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 The Fugs Cr�dito: The Fugs
I rented a former Kosher meat store on East 10th Street in late-1964, with groovy tile walls and chicken-singeing equipment which I transformed into a vegetarian literary zone called the Peace Eye Bookstore. I left the words "Strictly Kosher" on the front window. Next door above the Lifschutz wholesale egg market lived Tuli Kupferberg, a beat hero who was featured in anthologies such as The Beat Scene, and who published several fine magazines, Birth and Yeah, which he sold on the streets of the East and West Village. I had published Tuli's poetry in my literary journal, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. The term "folk-rock" had not been invented in late-1964 when I approached Tuli, after a poetry reading, about forming a rock group. Tuli eagerly assented, and was the one who came up with the name, the Fugs, borrowed from the euphemism in Normal Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead. We drew inspiration for the Fugs from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the "Theory of the Spectacle" in Aristotle's Poetics, and moving forward to the famous premier performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, to the po�mes simultan�s of the Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker's seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and to our concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used. Tuli and I began to write songs at a fevered pace. We created at least 50 or 60 between us. Soon we asked a friend, Ken Weaver, to join the Fugs. Weaver had been a drummer in his high school band, and brought fine song-writing skills and stage presence to our performances. Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders were friends, and agreed to perform at the grand opening of the Peace Eye Bookstore in February of 1965. They also joined in with the Fugs, our world premiere, at that party. Peace Eye was very packed; Andy Warhol had done cloth wall banners of his flowers image, and literati as diverse as William Burroughs, George Plimpton and James Michener were on hand for the premier croonings of "Swinburne Stomp" and other Fugs ditties. First Album We knew the famous filmmaker and artist Harry Smith, who had produced one of the most influential collections in history, The Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records in 1952. It had influenced an entire generation of singers. Harry came to many early Fugs shows, and brought our attention to Moe Asch of Folkways, who agreed to issue our first album. The first Fugs recording session, in April of 1965, featured Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver, plus Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. Some of the tunes on the first Fugs album came from the 23 tunes recorded on this session. The second Fugs recording session occurred in June of 1965. Its purpose was to create a demo tape for Verve/Folkways, a new label. On this second session were Sanders, Kupferberg, and Weaver, with John Anderson on bass, Vinny Leary on guitar, and Steve Weber. Peter Stampfel did not perform on the second session. I listened to the tapes over and over, for both sessions, selecting a sequence of tunes, and then Harry Smith and I edited the album. I wrote some notes and it was ready to be released. Performing The Fugs began appearing in galleries, clubs and theaters in New York City beginning in early 1965. They sang, for instance, at the opening party for the new location of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on 6th Avenue. They performed a number of times at Diane Di Prima's American Theater for Poetry on East 4th St. And they began a series of midnight concerts at the Bridge Theater on St. Mark's Place, which were always packed. First Tour In the fall of 1965 the Fugs headed out on their first cross-country tour, part of an anti-Vietnam War protest, and performed here and there at colleges, and while in San Francisco did concerts with the great bard Allen Ginsberg, the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe and the Fish, and other bands. The Fugs then consisted of Sanders, Kupferberg, Weber and Weaver. We returned to the Lower East Side in our Volkswagen bus in the late fall to find that our first album, titled The Village Fugs-- Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction had been released by Folkways Records. Determined to Thrive The Fugs returned to New York with very little position in the world of music, but determined to make their mark. We felt a little like Rastignac at the end of Balzac's Pere Goriot, standing at the summit of Pere-Lachaise cemetery, looking down upon Paris and hurling out a determination to thrive and survive. We vowed to live from our art, to have fun and party continuously, and to get our brains on tape. It wasn't going to be easy. We were challenging the system on several levels, and yet we were determined somehow to survive in the economic apparatus of the system. We knew there would be trouble; in fact there already was trouble. The police raided Peace Eye Bookstore a few hours after a midnight New Year's Eve (1965-'66) concert at the Bridge Theater. They seized copies of my magazine and I was arrested. The ACLU, to my lasting gratitude, took my case, which I ultimately won after a trial in the summer of 1967. We began performing at the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, where we shared bills with Danny Kalb, Al Kooper and the Blues Project, with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and with a young man named Richie Havens, who sat bent over close to his guitar singing Bob Dylan's tunes sometimes better than Bob Dylan. At the end of 1965, Steve Weber left the Fugs. We ran ads in the East Village Other and Village Voice for a replacement and found Pete Kearney, a guitarist who worked at the New York University bookstore. Pete Kearney had a gravelly, high tenor harmony which can be studied on "Coming Down" on this CD. He looked good on stage. We sometimes called him "Bomb Eyes," because they had a haunting combination of wastedness and wildness. A Deal with a Record Company We met a human being named Bernard Stollman who owned a record company called ESP Disk, which his parents were bankrolling for him. We lunched at a vegetarian restaurant by Union Square, and worked out a tentative deal. The Fugs very badly wanted an Off-Broadway Theater where we could set up scenery and lights to work our tunes and routines. ESP agreed to acquire us a theater, and we agreed to record an album for them. And, again without any outside help, such as a lawyer, we signed a strange, shackling contract. We had signed a strange deal with Folkways, and the deal with ESP was stranger. For example, the ESP royalty rate was 25 cents per album, regardless of the retail price, which in 1966 was $5.00 per unit. The 25 cents included both publishing and recording royalties, so our royalty rate was less than 3%, one of the lower percentages in the history of western civilization. Recording the Second Album One good thing happened as a result of the Fugs relationship with ESP� we met engineer/producer Richard Alderson, who owned (with Harry Belafonte) RLA Studios on West 65th Street, a building later torn down when they built Lincoln Center. Alderson had built his own studio in order to experiment with electronic music. We wanted to get beyond tribal primitive in our recording techniques. RLA Studios had a four-track Ampex and a two-track, which was state-of-the-art for 1966; even the Beatles recorded 4-tack. So the second Fugs album involved many 4-track to 2-track to 4-track bounces to free up tracks for overdubs. Richard Alderson wasn't one of those "don't touch the console" technobots so that the Fugs could learn the art of recording simultaneously while we cut the tunes. He had good ears and good ideas, and he brought precision to our recording. For the second album the musicians consisted of Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver, brilliant keyboardist Lee Crabtree, Vinny Leary on guitar, Pete Kearney on guitar, and Jon Anderson on bass. Whereas the first Fugs album required just two afternoon sessions, the second Fugs album occupied us, off and on, for four weeks during January and February of '66. Our harmonies still lacked the polish of the Beach Boys, but just as we had done in our original 1965 sessions, we crowded in front of the microphones and gave forth all the totally attentive energy and genius the Fates and our genetic codes would allow us to summon. With our new renown, we acquired some equipment. Ampeg gave us some amplifiers in exchange for our "endorsement," and Ken Weaver advanced from congas to a full set of rock and roll drums. John Anderson designed our red, white and blue Fugs logo which we stenciled on the bass drum head. The Astor Place Playhouse While we were recording the Fugs Second Album we began weekly performances at the Astor Place Playhouse on Lafayette Street across from what is now the Papp Theater. We performed there from January 21 till the middle of May. Other ESP recording artists, among them Albert Ayler, Jeanne Lee, Ran Blake, and Sun Ra and the Solar Arkestra, played the Astor Place Playhouse during those months. We began doing television shows-- in early 1966 we were on the David Susskind show in New York, and the Les Crane show in Los Angeles. For a while we hired a publicist named Tim Boxer who brought in gluts of ink for us. A man who identified himself as a vice president of the Coca Cola company came to a show at the Astor Place Playhouse and approached me indignantly afterward, threatening to sue over one of our more randy tunes, "Coca Cola Douche." I begged him, "Please, please sue us!" The Flag of the Lower East Side For their day, our shows were very controversial, though nothing when measured against what is allowed, on television for instance, in the year 2000. Lenny Bruce had been prosecuted not long before in NYC by a overzealous hater of personal freedom. And so naturally we were nervous when representatives of the NY District Attorney's office attended a show at the Astor Place Playhouse. We decided not to confront them, and did not alter a single wiggle, erotic expletive or complaint about the Vietnam war in our show. Only years later, after we got our FBI files, did we realize that there was a full-fledged investigation by the government of the Fugs. At the Bridge Theater however, an antiwar group had burned an American flag, which is always controversial in America. As a result there were front page news stories and police and fire inspectors at all the East Village theaters. We decided to burn a flag representing something we held very, very dear-- to make the point that it's just a flag, and you could still love a book, even if you burned its cover. So, we painted a flag that said "Lower East Side," and on stage at the Astor Place Playhouse we torched it. Sid Zion wrote a piece in a New York City newspaper which said we'd "burned a flag," The NYC establishment assumed it had been a U.S. flag, so that the theater was visited by fire inspectors and building inspectors, and soon the Fugs had to leave the Astor Place Playhouse, after a run of almost four months.
A Visit to the Charts The Fugs second album was released in March, 1966, with liner notes by Allen Ginsberg. It was a success, at least for the record company. A few weeks later we experienced the strange and eery (and very temporary) thrill of being on the charts. On July 9, the Trogg's "Wild Thing" was number seven on the singles list and "Paperback Writer" was number two. And wow! there on the album charts! The Fugs! at 89, just above Martha and the Vandellas Greatest Hits! It spawned the peculiar hunger which I call "chart-anguia," a thirst to get on the charts again, difficult to do with tunes like "Kill for Peace" and "I Feel like Homemade Yodel."
The Players Theater By the summer of 1966, the Fugs began a run at the Players Theater on MacDougal Street, in Greenwich Village, which lasted over 700 performances. During the summer of 1966, our bass player John Anderson was drafted, and he went off to join the army. Pete Kearney left the band, and during that summer Jon Kalb was our lead guitarist. And so, the summer of '66 Fugs included: Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver, Kalb, Leary and Crabtree. We were joined at various points in our run at the Players Theater by Jake Jacobs, a fine arranger and singer. For a while we hired a vocal coach, Bruce Langhorne, reputed to be the inspiration for Dylan's "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man." Jimi Hendrix was playing in a little club in the basement beneath the Players Theater, and the Mothers of Invention thrived three blocks away at a theater on Bleecker Street. With our second album on the charts, and our shows sold out, we were treated to the eery sensation of sudden fame. Though I lived in an apartment in a slum building, fans found it and hovered outside near the incredibly dingy ash cans and their squashed lids connected by chains to the cans. All through June and July of 1966 we partied and had fun with friends like Jimi Hendrix and Zappa, although we were reminded of the sad substrate of partying by the untimely deaths at summer's close of great comedian Lenny Bruce and great poet Frank O'Hara. Famous people began to watch our shows at the Players Theater and we were thrilled to shake the hands of stars such as Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Tennessee Williams and Leonard Bernstein in quick backstage visits. To Kim Novak we gave a Fugs teeshirt, hoping she might pop it on. The Ghastly Attention of the FBI & the Justice Department Popularity also brought us the attention of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. A few weeks after the Fugs Second Album was released, there was an FBI investigation of the Fugs, which I learned about years later when I obtained part of my files under the Freedom of Information Act. Someone at a radio or television station wrote an indignant letter to the FBI complaining about The Fugs. Of course, in those years the FBI was known to write letters to itself, or set up such letters, in order to justify investigations of American activists. In the early summer a FBI memorandum stated that a Postal Inspector had finished an investigation: "He advised The Fugs is a group of musicians who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers, i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. .... it is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene." If we'd only known about this, we could have put a disclaimer on the record, "Ruled NOT obscene by the FBI!" A Hunger to Record Again Our lead guitarist Jon Kalb returned to college in the fall of 1966, and we began to change personnel for a number of months, until we arrived at a stable band for the remainder of the 1960s. The Fugs relationship with ESP records was, mildly to state it, turbulent. We were told, for instance, that the mafia was illegally manufacturing Fugs records and selling them. We can be forgiven for not really believing that the Genovese crime family would bother with the Fugs, when there were the Beatles, the Stones, Mantovani, and Petulia Clark to rip off. The owner of ESP had insisted on ducking some of the lyrics of Ted Berrigan's song, "Doin' All Right" when we mixed it. The more we learned about the implications of our contract, the more the shackles came into view. Signing with Atlantic With the constant changes in line-up, the original Fugs� Sanders, Kupferberg and Weaver� became, in effect, the Fugs, and thereafter became the core group. I had met one of the owners of Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler, when Atlantic had put out a recording of Allen Ginsberg reciting his great poem "Kaddish." We began to explore the possibility of the Fugs signing with Atlantic. We cut a demo at Atlantic studios, and they offered us a deal. Jerry told us to record whatever we wanted. There'd be no censorship. In fact, he encouraged me to be as controversial in song material as I wanted. For a few weeks we had a fine guitarist named Stefan Grossman with us. Then we hired Jake Jacobs. We'd seen him sing and play at the Night Owl Cafe around the corner from the Players Theater. Jake was known for his fine voice and his guitar work in the studio. Jake had played guitar on at least one of the Monkees' big hits. Recording at Talentmasters on 42nd Street. We recorded an album for Atlantic at Talentmasters studio on West 42nd. It was where Otis Redding apparently had also recorded, because there were lots of his track-tapes in the storage room. It was a case of situation ethics. We listened to some abandoned Redding instrumental tracks. They were great!! All we would have had to do was stick on our own wild Fugs lyrics and vocals and we'd have had a bunch of quick tunes! But we didn't. The Fugs line-up for these sessions, in the fall and winter of 1966-67 was Sanders, Weaver, Kupferberg, Crabtree, and Jake Jacobs. In addition, we did some tunes with some great studio players-- Eric Gale on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Robert Banks on piano and organ and Bernard Purdie on drums. Chris Huston was the engineer. After a few weeks, we completed the album, and sent the mixed master to the honchos at Atlantic Records. Sudden Fame I learned I was on the cover of Life magazine in February of 1967 when the Johnny Carson television show called to have me on as a guest. Before I would appear, I insisted on having the Fugs sing "Kill for Peace" on national television as a protest against the Vietnam War, which they refused. It wasn't always so friendly to be suddenly famous. Someone mailed a package to me at my post office box in the East Village. I opened it up in the lobby of the post office. It was a brand new copy, with a bright red dust jacket, of the Modern Library edition of Dostoievsky's The Idiot. As I held it, the cover popped open and I heard a kind of mousetraplike whacking sound. I saw that the inside had been very neatly cut away to make a square compartment, into which were arrayed a battery, a spring-driven on/off switch and some wires attached to some small cylinders. I walked over to the counter and told the clerk, "I think someone has sent me a bomb." Wow, did the postal employees scatter! It turned out to be a ersatz bomb. The explosive cylinders turned out to be CO2 cartridges of the sort that were used to power model rockets. Not long thereafter an anonymous phone call came into Avenue A, with my 2 year old daughter asleep in her room, that the caller was first going to bomb my house, then the home of Frank Zappa. As a result, for the next ten years we had an unlisted telephone number.
The Year of Flower Power
Nevertheless 1967 was had seething sequences of glory. We made our second visit to Los Angeles in early 1967. Met Janis Joplin, and helped prevent her from signing with ESP. Later in the year I finally won my case from the police raid on Peace Eye Bookstore, although they refused to return the hundreds of books, letters and personal archives they stole from the store. Did the Les Crane television show. Met Phil Ochs. Played with Eric Burden and the Animals in Santa Barbara, and fans mobbed us, tearing off our shirts. In the Spring of '67 the Fugs appeared at a free concert with Country Joe and the Fish at the Panhandle of Golden Gate park, near Haight Ashbury. 1967! Yes. It saw a swelling of hope in America. The culture seemed like the swelling bug of a flower of instant promise. We were beginning to understand the strength of right wing nuts in the American power structure. There were revelations about the CIA in the spring of '67 and it looked like John Kennedy had been killed by right wing U.S. government slime.
The Fugs are a band who formed in New York City in 1965 by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg. The band was named by Kupferberg who borrowed it from the euphemism in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead. The Fugs were a satirical and self-satirizing rock band which performed at Vietnam War protests nationwide. The band's frank lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics aroused a hostile reaction in many quarters. One of their better known songs was an adaptation of Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach. The Fugs played their "final" concert of the 1960s in 1969 at the Hershey Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania with the Grateful Dead. The Fugs reunited in 1984 with several performances at the Bottom Line in NYC.
The Fugs Arguably the first underground rock group of all time, the Fugs formed at the Peace Eye bookstore in New York's East Village in late 1964. The nucleus of the band throughout their many personnel changes was Peace Eye owner Ed Sanders and fellow poet Tuli Kupferberg. Sanders and Kupferberg had strong ties to the beat literary scene, but charged, in the manner of their friend Allen Ginsberg, full steam ahead into the maelstrom of '60s political involvement and psychedelia. Surrounded by an assortment of motley refugees from the New York folk and jug band scene (including Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders), some of whom could barely play their instruments, the group nonetheless was determined to play rock & roll their way - which meant rife with political and social satire, as well as explicit profanity and sexual references, that were downright unheard of in 1965. Starting on the legendary avant-garde ESP label, the Fugs' debut was full of equal amounts of chaos and charm, but their songwriting and instrumental chops improved surprisingly quickly, resulting in a second album that was undoubtedly the most shocking and satirical recording ever to grace the Top 100 when it was released.
After cutting an unreleased album for Atlantic, they moved on to
Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, unleashing a few more albums of equally satirical material that were more instrumentally
polished, but equally scathing lyrically. Breaking up around 1970, Sanders and Kupferberg continued
to write prose and poetry, and sometimes wrote and performed music both on their own and as part of Fugs reunions.
By breaking lyrical taboos of popular music, they helped pave the way for the even more innovative outrage
of the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, and others.
The Fugs The Fugs were the quintessential satirical/political group of the Sixties, the foremost parodists of the Establishment and defenders of the counterculture. Their obscene, agit-prop vignettes updated a tradition that dated from Chuck Berry's early hits and predated Frank Zappa's operettas. Their use and abuse of cacophony and collage was way ahead of their time. In 1966, the year they recorded Virgin Forest, nobody else was even thinking of using the studio to create what was pure sonic folly.
The Fugs are probably the greatest among the great rock bands that have been forgotten by succeeding generations. A case in point is Virgin Forest, the first collage piece in the history of popular music, one of music's most creative expressions, and almost totally unknown. The Fugs were also the first politicized group in the history of rock, also perhaps the greatest, the standard bearers of punk-rock. The sarcasm of their songs and the nonconformist mode in which they played them inspired Frank Zappa. Their free style compositions, although sometimes chaotic, anticipated progressive rock. Their specialty was the satire that reintroduced the political vaudeville of Brecht/Weill in the era of peace marches, sit-ins, and Bob Dylan. Few musicians were as original as the Fugs, at a time when the charts were dominated by the Beatles and the Monkees. Anarchist, beatnik and bohemian, the Fugs represented "the other" America, the America that didn't watch the Ed Sullivan Show, didn't bother with the charts and didn't go crazy at the sight of the dandy pop star. The America that got drunk and took drugs, lived at the edge of the "American Dream", read libertarian libelous pamphlets and planned escapes from reality, the same folks that one day would be known as "punk." The Fugs put to music the demystification of capitalism and the removal of social taboos. They attacked the 45, the charts, the image of the bourgeois singer, manufactured stars like Presley and the Beatles, entertainment marketing and the entire anomalous machine of musical consumerism. They hurled themselves against secular taboos to create an alternative music regulated by alternative codes. In short, they laid the foundations for the genesis of rock and alternative rock for the remainder of the century. The Fugs were first to suggest the equivalence between agit-prop and rock. Rock music, which up until then had kept its distance from politics, took a decisive turn to the left. The forest of sounds in Virgin Forest, a collage of breathtaking, primitive, wildly cacophonous music is the artistic testament of the Fugs. Its anarchical structure is one of the fundamental artistic conquests of the 60s. The Fugs were formed at the end of 1964 by two seasoned members of the intelligentsia: 43- year-old journalist Tuli Kupferberg and 32-year-old poet, movie maker, bookseller and editor Ed Sanders, who had served a year in jail for pacifism, where he penned "Poem from Jail." A self-declared "body-rock singing group," the Fugs circulated among beatniks and folk singers. Their music, a series of manifestos that proclaimed their intention to carry out a total offensive on mainstream culture, was even too methodical. Their shows often featured other folk and country musicians, abundant in Greenwich Village, in particular Pete Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders and drummer Ken Weaver, a poet and former boxer, who was booted out by the Air Force for drugs. Their rather unsophisticated sound comprised whatever element they eyed: exotic instruments, street choruses, maniacal screams. Their shows were cocktails of political rhetoric, provocation, and folk music. They celebrated the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Free Speech Movement; they smashed instruments; they indulged in alcohol, drugs and sex on stage; they performed cabaret sketches in costume. Their repertoire was inspired mainly by folk nursery rhymes, by jug bands, and perhaps by Broadway musicals, but augmented by improbable solos and tortured harmonies. Their corrosive lyrics, the soul of their craft, mocked the American way of life and all its contradictions - the hypocrisy of government, the sexual repression, the consumerism, the persecution of drug users, Vietnam. Their shows were more than political vaudeville routines; they often degenerated into savage, obscene leftist happenings. Their provocative, sacrilegious and offensive humor had more precedents in comedy than in music. Woody Guthrie had been a sort of Gandhi, and Dylan was a messianic prophet. The Fugs were the vulgar jesters of the absurd and the grotesque. Their transgressive acts gave them enough fame to justify recording an album, entitled Village Fugs (Folkways, 1965), reprinted as First Album (ESP, Jan 1966), that contains the songs most requested at their concerts, in particular the satire on bourgeois respectability Supergirl. Slum Goddess and Boobs A Lot are pieces in which anything can happen, because what counts is to play for the sake of playing. Carpe Diem and Nothing are existential songs worthy of the theater of the absurd. For those reprehensible musical manifestations, the trenchant guerrilla fighters of Greenwich Village were banished by all respectable folk clubs, but took comfort in cheering many alternative assemblies. Fugs (ESP, march 1966), reprinted as Second Album (Fantasy, 1994), influenced by Frank Zappa's first album, is not just a collection of jokes. Its musical aspect is not to be considered secondary, much as the paintings of Andy Warhol are not to be considered just provocations, but also works of art. Besides the desecrating irony of the commercial epic Kill For Peace and the epileptic comedy of Frenzy - a parody worthy of the rhythm and blues of the 50s - Virgin Forest dominates the collection of samples and styles, bounded by the demonic merry-go-round Dirty Old Man and the quasi-mantra Morning Morning. Virgin Forest, this long piece of equatorial mythology, recorded at reduced speed, is a natural forest of sound experiments, with whistles, falling pottery, door bells, sirens, tampered tapes, natural sounds, speeded-up voices, African drums, wild screams, blows to the keyboards, litanies of castrated muezzin, Mediterranean chords, charming flutes, exotic atmosphere, chirps, distortion, and a choral apotheosis of Gregorian chant, all rendered at a thousand rpm. It is the first example of collage. Fully conscious of their own pioneering spirit, the Fugs hoisted the psychedelic flag with New Amphetamine Shriek, one of Stampfel's acid-folk gems, and Hallucination Horror, both on Virgin Fugs (ESP, 1967), which also includes the pungent satire Coca Cola Douche and two small masterpieces of political music hall: CIA Man and Saran Wrap. Although each caustic lyric in this album is creatively put to free music, overall the album lacks the ambitious piece, the so-called masterpiece. At the height of their popularity, October 21, 1967, the Fugs participated in a sit-in in front of the Pentagon during which they tried to exorcise the evil spirits who infested the building. In 1968 the Fugs - minus Stampfel and Weber who had resumed their folk careers - practically began a second career, more musical and less political. The structure of It Crawled Into My Hands (Reprise, 1968) brings to mind the collections of Zappa's heretical aphorisms. The same ability to string songs together, and the same theory of the collage, precede the reduction of the musical universe into infinitesimal parts, while Dylan's influence encourages the human parade to go backwards in time, from Robinson Crusoe to Ramses II, who inspires the album. Crystal Liaison heightened by a horn section, jingle-jangle background, a heavy metal guitar solo and a church choir, shows a great deal of sophistication. The yodeling Ramses II is structured as one of their incoherent pub ballads, but with a sound full and strong, a string section and a honkytonk piano. The funeral march Wide Wide River sets interlocking samples of gospel, country, bass, and a drunken brawl as the background for a political meeting. The rest is no less eclectic and meticulous: the operetta Burial Waltz, the bluegrass anti-fascist ballad Johnny Pissoff, and the cool-jazz piece Claude Pelieu, a micro-concert for clarinet, flute, baritone and chorus. The Native American tribal dance When The Mode Of The Music Changes, somehow mixes a big band arrangement with a string section and female background vocals. The fertile inventiveness of Sanders and Weaver gets even looser in minuscule intervals: a ten-second Gregorian chant, a collective exorcism, a marching band riff, a prayer with church organ, a mantra for Japanese percussion, and even a three second piece, the shortest in the history of music. With these experiments the Fugs add a musical dimension to their political theater of farce, realizing for the first time on a large scale the program originally sketched out in Virgin Forest. Tenderness Junction (Reprise, 1968) is immersed in the progressive mood of the moment. Although still faithful to the tradition of the political anthem, with Timothy Leary's Turn On Tune In Drop Out, and to the Beat generation, with Allen Ginsberg's Hare Krishna, the Fugs update their musical language for the thriving psychedelic culture on the other coast. There are stirring blues ballads (Knock Knock), dreamy acid fantasies a la David Crosby (The Garden Is Open), and extravagant classical arrangements (Dover Beach). Between the lines Sanders paints another of his lopsided choral ballads (Wet Dream) and another amusing parody (War Song). The grand finale is the apocryphal Aphrodite`s Mass in five movements, complete with pagan motets, Hare Krishna processions, Gregorian chants, and orgasm moans. At the end of 1968, while on a European tour in a rickety Volkswagen, they didn't hesitate to head toward Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, only to be stopped at the border. Bell Of Avenue A (Reprise, 1969), their most musical album, is also their swan song. It's an album of simple folk ballads for voice and guitar (Bell Of Avenue A), satirical gags (Chicago), absurd Alpine digressions (Yodeling Yippie), a nostalgic sing-along hippie celebration (Flower Children), nursery rhymes, psychedelic solos, and hard riffs. It's the summary of five years spent together, and also a sad farewell, but without the sardonic mode of the past. As the glorious underground season came to an end, the new ideologized movement made it clear that it had little patience for its putative fathers. Rock music was undergoing a radical revolution of sound that made the style of the Fugs outmoded. The Fugs could have abandoned their naive folk roots and banked on their inexhaustible creativity alone, instead they accepted the verdict of time. After the band dissolved Kupferberg went to work in the theater, while Sanders recorded a couple of deviant albums, Truckshop (Reprise, 1971) and Beer Cans On The Moon (Reprise, 1972), worthy sequels to the style of Bell Of Avenue A. In 1973, he went back to writing.
The Fugs played and recorded occasionally. In 1994, after an exhibition with Allen Ginsberg, Sanders (54) and Kupferberg (71) officially dissolved the Fugs.
Discography The Village Fugs (The Fugs First Album) Broadside/Folkways 1965 & then it was released by ESP-Disk 1966
Slum Goddess
The Fugs (2nd album) ESP-Disk 1966
Virgin Fugs (bootleg) ESP-Disk 1967 Tenderness Junction Reprise 1968 It Crawled into My Hand, Honest Reprise 1968 Belle of Avenue A Reprise 1969 Golden Filth (Live at the Fillmore East) Reprise 1970 Refuse to Be Burnt Out (Live reunion) Olufsen & New Rose 1984
THE FIVE FEET
No More Slavery (Studio album) Olufsen & New Rose 1985 No More Slavery
Star Peace (two disk set, an opera) Olufsen & New Rose 1986 Fugs Live in Woodstock 1989 Songs from a Portable Forest (best of 1980s reunions) Gazelle 1992
No More Slavery
The Real Woodstock Festival- 2-CD - Ace Records - Novembro de 1995
Disco 1
Disco 2
Given the American social and political climate during the mid '80s, the semi-permanent reunion of founding Fugs Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Saunders could not have been more culturally apropos. The Real Woodstock Festival is a live two-disc set featuring Kupferberg and Saunders accompanied by: Steve Taylor on guitar and backing vocals, Coby Batty on percussion and backing vocals, and Scott Petito on bass. Also joining the festivities are two counter-cultural icons: beat poet Allen Ginsberg and "Country" Joe McDonald -- the only artist to have performed at the original event in 1969 and the Fugs Real Woodstock Festival in 1994. Ironically, unlike any of the other events bearing the 'Woodstock' albatross, the Real Woodstock Festival was actually held in the town of Woodstock, New York -- where Ed Saunders has maintained a permanent residency since the early '70s. Likewise the two performances were held on the true anniversary of the original event -- August 13 & 14. The loose camaraderie and rag tag frenetic madness that defined the Fugs 'high art' of blending music with socially conscious poetry is certainly alive and well on this collection. In addition to performing a handful of new compositions, Kupferberg and Saunders revived some of their most treasured works from every phase of their career. From their days on the uncompromising ESP label, "Frenzy," "CIA Man," "Morning, Morning," "How Sweet I Roamed From Field To Field" and "The Post-modern Nothing" have been modernized with new arrangements, yet remain as poetic and arguably even more relevant in this context. Likewise, there are a few rarities from the Fugs tenure on Reprise Records in the late '60s: "Crystal Liaison," "I Want To Know" and the rarely performed "When The Mode Of The Music Changes." The latter undoubtedly contains further portents as less than an hour away from this celebration, Woodstock '94 was co-opting an entire generation. (Lindsay Planer)
Interview with Ed Sandersby Billy Bob Hargus (June 1997)Q: Could you talk about your writing and work before the Fugs? I had a small book out from City Lights in '63. I had written it in jail in Connecticut, having tried to board a Polaris submarine at its commissioning in August of '61. So I wrote this poem which I smuggled out, written on toilet paper (because we weren't allowed to write) and copied it onto bits of foil and cigarette packs. I sent it to (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti and, to my everlasting gratitude, he published it. It was a long poem based on an ancient legend. Then I had a small book of poetry published from Renegade Press in Cleveland. There were also various pamphlets that I had published. Q: What kind of things were you listening to then that got you interested in music? The Fugs musically grew out of the Civil Rights area when we all used to go out to marches in the South. We would sing all of these Civil Rights songs that had their basis in three chord, rural folk music: 'Down By The Riverside' and 'We Shall Overcome' and Pete Seegar's songs. But also, I grew up in Kansas City and was exposed to a lot of jazz. I used to go as a kid to see Jay McShann and others. We didn't realize it was jazz. It was just this beautiful music we used to go see. And then of course, there was a country and western strain in the mid-West, like Roy Acuff. I also studied drums for a while with the drummer for the Kansas City Philharmonic- this gave me exposure to classical music. Then I took piano (lessons)- my mother bought one when I was a kid. Like most American boys of that era, I took piano for four or five years. Tchaikovsky's and Beethoven's piano concertos were a big influence on me. I also sang in my high school choir and I belonged to the Society of Barbershop Quartet Singers. I used to sing a lot of stuff when I was in high school, like the Cleftones- it was a Queens teenage band and we used to sing their songs in Missouri. There was also various arrangements of show tunes that we did. I got a lot of singing done as a kid and listened to a lot of music. Of course, there was rock'n'roll with Elvis Presley. I used to go to Kansas City Municipal Auditorium where I used to see Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Bill Haley. I used to come to New York as a kid and I would come to ABC Studios on 67th Street and see rock'n'roll shows. Then there was the happening movement. There was a lot of jazz and poetry. I went to see Sonny Rollins and others at the clubs in the Lower East Side. It was a whole hodgepodge of music for me. As pacifists, we used to listen to Stravinsky's 'Rites of Spring' before we would go out to commit civil disobedience. Early Joan Baez records were really influential too. Then of course, there was Dylan. There was this thing called the Worldwide General Strike for Peace and this kid played there in the fall of '61 named Dylan. Then I later knew Phil Ochs and the folk singers. So everyone was influencing everyone else. That was kind of the way it was. Q: What kind of influence was the Beat movement for you? When I was in high school, I first became exposed to Beat literature. I didn't knew what it was. The story's told in TALES OF BEATNIK GLORY, my book of short stories. In particular, I bought 'Howl' when I was 17 at the Univeristy of Missouri book store. It changed my life. I memorized it. I went to New York a few monthes later and I immediately went to all the poetry readings I could. I loved the Beats. The poems in 'Howl' struck a note that reverberated across the entire culture of America. It had an impact on a number of generations right then. It had a long threnodic line that took quite a breath to read. It had interesting metrics and it had a brilliant analysis of America in a kind of Blake/Whitman/cavalistic, doom-tinged/Poe-like line that also had a lot of populism that grew out of William Carlos Williams and Carl Sandberg. At one point, Ginsberg had wanted to be a labor laywer. His mother was a communist and his father was a social democrat so he had a radical 'let's make a big change' upbringing that was reflected in 'Howl.' He called upon a new America to be formed really. He dared to be overtly sexual. It was quite a brave document. It changed my life. Q: How did things change for you when you came to New York? There wasn't a tradition of coffee-house poetry readings in the mid-West, although there is now. I travel all over America now and there's coffee shop poetry and magazines in every city and college. It was quite different to come to New York because it had a lot of theatres. One of the first things I did was to see Anton Chekov's 'Ivanov' and 'Playboy of the Western World' and Beckett's 'Waiting For Godot' all in a short time. There was also a lot more bookstores in New York in those days. The rents were cheaper. Then there was the whole wonderful Beat culture, which was combative and controversial at the time. There were a lot of interesting gallery things happening- abstract expressionism like Franz Kline and William DeKoonig who I'd see in the Cedar Bar where I used to drink. I met people like Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. It was finding the best minds of my generation. In those days, if you were a poet, you went to San Francisco, Berkeley or New York. It was just packed and full of life. There weren't that many people doing it but you knew where they were. There weren't that many publications where you got data on where to meet people and where the shows were. That's where you went and hung out. Q: How did you meet up with Tuli? Tuli was a Beat hero. He was in all these books. I saw him selling things on the streets. He had Birth Press and a magazine called 'Yeah.' I read these and I saw his picture around in various anthologies. Then I was publishing a magazine, 'Fuck You- a Magazine of the Arts'. He gave me some poetry for that in '62. In late '64, when I opened a bookstore on East 10th called Peace Eye, his pad was next door above Lescer's Wholesale Egg Market. I took over an old Kosher meat market with Hebrew on the window and kept the words 'strictly kosher' up there. This was the time of Roy Orbison's 'Pretty Woman' and the Beatles' 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' and (Wilson Pickett's) 'Mustang Sally.' There was a lot of interesting music being created. Folk rock was a year away. Dylan hadn't gone electric yet. We decided to form a band and do some poetry and music. We didn't have any grandiose scheme in mind- we just wanted to have some fun. I had a bookstore where we could practice. I had met this guy who had played drums for his high school marching band named (Ken) Weaver so we asked him to come aboard. These guys from the Holy Modal Rounders were around for three years on their own so they came aboard. We did some gigs at little theatres on the Lower East Side and a bunch of little art galleries. One thing led to another and all of a sudden, these places began to get packed. People would line up outside. Right away, we wrote about 50 or 60 songs. Some of them were written right there in the bookstore- I had a little tape recorder. Junkies kept stealing our equipment though. We had our first gig at Izzy Young's Folk Center and a day or two before, the junkies broke into my store and stole our equipment. Ken had to use a cardboard peach box as a drum. I had a pair of maracas too so that might have been the whole sum of our music right then. We had pretty humble beginnings and we stayed that way although we ultimately, after a few years, wound up on a major recording label. It was a LONG jump to make from such a primitive beginning. Q: Tuli thought that the Fugs were kind of punk band before its time because the band went ahead without any great technical skills. It was the era of happenings. You could fill up a bathtub with cherry jello, get a strobe light and some paintings and have a happening in a gallery. We played all these galleries. We sang and shouted our songs but we had good timing. If you listen to those early tapes, one thing about them was that they weren't tuned perfectly to a tuning fork but the timing is good. Tuli, Weaver and I and the others had good time. We sang together, you could hear the words and they were quite clear. Our tunes seems to have some literary merit because they keep reissuing CD's of this stuff 30-35 years later. We had an attitude to use our youthful energy to surge ahead and present our music, no matter what. But there has to be some level of talent somewhere in order to pull it off. Q: Another thing made the Fugs different were the lyrics. At that time, a lot of rock lyrics were love songs but your group was using poetry for your music. I would love to say that this was a deliberate plot and we had a vast scheme to change American civilization but part of it was just to have fun. We were all 'literate.' Our whole life, in part, was books. Kupferberg, during the whole time I've known him, always goes out to look for books. When we travel in Europe, he's in the bookstores. He's always reading. I remember being in a van in Italy a few weeks ago. I look over my shoulder and he's reading a dictionary of obscure philosophical terms. But it's true that we did bring poetry to our songs but that's just the way we wrote. I had a bunch of books out, Kupferberg had a bunch of books out. I knew Greek and Latin, I had just graduated from college. I was corresponding with all these poets like Gary Snider and Charles Olson. I was writing these learned letters to Ginsberg and then hanging out with him when he got back from India in '63. I was friends with all these guys. I was invited to the Berkeley Poetry Conference where I gave a reading in '65. I was a poet and I thought that this (the Fugs) was a joke and a game that would be over in a few monthes. But then it went on and on and on. Here we are, 30-35 years later, still surging onward. Q: Tuli was also saying that an important part of the band was dope and fucking. That's a little bit simplistic. We were a pot band more than anything else. I certainly never take heroin, for instance. When my friend Janis Joplin died, I vowed to tell people as much as I could about the dangers of heroin. I wouldn't throw the word 'dope' around. If you mean pot or magic mushrooms, you could certainly say we were in favor of the legalization of the stuff and took our share of it. You can look at the songs we put out. 'Tune In Drop Out' was a satire on rock lyrics. 'I Couldn't Get High' was a satire too. Everybody has a right to have had a wild youth and I guess we did. But I would say our main thing was satire and anti-war. We were randy young men. Q: Did you think that the Fugs fit in with other bands at that time? We got along with everybody. What upset me most is that we were promised to get invited to the Monterey Festival in '67- Derek Taylor promised me over the phone. Then they didn't invite us. But we knew Jimi Hendrix. We knew Frank Zappa- I just wrote the liner notes for this record of his that came out. At one time or another, I guess I met almost everybody. I don't think we were outcasts. But once we played a big hall, we had a hard time playing it again. It would be our lyrics like 'River of Shit' or other tunes we did. The concert managers tend to be pretty conservative. Q: You were talking about how politics were an important part of the Fugs. We put daisies in the rifle barrels at the Pentagon. We did the excorcism of the Pentagon with the San Francisco Diggers. In October of '67, Tuli and I paid for the flat bed truck and the sound system for this. We stood outside the Pentagon with the Diggers chanting 'Out Demons Out' and it's on our record Tenderness Juncition. We must have done 50 benefits to raise money for the Resistance. Q: How about when the Fugs moved to a major label? We did an album for Atlantic and they didn't like the cut of its jib. They bounced us off the label. We started the record in early '67 and we got bounced off in the early summer. We lost a year and that really screwed us up. I was on the cover of LIFE magazine and we were a very famous group. Fans camped outside our houses. It was right at the most optimal moment to do a record. Then we signed with Reprise, to their credit. We're very grateful to them. Mo Ostin and Reprise never censored us. They always put out what we released. They never told us to do anything at all. It was total freedom. But that record, Tenderness Junction, didn't come out until early '68. Q: What do you think changed for the band by that time? We had done 700-800 performances by then. My judgment, as the leader of the band, was that we had to have some musicians who were stable- who would show up for gigs, who were willing to rehearse and could do harmony singing and who had good chops. By hook or crook, I finally came up with some guys who could really play. We had Danny Kootch there for a while- he was really a talented musician. He wrote with Don Henley of the Eagles later but he was just a boy from the East somewhere when he was with us. We finally wound up with Ken Pine on guitar and Bob Mason on second drums (we had two drum sets like the Mothers) and a bass player named Bill Wolf. They were really good, especially Pine. He was really an underrated, creative and talented guitar player. I understand that one of Jimi Hendrix's jam sessions has just been released with Ken sitting in on guitar (ED NOTE: he appears on 'My Friend' from FIRST RAYS OF THE NEW RISING SUN). We used to jam with Jimi. Q: What was the band doing at that time? We went to Europe twice in '68 in the spring and the fall. Our opening band was Fleetwood Mac. We played constantly. We went to California twice. We played the Avalon Ballroom and psychedelic clubs up and down the coast. We went to Detroit, Chicago, Boston, all over the United States and we also put out two records that year. Q: If the band was really getting it together, why did it break up? I reopened the Peace Eye book store. It had been closed for a while. I moved it to the old East Village Other office on Avenue A. I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I was very discouraged with what happened in '68 with all of these assassinations. In early '69, it came out about the My Lai massacre. Nixon was president and we didn't know what the hell he was going to do. So these political things were very, very disturbing to me. '68 was a very good year and a very bad year. It should have been the best in American civilization. By '69, I decided that I just wanted to be a beatnik and run my bookstore. So we did some touring and a gig with the Grateful Dead in Pennsylvania in the spring and that was it. I decided I had it. It was kind of dumb too. We had the opportunity to tour that summer for what was good money for us but I decided to turn that down. I did my own record for Warner Brothers called Sanders' Truck Stop during that spring and summer. In the fall, I got interested in the Manson case and I got a book contract. By then, it was really too late to get the Fugs back together. I was busy day and night, writing my book on the Manson family. Then 15 years went by until we had our reunion. We started having reunions quite regularly because I found this guy named Steve Taylor who sings really well. We got a guy also to do harmony parts named Coby Baty. We did reunions in '84, '85, '86, '89, '94 and now in '97. We've just been invited to Japan. We're going to do one more studio record. We decided to do Fugs Final Record, just in case. Q: What do you see as the achievements or legacy of the Fugs? I think it has an honest legacy. It wasn't perfect- there were plenty of things that I guess I wish I could re-record and fix up a little bit. But it's what it was. I'm honored that people are still interested. I thought that NOBODY would ever be interested and even think about it now. Because of these compact discs, I have more records out than when I was in my twenties. I think I'll do what Zappa did- put out a record of guitar breaks. I listened to a lot of those (Fugs) records and we had some really brilliant gutiar players- Pine, Kootch, John Kalb, Stefan Grossman. Q: Grossman once said that when you interviewed him for the band, you asked 'Are you crazy?' No, I might have said 'you have to be a little crazy to join the band.' We had things like 'Kill for Peace' and 'River of Shit.' Anyway, he was a good player. So, Zappa did this guitar break album and I wanted to do Great Moments of Tuning. You didn't have the electronic tuners then so tuning was quite a existential praxis back then. So again, I'm honored that people are interested. It was a little bit of poetry. It wasn't perfect. There was honesty, verve, energy, directness, a certain amount of skill, some timing in there. Tuli wrote some really good songs. You're rolling the dice when you leave art behind. Q: How did the reunions happen after all those years? The first one made sense as it was 1984, the era of Reagan. We were a little bit upset with Ronnie. Tuli and I got together. We had written some songs and we were involved in a film project. We started working together again and we decided 'what the hell.' The guys who ran the Bottom Line were really decent. So we got together and it was wildly successful. People really liked it. I had worked also with Steve Taylor. We went to Europe that fall. Then in '86, I wrote this anti-war/Star Wars piece called 'Star Peace' which we performed here and there. We did another reunion in '88. We'd done a bunch of them up here (Woodstock) because they really like us here, we have a huge crowd. We're thinking about doing a salute to Allen Ginsberg maybe later on this summer if I can get it together. We did reunions here in Woodstock in '88 and '89. In '94, we did the Real Woodstock Festival with Allen Ginsberg and Country Joe McDonald. Out of that came a 2 CD set which Ace Records put out a couple of years ago. The idea is to get together when it makes sense. It's wonderful to sing three part harmony. It's thrilling to sing with guys who know how to sing and to do some really good music. The band's really good now. I've had the same band now for 10 years. Q: How is this version of the Fugs different from the '60s band? I don't know but I think the music is better. Another reason that I wanted to do these reunions is because I realized that there were some aspects of us that we did not reveal in our crazy '60s persona. So now he have a 33-year history. You do change a little bit as you get older. We're not quite as radically wild as we were but we're as politically dedicated. I'm a democratic-socialist and Tuli's an anarchist- between those poles, an interesting tension derives. It fuels some of our songwriting. Comparing our songs from the '60s with our songs from the '80s, I think a lot of our best music ultimately in the long run will be from some of our stuff in the '80s and '90s. Q: Outside of the Fugs, what have you been doing? For the last two years, my wife and I have run a newspaper called the Woodstock Journal. We formed it directly to go up against the right wing after Newt Gingrich won in '94. In '95, I also finished my biography of Anton Checkov as a 240 page poem that traces his life. Just now a book is coming out called 1968- A HISTORY IN VERSE on Black Sparrow Press, a poem tracing that year. I completed Volume Three of TALES OF BEATNIK GLORY. Volume One and Two came out in 1990 and they're still in print. They keep re-releasing my book on the Manson family all over, like in Czechoslovakia, Japan and Poland. Then this record company in London keeps putting out Fugs records. I have a very busy life. I'm going on a book tour for '1968' this summer and doing a bunch of book-signings. I'm lecturing at Yale. I'm going to teach at a poetry school this fall. I have a whole recording studio here. I build musical instruments. I'm working on an instrument with bird calls- it plays different layered sounds of birds so I can write poetry to it. So my life is, knock on wood, not so bad. I'm 57 and I'm facing a kind of right-wing, blaisez-faire America that I thought would not be quite as cruel as it. But hey, it's not bad. I'm still having fun. I've been married 36 years now and we have a daughter that's grown up. I have a lot of be thankful for, especially considering that I'm missing a lot of my brothers and sisters who are now dead. Like Allen Ginsberg, who we really, really miss.
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