by Sanders, Ed
I wrote a satiric article on the Moratorium, describing the thrill of clanging on the doors of the Justice Department, which I submitted to Esquire magazine. The editors decided not to publish it, but then in early December the Manson case broke, and I spoke with an editor at Esquire about doing an article on the Manson group for an upcoming issue that would feature a section on the theme of “California Evil.”
Becoming a Clipper
I had learned from Allen Ginsberg to clip articles. I mean oodles of articles. He’d started in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Allen sent me lots of clippings during the 1960s, often on the struggle to liberate pot from the grouches of the überculture. Late in 1969 I started clipping everything I could find on the Manson group and what the press called the Tate-LaBianca murders. You know how it is when you read the same clippings over and over—the questions start to pile up.
I was set to fly out to California and do some research, utilizing my extensive connections in the music world and in the counterculture to get the inside story. Then I learned that Esquire had decided to give the Manson assignment to writer Gay Talese. I had already clipped oodles of articles on the Manson group, so I gulped and decided to write a book, thinking it would take about six months, after which I could return to a quiet life of poetry and peace.
Of course, poetry and peace were not what 1970 had in mind. Because I was well known, it did not take much effort to get a book contract. I acquired a top-rank agent, Carl Brandt (who at the time represented Jerry Rubin, who had recommended Brandt). Hal Scharlatt, editor in chief of E. P. Dutton, offered a contract, and I picked up an assignment from Esquire to write an essay on the upcoming trial. In order more easily to acquire information from the remnants of the Manson group, I secured a position on the staff at the important underground newspaper the Los Angeles Free Press, agreeing to write a weekly column on the case.
Olson’s Float-Away
My mentor Charles Olson had landed a teaching job at the University of Connecticut that fall. Then his health began to deteriorate. By late October he checked into a local hospital, and then during his third week there came the diagnosis—liver cancer. On December 18 Harvey Brown, longtime Olson supporter, brought him in an ambulance from Manchester to New York Hospital. The slim hope was for a liver transplant, but tests in New York showed the cancer had metastasized and a transplant was not an option.
Charles Olson’s funeral card.
Olson’s winged skull stone.
Visitors by the score showed up, including a prominent book dealer who brought a thick stack of Olson’s books to sign. I brought an Egyptian painted plaque, which went up on a nearby table. Olson told me because he felt that a woman’s liver could regenerate, then he wanted to have his sex surgically changed and to be given injections of “female hormones.”
There were the indignities of failing fast, such as when they lost his dental plate in radiology. His eighteen-year-old daughter, Kate, stayed with him to the end. I recall a roommate sharing Olson’s room, also a cancer patient, who checked his stocks each day in the New York Times. Early in the morning of January 10, 1970, Olson passed away. It shivered through my life like an icy scimitar! In a way it seemed as if my entire youth, especially the 1960s, had also passed into the void.
I flew to Boston with Allen Ginsberg and George Kimball, then to Gloucester for the funeral. As I helped carry Olson’s coffin from the Catholic church on the way to Beechwood Cemetery in Gloucester, I felt as if a close relative had passed away. During the viewing of Charles’s open casket, a local Gloucesterman paused and exclaimed, “Charlie, you’re beautiful.”
An era had closed. There was an indirect line from helping carry his coffin to the limousine all the way back to discovering Olson’s great poem, “Maximus from Dogtown—I” in 1959 at the 8th Street Bookshop when I was an NYU student. Only eleven years separated the two, but it seemed like an eternity.
Final Recording Session of the 1960s
The final recording session of the 1960s occurred in early December with Ken Pine at Apostolic. I recorded “Six Pack of Sunshine,” “While My Moog Gently Weeps,” “I’m Just a Tired, Lonesome Street-Punk,” and “We Don’t Allow No Robots at Sunday School,” all tunes I was thinking of using on the follow-up album to Sanders Truckstop.
An Award for “The Hairy Table”
At the end of 1969 I became involved in a censorship issue over my short story “The Hairy Table,” which had been published in 1968. A panel of judges, including Joyce Carol Oates, had selected it to be in a prestigious anthology to be published by Viking Press. Furthermore, it had won a $1,000 prize from the National Endowment for the Arts.
My Lower East Side congressman, Leonard Farbstein, sent me a letter of congratulations dated December 2, 1969.
Dear Mr. Sanders:
I was indeed pleased to learn that you have been granted an award in the amount of $1,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts for your short story, “The Hairy Table.”
May I take this opportunity to extend to you my warmest congratulations and wish you the very best in the future.
Leonard Farbstein, Member of Congress.
“The Hairy Table” had originally been published by Jan Herman in his magazine San Francisco Earthquake. It was a section of a novel I was writing back in 1967–1968. The Kansas City Star described the story this way: “The short story deliberately carries obscenity to an absurd extreme.” I was exploring the outer limits.
I also received a letter of congratulations from Nancy Hanks, who was appointed by Richard Nixon to be the head of the National Endowment for the Arts:Dear Ed Sanders:
You have been selected to receive a National Endowment for the Arts award under the American Literary Anthology program for your short story: ‘The Hairy Table,’ in THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE. It will appear in THE AMERICAN LITERARY ANTHOLO GY/3, to be published by Viking Press in January 1970. . . . I congratulate you on this award and wish you every success in your future work.
Sincerely yours, Nancy Hanks, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
There was pressure on me to proof the galleys and get a short bio to the publisher. It looked like a dollop of glory was to come my way as I headed off to Los Angeles to write about the Manson group.
Then Nancy Hanks was given the galleys and read “The Hairy Table.” She reportedly actually fainted. The piece consisted of a highly fictionalized series of erotic encounters at the Peace Eye Bookstore while I was printing the second edition of The Toe-Queen Poems. It also involved various ancient Greek and Egyptian elements.
I spoke with George Plimpton when I was already in Los Angeles. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He said that if they left “The Hairy Table” in the NEA/Viking anthology, the entire NEA budget, in the first year of Nixon’s reign, would be in danger. Did I want the entire National Endowment for the Arts, a glory of American democracy, to fail because of my story? I was already at work on my investigation of the M group, and so I agreed, reluctantly, to the excision.
In a later letter to me Plimpton noted that “Nancy Hanks, who is the director of the Endowment, told me that she honestly felt that a one-word poem (‘Lightght’) by Aram Saroyan [published in the NEA/Viking anthology, volume 2] had, in the hands of certain ‘Neanderthal’ congressmen, cost the endowment five million dollars.”
I decided not to protest too much. I was getting tired of being a modern-day American Bacchus. Instead I purchased a dark blue Gucci blazer with brass buttons to wear at the upcoming Manson family murder trial and set aside Bacchus while I spent two years investigating a murder case.
Then 1970
It may be late-1960s ’noia, but the amount of heroin in the Lower East Side jumped drastically with the advent, in early 1969, of the regime of Richard Nixon. I was mugged that spring, and Miriam and I had that winter witnessed a woman knifed to death in the street outside our second-story window. She staggered among the cobbles, screaming for hel
p, then died, as we called the police. The man who ran a sewing machine repair shop across the street was murdered by someone wielding a brick.
The streets seemed more and more dangerous. We placed Deirdre in kindergarten at the Emmanu-el Midtown YM-YWHA, up on Fourteenth Street. But for the first grade she was going to have to attend a school on Avenue D, involving dangerous walks each morning and afternoon.
Through poet Joel Oppenheimer we learned of a brand new loft building for artists and the creative located in the West Village—it was called Westbeth. The National Endowment for the Arts had given a matching grant back in ’68 to the J. M. Kaplan Fund to set up the nonprofit Westbeth Corporation, which purchased the old Bell Telephone Laboratories on West Street for renovation into artists’ studio/living quarters. There were some 384 units, ranging from efficiencies to three-bedroom apartments, and ample room for studio space in the basement, plus exhibition galleries. The building was a product of the Great Society of the 1960s!
Westbeth was about to open in early 1970, and I learned that there were a few apartments still available, at a very modest rental, which was to be adjusted according to income. I pulled strings and landed us a new pad—a beautiful duplex for $ 186 a month! Peter Orlovsky helped us move our stuff from Avenue A to the West Village.
Closing Peace Eye
I decided to close Peace Eye Bookstore. I’d thought of keeping it open, or bringing in a partner, but in the end I just gave away thousands of books. Wow, did they flock into the store to get free stuff! It was like the old Digger Free Store, but only for a couple of days. I brought Spain Rodriguez’s Peace Eye sign to our new loft at Westbeth. (I still have it, in our garage in Woodstock, forty years later.)
My Testimony at the Chicago 7 Trial
I paid for my own ticket from New York to Chicago to testify at the Chicago 7 trial before Judge Julius Hoffman and twelve jurors. I was given a prep talk by Tom Hayden just before my testimony was to begin on January 8. The way I interpreted what Tom Hayden was saying to me was that I was to come on weird, as if to show the sort of person who WAS NOT indicted. I did my best to fill the bill.
To my disappointment, Judge Hoffman refused to allow into evidence a large Yippie flag I had brought to court with the inscription “Abandon the Creeping Meatball.” This referred to a song I had written back in early ’68 to celebrate the birth of Yippie. The tune’s opening lines wereRise up and abandon the Creeping Meatball
in Nixon’s land
We’re going to sing and dance in Chicago
for the Festival of Life
I had purchased brand-new shiny blue suede shoes for the testimony, so at the outset of my testimony, the defense thought of a game whereby I’d pretend I was waiting for my shoes.
Mr. Weinglass: Your honor, without excusing the jury, our next witness is waiting for his shoes, and if I may have a few minutes.
The Court: Well, I have seen people come here almost without shoes so he may come in without his shoes. I will excuse him.
Mr. Kunstler: I just want to see if they arrived.
[I came in to the courtroom wearing just my socks, and then my spanking new blue suede shoes were brought to me, and I put them on.]
Mr. Weinglass: Do you recall what it was that brought you from Jackson County, Missouri, to New York?
The Witness: Reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in shop class in high school in 1957.
Mr. Weinglass: Mr. Sanders, could you indicate to the Court and to the jury what your present occupation is?
The Witness: I am a poet, songwriter, leader of a rock-and-roll band, publisher, editor, recording artist, peace-creep.
Mr. Schultz: What was the last one, please?
The Court: Peace-creep?
The Witness: Yes, sir.
The Court: Will you please spell it for the reporter?
The Witness: P-E-A-C-E, hyphen, C-R-E-E-P.
The Court: Peace-creep, Mr. Schultz.
The Witness [continuing]: and yodeler.
Mr. Weinglass: Now in connection with your yodeling activities—
Mr. Schultz: Your Honor, this is all very entertaining but it is a waste of time. We don’t have to do anything in connection with his yodeling to get to the issues in this case.
The federal judge would not allow me to demonstrate my yodeling abilities. I was disappointed, for verily I was and am the only Beat who can yodel. However, I resisted the dramatic impulse to weep and show trembling agitation in front of the judge at this restriction on my yodeliferous genius. Why? Six-month jail term and maybe a $1,000 fine for insulting the dignity of the court. I had to get to LA and start investigating the Manson family.
The Court: You may finish your question.
Mr. Weinglass: Mr. Sanders, can you identify these two items?
The Witness: They are two phonograph records. The records were produced by me, by the group, The Fugs, of which I am the leader and head fug, so to speak.
Mr. Weinglass: Now, Mr. Sanders, have you also written a book about the Yippies?
Mr. Schultz: Leading, objection.
The Witness: Yes.
The Court: I sustain the objection. Mr. Witness, will you wait when there is an objection so that I can indicate my view of the objection? Will you do that?
The Witness: I’ll try.
Mr. Weinglass: Now, directing your attention to the latter part of November in the year of 1967, did you have occasion to meet with any of the defendants seated here at the counsel table?
The Witness: I met with Jerry Rubin. There was a conference at the Church Center for the UN in New York City.
Mr. Weinglass: And at the time of that meeting did you have a conversation?
The Witness: Yes. I mentioned the Monterey Festival, which was a free festival featuring all the rock bands in America. Mr. Rubin said it was inspirational that some of the major rock bands in America were willing to play for free at a large tribal-type gathering of people, and I said it was really great and that we should consider convening something for the following summer or in the following year of a similar nature, that is, a free rock festival composed of all the major rock bands in America.
Then Keith Lampe said, “Why don’t we hold it next summer, you know, sometime in August?” And it was agreed-at that point everybody decided it would be a wonderful idea to have a free rock festival denoting the new life styles emerging, and that we would get in touch with Abbie Hoffman and other people and have a meeting right away.
Mr. Weinglass: Now, directing your attention to the evening of January 4, 1968, do you recall where you were that evening?
The Witness : Yes. I went to Jerry Rubin’s house in New York City to get briefed on a meeting that had taken place.
Mr. Weinglass: What took place at that meeting you had with Jerry Rubin?
The Witness: Well, first we had a period of meditation in front of his picture of Che on the wall for a half hour.
The Court: Picture of whom?
The Witness: Che, Che Guevara. Che, the great revolutionary leader.
The Court: Oh. Would you spell it for the reporter.
The Witness: C-H-E.
Then we practiced for about a half hour toughening up our feet walking around in Baggies full of ice, and then Jerry informed me about the circumstances of the meeting that had taken place, forming the Youth International Party, and that it was decided to hold a free rock festival in Chicago during the time of the Democratic National Convention, and that the convening would be a convening of all people interested in the new politics, guerrilla theater, rock and roll, the convening of the hemp horde from all over the various tribes in the United States. I was asked by Jerry if I would help coordinate since I knew the major rock groups in the United States, if I would contact them and ask them if they would play.
I said I would be happy to and that I would proceed forthwith in contacting these major rock groups, and that I did.
Mr. Weinglass: Now, had you ever discussed with either Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffm
an in person your contacts with these major rock groups?
The Witness: Yes.
Mr. Schultz: Your Honor, would you please ask Mr. Weinglass not to ask leading questions, not to lead the witness?
We keep on getting up and getting up. It becomes embarrassing. For people who don’t know the legal rules, it looks very bad for the Government to constantly be getting up.
The Court: I appreciate that, Mr. Schultz.
Mr. Schultz: I am begging—I am begging defense counsel to ask questions properly.
The Court: Don’t beg.
Mr. Schultz: That is what it is.
The Court: Don’t beg. You needn’t beg. I will order them not to ask leading questions.
Mr. Weinglass: Now, directing your attention to March 27, do you recall where you were in the evening of that day?
The Witness: I was at my home in the Lower East Side.
Mr. Weinglass: What, if anything, occurred while you were at home that evening?
The Witness: I received a phone call from Jerry Rubin.
Mr. Weinglass: Could you indicate to the Court and to the jury what the conversation was that you had with Jerry Rubin on the telephone that night?
The Witness: Well, he said that he was very—he had gone to Chicago and that they had placed a petition for a permit, filled out the necessary forms with the necessary officials in Chicago.
Then I said to him, “I hear that you’re thinking about nominating a pig for President, an actual pig, oinky-oink, you know, Pigasus, the Immortal.”