoarse and whispery. As a result Allen was the only bard in the history of Western civilization to have over-ommed, that is, he’d uttered the seed syllable “Om” for so many hours trying to quell the violence that he peace-pained his voice and was omming, at the end, like Froggie the Gremlin.
That night the protesters threw a sixtieth Unbirthday Party for Lyndon Johnson at the packed Chicago Coliseum. Six thousand people were there while Phil Ochs sang “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.” A guy burned his Draft card, and then in one amazing sequence of seconds there was a sudden poof-up of maybe a hundred blazing Draft cards pointillistically patterning the Coliseum audience.
Ginsberg’s voice had not yet returned from his many hours of over-omming to quell the violence, so he passed me a note to read to the audience: “Introduce me as Prague King of May—Ed—in my turn, you explain I lost my voice chanting Aum in park—so please you read my piece—then I’ll do 3 Minutes of Silence Mind consciousness & belly breathing.”
Wednesday, August 28
That afternoon Daley allowed a single rally at the bandshell in Grant Park sponsored by the Mobilization (one of the sponsoring groups in Chicago, whose formal name was National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam). Around 10,000 to 15,000 showed up. About 4:30 Dave Dellinger addressed the crowd through a portable bullhorn to announce a nonviolent march to the Democratic Convention, four and a half miles from Grant Park.
Grant Park is connected to downtown via a series of bridges across railroad tracks to the west. Lines of soldiers prevented the marchers from leaving over any of the bridges, and many of us sat down in front of the troops while U.S. Army helicopters circled overhead.
It was very scary. There were fixed bayonets and jeeps with barbed-wire Hippie-sweeping screens, plus the whoppa whoppa of helicopters mixing with the songs Phil Ochs sang to calm us: “We’re the cops of the world, boys, / We’re the cops of the world.” And then, through a bullhorn someone was holding to his face, Ochs sang “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.”
Then Allen Ginsberg, still hoarse from singing seed syllables in the rings of violence, chanted “The Grey Monk” by William Blake through the bullhorn. All of us who were sitting and waiting were chatty and restless, yet by the time he chanted (from memory) the final verses of the poem, all grew silent except the ghastly helicopters:Thy Father drew his sword in the North,
With his thousands strong he marched forth;
Thy Brother has arm’d himself in Steel
To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel.
But vain the Sword & vain the Bow,
They never can work War’s overthrow.
The Hermit’s Prayer & the Widow ’s tear
Alone can free the World from fear.
For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing,
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe
Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow.
The hand of Vengeance found the Bed
To which the Purple Tyrant Fled;
The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head
And became a Tyrant in his stead.
A few of us had pushed fresh daisies into the rifle barrels at the Pentagon just ten months ago. But now, even though I again had fresh white flowers, I knew that this was a different type of event and that I would likely have been bayonetted and shot pushing petal in metal. Finally, after hours of negotiations, the protesters found a way of getting out of Grant Park, and they surged across a bridge and gathered in front of the Hilton on Michigan Avenue at Balbo.
In the lobby where the Democrats were preparing to go to the convention hall four miles away, soldiers with helmets and guns marched past the plush divans and the potted trees. Then, without warning, a throng of police charged the demonstrators at 7:56, smashing, macing, beating, apparently to clear the avenue.
Jeeps with machine guns mounted to them arrived at the Hilton. “Wahoo! Wahoo!” an officer on a three-wheeled motorcycle shouted as he mashed into the crowd, sounding like the bomb-riding cowboy at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
Thus began hours of bloodshed. In the streets outside the Hilton and Convention Center and in the surgery-room glare of the television lights, thousands took up the chant “The Whole World Is Watching. The Whole World Is Watching.”
Volunteers for Senator Eugene McCarthy set up a first aid station on the Hilton’s fifteenth floor at his suite. They gave up their passes to get the injured to the rooms. Hubert Humphrey was on the twenty-fifth floor. An aide opened a window and complained of tear gas.
On the nominating floor four miles from the Hilton CBS-TV’s Dan Rather gave a live report, “A security man just slugged me in the stomach,” to which Walter Cronkite, the dean of American broadcast journalists, replied, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”
Inside the convention that horrible night Senator George McGovern was a last-minute peace candidate after McCarthy refused to lead a floor fight against Humphrey. Senator Abraham Ribicoff was giving his nominating speech: “With George McGovern,” said Ribicoff, “we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”
Mayor Richard Daley, his face reddened with malevolence, shouted, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker, go home!”
Daley was seated in the front. Ribicoff looked down at Red Face and said, “How hard it is to hear the truth.”
Allen Ginsberg leaped to his feet in the balcony and began shouting, “OMMMMM” for about five minutes. Meanwhile outside in the television lights, the teargassed, terrified, and angry crowd continued its own version of ommmmm, chanting, “The Whole World Is Watching! The Whole World Is Watching!”
The next day, Miriam, I, and Deirdre flew from Chicago back home, where I immediately began plans for the release of our new album.
The Two Albums for 1968
We tried to make up for lost time with two albums in 1968—Tenderness Junction early in the year, and now, our greatest production, in early September, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest, just in time for our fall tour to Germany and to London.
The cover of It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
Tenderness Junction. Photos by Richard Avedon.
My liner notes for It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.
Side A
Crystal Liaison: Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver, Ken Pine (3:11)
Ramses II Is Dead, My Love: Ed Sanders (2:50)
Burial Waltz: Ed Sanders (2:27)
Wide, Wide River: Lionel Goldbart, Ken Weaver (2:53)
Life Is Strange: Tuli Kupferberg (2:41)
Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel: Ed Sanders (4:33)
Side B
Marijuana: Bob Dorough, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg (1:36)
Leprechaun: Ken Weaver (:11)
When the Mode of the Music Changes: Tuli Kupferberg (3:55)
Whimpers from the Jello: Ed Sanders (:21)
The Divine Toe, Pt. 1 : Ed Sanders (:37)
We’re Both Dead Now, Alice: Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver (:15)
Life Is Funny: Tuli Kupferberg (:14)
Grope Need, Pt. 1 : Tuli Kupferberg , Visited by the Ghost of Plotinus/ More Grope Need (:38)
Robinson Crusoe: Ken Weaver (:17)
Claude Pelieu and J. J. Lebel Discuss the Early Verlaine Bread Crusts: Ed Sanders (4:27)
The National Haiku Contest: Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver (:24)
The Divine Toe, Pt. 2: Ed Sanders (:47)
Irene: Ed Sanders (1:11)
For backup harmonies, we used some fine singers who had worked as Harry Belafonte’s harmonists. You can hear them, say, on “Wide, Wide River” and “When the Mode of the Music Changes.”
Ed Sanders: Vocals
Tuli Kupferberg: Vocals
Ken Weaver: Drums, vocals
Ken Pine: Guitar
Charles Larkey: Bass
Bob Mason: Drums
Engineer and music talent coordinator: Richard Alderson
Recorded at Impact Sound, New York City
Vocal arrangements (except “Wide, Wide River,” “Johnny Pissoff,”
and “Life Is Strange”) by Doug Franklin
“when the Mode of the Music Changes” arranged by Warren Smith,
Ken Pine, Dan Kootch, Ed Sanders
“Burial Waltz” arranged and conducted by Warren Smith
“The Divine Toe (Parts 1 and 2)” arranged by Arthur Jenkins
“Claude Pelieu and J. J. Lebel Discuss the Early Verlaine Bread Crusts”
arranged and conducted by Randy Kay
“Ramses II Is Dead, My Love,” arranged by Al Schactman
“Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel,” “Life Is Strange,” and “Marijuana”
vocals and instrumentals arranged by Bob Dorough
“Crystal Liaison” arranged by Ken Pine, Dan Kootch, Richard Alderson,
Warren Smith
Thanks to the Fugs Chorale: Leslie Dorsey, James Jarvis, Kenneth Bates,
Jennifer Brown, Marlys Trunkhill, Barbara Calabria, Bob Dorough,
Bob Hanson
An Apartment for Doc Humes
Late that summer I located an apartment on Ninth Street for legendary novelist H. L. “Doc” Humes, one of the founders of the Paris Review, around the corner from Peace Eye. A few of us paid the rent. The building was owned by Sam Scime, the landlord for Peace Eye. (Doc Humes was known for his generosity, so it was time to help him. Back around 1960 he had given around six months rent money to future Fugs producer/engineer Richard Alderson to rent a loft on Sixth Avenue.)
Of course, it was an era of ’noia, and fear of the government. Part of it was caused by the cosmic revelations of acid and psychedelics. But that was only a part of the Era of Fear: the revelations about the CIA; the suspicion it had killed JFK; the bugging of my home phone. It was in this context of’noia that Doc Humes began to hang out at the Peace Eye Bookstore. I’d been friends with Doc through most of the ’60s. It was through him I first met Harry Smith, who produced the first Fugs album.
He had the ’NOIA. He thought there was a huge and benevolent network of computer scientists who ran a network called FIDO. He would stand in Peace Eye up against the bookcases and talk in a low voice, certain that FIDO satellite-based monitoring equipment was picking up his words. He also thought the CIA was spreading low-grade infections in the counterculture. He told me he thought a friend of his was a CIA officer who had tried to strangle Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador kitchen after Kennedy was shot. Doc was very magnetic, and young people would come into Peace Eye to hear him talk about FIDO and the Great Fear.
A Yippie Pot-Mailing Caper
I drew Doc Humes into a clandestine Yippie project that September. It involved the mailing out of thousands of rolled joints, along with a Yippie flier, to a random list of New Yorkers.
My responsibility was around five hundred joints. We were given envelopes with stamps and addresses. I recruited Doc Humes and a volunteer named DAK. All of us wore rubber gloves as we rolled the joints and stuffed them into the envelopes, along with the Yippie salute, sitting in the Secret Location studio (where once I had shot my underground films) I still rented on Avenue A.
Floor of the Secret Location in 1968 during the time we mailed the Yippie joints. Photo by Ed Sanders.
On Firing Line with Kerouac, September 3
I appeared on William Buckley’s television show Firing Line with Jack Kerouac and sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, author of a book called The Hippie Trip. I was in the elevator going up to the studio when a guy came aboard wearing a checked sports coat with two friends. I didn’t recognize him at once. All of sudden he said, “You look like Ginsberg, you talk like Ginsberg, and you write like Ginsberg.”
I had spoken with Allen Ginsberg before the show and agreed not to respond to any Kerouacean hostility. He was one of my heroes whose novels, especially Big Sur, Dharma Bums, and The Subterraneans, had been like religious texts when I was in college.
I knew he’d swung to the right, as they say, and had supported Buckley’s run for mayor of New York City. One of the first things Allen Ginsberg had told me when I first met him in person in early ’64 was that Jack couldn’t handle fame.
He’d ridden to New York from Lowell with two pals, Joe Chaput and Paul Bourgeois. They’d had a couple of drinks on arriving in the city, then checked into the Delmonico Hotel. William Burroughs was also at the Delmonico, finishing his piece on the Chicago riots for Esquire. At the Delmonico Jack had chugged and smoked pot into the zonk mode. Burroughs urged him not to go to the show.
The audience for the September 3 Firing Line comprised Allen Ginsberg, plus students from Bernard Baruch College, Columbia University, and Hofstra University. The film that aired lasted fifty-two minutes.
Kerouac wasn’t very friendly. His face was very florid, and his forehead vein popped out when he stroked above his nose with a hand that held a Coronella-sized cigar. I told him before the show that I respected his writing too much and that I wasn’t going to fight with him on camera, even though my years steeped in controversy as a poet, publisher, and Fug had trained me well to give back razory raillery.
During the show I was very tempted to mention his daughter Jan, who’d come to many Fugs shows. I remembered how the owner of the Astor Place Playhouse had come on Jan and a Fugs guitarist making it on the drum riser one midnight.
I remembered how Kerouac would call me now and then and recite little poems, which I would write down. I remembered other things that Peter Orlovsky told me in Peace Eye after Kerouac visited Allen’s pad just up the street at 408 East Tenth, but why tell all just because Tell tells you to tell? So I mostly kept silent in front of the author of Mexico City Blues, as the filming began and he tried to jab at me.
William Buckley: Our topic tonight is the Hippies, the understanding of which we must, I guess, acquire or die painfully. We certainly should make considerable progress in the next hour because we have a professional student of hippies and also someone who is said to have started the whole Beat Generation business, and finally a hippie type who can correct us, ever so gently please, if we’re wrong.
Mr. Lewis Yablonsky is a sociologist who studied at Rutgers and took his doctorate at New York University and teaches at San Fernando State College in California, where he is chairman of his department. His first book, which focused on teenage gang life and drug addiction, prepared him for his magnum opus, which is called The Hippie Trip: A Firsthand Account of the Beliefs and Behavior of Hippies in America.
Mr. Jack Kerouac over here became famous [the camera pans on Kerouac, his eyes closed, his right hand holding a small cigar and pushed against his face] when his book On the Road was published. It seemed to be preaching a life of disengagement, making a virtue out of restlessness. The irony is that when the book was belatedly published in 1958, seven years after it was written, Mr. Kerouac had fought his way out of the Beat Generation, and is now not exactly orthodox, at least a regular practicing novelist, whose thirteenth book, The Vanity of Duluoz, is widely regarded as his best.
Mr. Ed Sanders is a musician, a poet, and a polemicist. He is one of The Fugs, a widely patronized combo. He has published four books of poetry and has vigorously preached pacifism for a number of years. I’d like to begin by asking Mr. Sanders if we have serious terminological problems. Are you a hippie, Mr. Sanders, and if not, wherein not?
[I was attired in a white, ruffle-fronted shirt, fresh new black jeans, and white boots, and I was wearing a recent birthday present from Miriam on my thumb, my silver “runic thumb ring,” adorned with runes, which I played with during the program.]
Sanders: Well, I’m not exactly a hippie. I have certain sentiments toward that, quote, hippie movement, unquote. I would say that I differ from hippies in that I would have a more radical political solution to the problems of this part of the
century. And I have my roots more strongly in, say, the classical tradition and in poetry and literature rather than in dope and street sex.
[I was presenting my bifurcated roots: my studies in Greek, Latin, and modern poetry, versus my experiences in the wilder reaches of the counterculture.]
Kerouac [breaking in]: And you published that magazine called what?
Sanders: Called Gutter Expletive/ A Magazine of the Arts.
[Round of laughter from audience]
[I should have blurted out the real title: Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts.]
Buckley: Do I understand from this, that we are supposed to make the inference that the hippies don’t have a highly developed political schedule, a highly developed political ideology.
Sanders: The problem with the term like “hippie” is that they have a definition foisted upon it by the media, and that the word “hippie” has been limited by the necessities of the type of journalists that promote it. You can’t rely on the name “hippie” to include a human being, everything about a particular human being. It’s a bad term, I think, because it has no meaning; you might think of hippopotamus. It has no other connection, spiritual or emotional, like, say, the Beat Generation title has. It has other implications. The word hippie, you immediately think of—you don’t have any good connections. . . .
Lewis Yablonsky [breaking in]: I kind of disagree with that. I spent last year traveling around the country to various communes, to various—Haight Ashbury, the Lower East Side, various city scenes—and there was an identifiable—define a hippie as generally a young person: in several categories. There’s kind of a priestly type; I would include Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and individuals like that in that category. People searching for some loving solutions to society’s ills, trying to tune into the cosmos, whatever that means, we can explore that. Generally using psychedelic drugs.