by Sanders, Ed
Brain Girl
Kasoundra
One of the mysteries of the 1960s: What happened to this album? Is it somewhere in the vaults of Douglas Records?
Shards of God
I had been in negotiations with Grove Press about a novel I was writing in 1967 called The Hairy Table, which was a very fictionalized semiautobiographical account of my operation of the Peace Eye Bookstore and the adventures of The Fugs. Richard Seaver, one of the main editors at Grove, had written me in October ’68, “I wonder if you’ve made any progress on THE HAIRY TABLE since we last discussed it about a year ago? If you’ll remember, you gave us an outline and we were wondering if we could get a little more to go on. It occurred to me that you may now have some further material and in that case I’d like very much to see it.” A chapter of The Hairy Table was published in the summer–fall ’68 issue of San Francisco Earthquake, edited by Jan Herman. The chapter created a stir, as we shall see, when it won a National Endowment for the Arts literary prize, but then was censored by George Plimpton from an NEA anthology on the grounds that its inclusion might endanger the entire NEA budget, which is voted on by Congress.
Like Phil Ochs, I had been wounded by the Chicago police riots and the thuglike conduct of the Democratic Convention, so I decided to set aside The Hairy Table and with my oodles of free time (now that The Fugs were disbanded) to concentrate on a satiric novel set inside the Chicago riots and the partisans of the Yippies. I added a sci-fi theme—the I-mouthed saucer people and their visits to earth.
July 20
Miriam and I watched the moon landing at our apartment on Avenue A. It seemed like a great gift from a slain president, who had set the moon voyage in motion. Meanwhile out in Los Angeles in a hillside home on Cielo Drive, Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and her father, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tate, watched the moon landing. She had asked Abigail Folger and Wojtek Frykowski to stay at the house until her husband returned from London.
Out at the Spahn Movie Ranch on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, just at that moment, young Snake Lake and a few other followers of Charles Manson gathered in the “bunkhouse” on the make-believe western town movie/TV ad set to listen to “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” on Straight Satan biker Danny DeCarlo’s radio.
In the days before her death Sharon was seen in local department stores purchasing baby supplies. Her white Rolls Royce was on the way home from London. The nanny would come as soon as her papers cleared immigration.
Sharon was bubbling with happiness over the impending birth of the baby. She was exercising in preparation for the delivery. She bought books on childcare and supplies for the nursery, which was being built in July in the north wing of the house. Everybody had plans in motion. I was trying to finish my novel about the Yippies in Chicago and was wondering, what was the deal with Chappaquiddick? What the hell was going on?
We were enjoying the summer. People were talking in the Lower East Side about some sort of huge rock festival being planned in upstate New York for August.
Ten Years for Two Joints
On July 28, two and a half years after poet John Sinclair’s arrest for rolling a couple of joints from a brown cookie crock to give to an undercover cop in Detroit who was pretending to be a volunteer for the Committee to Legalize Marijuana, he was sentenced to ten years in prison! It was the ultimate punishment for taking part in LeMar. I wrote an article, “The Jesus Christ of Marijuana,” for EVO. It began:It makes one weep that a man like John Sinclair is imprisoned when criminals like Kenneth Conboy, the board of directors of Minneapolis Honeywell (the fragmentation bomb company) and Melvin Laird [then secretary of defense] are allowed to roam about destroying the noble spirit of humanity.
John Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in the Southern Michigan Prison for passing out free, two joints to a bearded undercover agent who with a policewoman posing as his wife, was running a psychedelic candle shop in the Detroit poetry-rock-publishing community. 10 years for 2 cigarettes of marijuana, the benevolent herb of Ra. 10 years! One ought to be given awards for turning on a cop. Instead he may be forced to tithe one-seventh of his allotted earthly time for dispensing 2 items of pleasure!
East Village Other, August 6, 1969.
The article continued tracing Sinclair’s heroic career running the Artist-Writers Workshop in Detroit and managing the MC5 rock group. I mentioned a big campaign ahead to free him. Indeed several years would pass before John Lennon and others would mount a successful drive to free Sinclair, with John Lennon performing in December 1971 at a sold-out Free John Sinclair rally at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor.
Sanders Truckstop
I had an okay from Mo Ostin, head of Reprise Records, to do my own solo album. Yay! For some reason I decided to do a modern country-and-western /East Village/truckstop project. I went forth to record stores and purchased about eight albums of Hank Williams—all I could find. He was a fixture of my Missouri childhood. I also bought Jimmy Rodgers, Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, a Porter Waggoner and Dolly Parton album, plus Dave Dudley trucker albums. I listened to them over and over. I also spent time practicing my yodeling to Williams and Rodgers. It was dawning on me, finally, that I was the only Beatnik who could really yodel, as I had shown on The Fugs tune “Yodeling Yippie.” Slowly I was forming my “Theory of Truck,” working up a sequence of my melodies on my auto harp at home on Avenue A.
I went to a Linda Ronstadt concert at Town Hall in August. There she was, barefoot and belting a kind of country-and-western uptempo hipster-saturated music that was amazing! She had put out a remarkable album in the spring, Hand Sown . . . Home Grown, for Capitol Records. Hand Sown brought country music to rock. Her voice could soar and had great subtlety. I had known of her since her days with the Stone Poneys when we played at the same club in Cleveland.
I was astounded by her marvelous voice, belting out tunes from the stage of Town Hall. Wow. I also liked the upfront quality of her drummer, John Ware, and the bass player, John London. I learned they were going to be in town for a few days, so I hired them for Sanders Truckstop.
I moved quickly, booking Apostolic Studios, where in two days, September 20–21, we recorded “Home Sick Blues,” “The Plaster Caster Song,” and “Johnny Pissoff Meets the Queer” (what the American Federation of Musicians forms that were filled out that day called “The Iliad”), “The Maple Court Tragedy,” “Breadtray Mountain,” “The Heartbreak Crash Pad,” “Banshee,” “ABM Machine,” and, finally, “Cutting My Coffin at the Sawmill.”
Guitarist Dan Hamburg was a big part of the musical ensemble I put together for the Sanders Truckstop sessions at Apostolic. Dan came to my house, and we worked on a bunch of the tunes, such as the Johnny Pissoff tune, “The Iliad.”
Jay Ungar: Fiddle
Bill Keith: Banjo and pedal steel
Dan Hamburg: Guitar
John Ware: Drums
John London: Bass
Dave Bromberg: Dobro
Patrick Sky: Guitar
It was a good group. Sanders Truckstop was released in spring of 1970.
Jimmy Joe, the Hippybilly Boy 5:14
The Maple Court Tragedy 2:31
Heartbreak Crash Pad 4:02
Banshee 3:00
The Plaster Song 2:58
The Iliad 4:05
Breadtray Mountain 2:20
The ABM Machine 2:25
Cutting My Coffin at the Sawmill 3:12
Homesick Blues 2:33
Pindar’s Revenge 3:25
Off to LA
I flew to Los Angeles in September to work on the album design and to bring the mixes to Reprise Records. I stayed at the Landmark Motel. Janis Joplin was also there. We had a chance to catch up one afternoon when I visited her room. She was waiting for a ride and was very upbeat. She joked about how she was becoming so wealthy she was going to be able to purchase her hometown, Port Arthur, Texas. She talked about two recent lovers, Joe Namath and Dick Cavett. She said Cavett was better.
She blew Cavett, she told me. He contended it was his first time. Her tone of voice indicated to me that maybe she thought he was fibbing. On her arm were about twenty narrow bracelets. I thought later they might have been obscuring her shoot-up marks.
The murders of Sharon Tate and three of her friends in Los Angeles were all the gossip. My friend poet Allen Katzman (also editor of the East Village Other) had returned from his own trip to LA right after the murders, and he told me excitedly about some things he had heard about the killings he said he’d gotten from Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper—director, author, and one of the stars of the recently released Easy Rider—was on top of the film world at the time of the murders. And he was then living with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, the source, Hopper told Katzman, of what he had heard.
Katzman was in San Francisco the weekend of the murders and decided to go to LA, apparently as the guest of Los Angeles Free Press publisher Art Kunkin. Hopper called Kunkin, Katzman later wrote in his autobiography, The Perfect Agent, an Autobiography of the Sixties, and offered to supply an inside story he had learned. Kunkin and Katzman met with Hopper at Columbia Studios. They then went to a restaurant, and Hopper explained that he and Michele Phillips were then living together, and “through her he had recently been caught in the maelstrom of the Tate murders,” as Katzman recounted it.
“He explained that the four murder victims had been involved in a sado-maso club run out of Mama Cass’ house. A coke dealer had ‘burned’ Sebring and Frykowski for a large amount of money, and as revenge he was kidnapped by them, taken to Mama Cass’ where in front of 25 prominent rock and movie stars he was ‘stripped, whipped and buggered.’” Hopper implied his source was Michele Phillips. After that, the tale went, vengeance occurred.
Katzman wrote a piece on the murders in the East Village Other, which he edited. (It turned out that the dealers had alibis and went free.)
When I was in Los Angeles to hand in the mixes of Sanders Truckstop, Andy Wickham, then an executive at Warner/Reprise and a longtime friend of The Fugs, had heard a lot of the same gossip about the murders as Katzman had.
An idea was forming. I was looking for something to do—maybe I should look into these strange murders. The Fugs were in the past. Sanders Truckstop was done. I probably should have put together a band and prepared to tour to back up the album. Indeed, I was doing some performances with Dan Hamburg of songs from Truckstop. I rented a country-and-western shirt and cowboy boots from Nudie’s. Then at dawn I drove out with a photographer to Bakersfield, looking for a proper “truckstop” location for the album cover for Sanders Truckstop.
In Bakersfield at dawn, September 1969, in my country outfit rented from Nudie’s.
The Harsh Reality of Airplay
Reprise Records sent “The Iliad” and “Jimmy Joe, the Hippybilly Boy” to Frank Zappa, who praised them. Reprise VP Stan Cornyn pointed out that because the word “jockstrap” was used in “Jimmy Joe,” it would never get airplay.
Signing with Grove
After I completed my novel Shards of God, set in the milieu of Chicago ’68 and Yippiedom, I signed a contract with Grove Press in September. So I had three post-Fugs careers lined up: (1) running Peace Eye Bookstore, (2) working as a novelist, (3) recording solo with Reprise.
The Chicago 8 Trial
On September 24 the Chicago 8 went to trial: David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies; John Froines, a chemistry teacher at the University of Oregon; Lee Weiner, a grad student at Northwestern University; and Bobby Seale, chair of the Black Panther Party. All were indicted for the rider placed on the 1968 Civil Rights Act— the so-called Rap Brown amendment—crossing state lines for the purpose of civil disruption.
Bobby Seale demanded to represent himself and to cross-examine witnesses. (His attorney, Charles Garry, had to have surgery, but the judge wouldn’t postpone the trial.) Seale kept interrupting the proceedings until finally Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged, and there he was in court like someone shackled in a ship’s hold. (On November 5 Hoffman finally severed Seale from the trial, and the Chicago 8 became the Chicago 7.)
Richard Nixon weighed in with his usual sour-souled analysis on one of his secret tapes: “Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews? Davis is a Jew, you know.” When someone told Nix that Davis wasn’t Jewish, Nix noted that, well, Abbie Hoffman was Jewish.
The Passing of Kerouac
The night of the second anniversary of Exorcism of the Pentagon, October 21, Allen Ginsberg was at his farm in Cherry Valley, just about to leave for a poetry tour beginning with Yale and then a teach-in about Vietnam at Columbia. Gregory Corso had come for a visit.
That evening the phone rang. Gregory answered. It was writer Al Aronowitz. Corso turned to Ginsberg. “Al! Jack died.”
Kerouac had been watching a cooking show called The Galloping Gourmet , eating some tuna and sipping whiskey in his living room, jotting in a notepad, when the blood burbled up his throat. He never regained consciousness.
Early the next morning Ginsberg and Corso walked through the early snow to the woods up the hill and carved Jack’s name in a tree.
Allen wrote a beautiful poem, “Memory Gardens,” after Jack’s funeral. Here are some lines:I threw a kissed handful of damp earth
down on the stone lid
& sighed
looking in Creeley’s one eye,
Peter sweet holding a flower
The poem ends with these words:Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work—
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
Those lines became the watchwords of the late 1960s and beyond.
The fall saw John and Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace in Canada. Allen was mentioned in “Give Peace a Chance,” so he called Lennon during the Bed-In to give good wishes.
Learning About the Manson Group
In October I was back in New York City when I received an issue of an environmental newsletter called Earth Read-Out. This issue contained the first mention of the group that soon would be known as the Manson family, reprinting a story from the San Francisco Chronicle dated October 15, 1969:The last survivors of a band of nude and long-haired thieves who ranged over Death Valley in stolen dune buggies have been rounded up, the sheriff’s office said yesterday. A sheriff’s posse, guided by a spotter plane, arrested 27 men and women members of the nomad band in two desert raids. Deputies said eight children, including two babies suffering from malnutrition, were also brought in. Some of the women were completely nude and others wore only bikini bottoms, deputies said. All the adults were booked at Inyo county jail for investigation of charges which included car theft, receiving stolen property and carrying illegal weapons. Six stolen dune buggies were recovered, deputies said.
Deputy Sheriff Jerry Hildreth said the band lived off the land by stealing. He said they traveled in the stolen four-wheel-drive dune buggies and camped in a succession of abandoned mining shacks. The band previously escaped capture by moving only at night and by setting up radio-equipped lookout posts on the mountains, he said. “It was extraordinary the way they covered up their tracks and would make dummy camps to throw us off,” Hildreth said. “They gave us a merry chase. . . . This is probably one of the most inaccessible areas in California.”
Earth Read-Out commented favorably on the roaming Hippie commune. Then, six weeks after I read those two paragraphs, the front pages of newspapers were filled with glaze-eyed pictures of Charles Manson, the accused murderer, and his band of choppers. He was depicted all at once as a Hippie-Satanist-car-thief-cult-leader-sex-maniac-bastard butcher. His followers—a few young men and around twenty girls—were depicted as “Satan’s slaves,” willing to do anything, anytime, anywhere for him. Out of all the headlines and stories, no consistent set of facts seemed to emerge that
explained in any depth how a group of young American citizens could develop into a commune of hackers. It seemed possible at this early stage of the case—from my perspective of just reading the frenzied news accounts and hearing rumors—that the whole thing was a setup and that they might even be innocent.
Meanwhile, there were two big demonstrations that fall in DC, called the “Moratoriums.” The first was on October 15, with coordinated activities across the nation. The Second Moratorium occurred on November 15, when at least 250,000 came to Washington. I was there, and the memory is exquisite of clanging the Justice Department doors while chanting, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead” and looking up to see wasp-eyed Nixonites staring from the upper windows.
Establishment figures such as Senators Charles Goodell, George McGovern, and Eugene McCarthy were on hand, as were Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dick Gregory, and Leonard Bernstein. While the 250,000 sang John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” Nixon ignored the message. He was watching a football game as 40,000 walked back and forth in front of the White House, each holding a card with the name of an American who had died while fighting the war.
Nixon pooh-poohed any thought that the Moratoriums would change his course, yet in his later Memoirs he wrote how they made him stop scheming for a wider war: “I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.”