A Review: The Life And Times Of Andrew Loog Oldham

A Review

The Life And Times Of

Andrew Loog Oldham

Of The Rolling Stones

by

R.E. Prindle

Oldham, Andrew Loog: Stoned, 2001, Vintage

Oldham, Andrew Loog:  2Stoned, 2003, Vintage

Oldham, Andrew Log:  Stone Free, 2012, Escargot Books

Oldham, Andrew Loog:  Rolling Stoned, 2013, Because Entertainment

 

-1-

Who Is Andrew Loog Oldham

For those who know this introduction will be superfluous, but for those who don’t know this essay will be an introduction to a man who through his exploitation of the Rolling Stones was an important influence on that memorable Sixties decade.  Perhaps moreso than is commonly thought.

Out on the consuming edge of the record industry in those days the name Andrew Loog Oldham seemed to be displayed as prominently on the record covers as The Rolling Stones themselves.  In the early days Andrew Loog Oldham might be known before Mick or Keith and certainly the other members of the band.  Yet Oldham wasn’t in the band so who was he?  And then records were issued bearing the name The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra.  Where did he get that name Loog anyway?  And just as suddenly the name Andrew Loog Oldham disappeared but the Stones remained.  Who was this guy anyway?

In those days when information could be gathered, if at all, at the proverbial snail’s pace, things have changed today when I can make a few clicks and see Andrew moving and hear him speaking; actually see his fabulous style of dressing as he described it.  In addition he has written two thousand pages describing himself more or less in full.  Now we can know who Andrew Loog Oldham is and what his relationship to the Rolling Stones was.

Andrew’s, we’ll take a familiar approach throughout, great tragedy is that his fated life opportunity showed up too early.  He was only nineteen in 1963 when the opportunity that few ever get a chance to grasp showed up on his front doorstep, so to speak.  That was the appearance of the London music group The Rolling Stones.  In order to come into his inheritance as he was under twenty-one and couldn’t legally act in his own name, Andrew had to find a surrogate to act in his stead.  Chance provided an old reprobate by the name of Eric Easton.  Eric was a plodder who had served as an organist at the resort town of Blackpool while representing two or three nondescript acts of which one was the redoubtable Mrs. Miller.  While not a household name at the present time Mrs. Miller whose act consisted of being an amusingly terrible singer, had her moment in the spotlight both in England and the US.  She did have records released and they did sell no matter how modestly.

Easton was slow on the uptake not realizing the cultural shift that was taking place with the arrival of the Beatles and would have been incapable of managing the Stones without Andrew’s grasp of the changing cultural situation of the Sixties.  However he was not too slow to understand money in the bank of which he made off with a fortune or two much to the chagrin of both Andrew and the Rolling Stones.

Andrew’s four volumes are records of his vicissitudes being a young Lancelot reaching for the Grail.  Andrew was green, he was.  In ordinary times he would have been cleaned and discarded never to be heard of again but these were the Sixties and not normal times.  Even in failure the times conspired to make Andrew comfortable by luxury standards, perhaps even rich, but not filthy rich.  The marvelous Sixties did that for so many people most of them undeserving.  By undeserving I mean takers with nothing to offer.

Well, this isn’t a tale about justice but one of the Sixties in which the whole concept of justice disappeared like the vapor from a nuclear plant.  As an extra special gift of the times to Andrew he is today still alive and kicking having passed the seventh decade barrier at 71 years of age.  The good didn’t necessarily die young just the unlucky.  Andy is lucky.

He can be seen introducing his third book, Stone Free, at his Face Book site for those interested.  Always the fashion plate he is a dapper impression of his hero Phil Spector, pointy nose and all.  His hair is becomingly combed back on the sides making for a very presentable 71 year old young at heart gentleman.  He wears a mint green light jacket and shirt, something of a cross between a butch femme and an effete hommy, but altogether passable.  He projects a pleasant aura indicating little brain damage from his very legendary drug use.  A look at him shows how Alex, the chief Droog of A Clockwork Orange may have looked as he made the passage from rough youth to a more dignified mature, the word ‘old’ does not apply to one like Andrew, or I might vainly say, myself.

-II-

Andrew Finds That Life Has It Hazards

I don’t really envy the English kids that came along after my birth year of 1938.  The war years were tough enough but then the long years of national poverty after 1945 must have been grating.  I can’t imagine a life without candy that the lads and lasses had to endure for nine long years.  In my paradise in the US candy bars in those days at a nickel were monstrous.  I couldn’t eat a whole one at one sitting.  Stuffed at less than a half.  Andrew must have known hardship and suffered horribly.

The war babies, mostly from ’42 and ’43 can have no memory of the war but the long ten years of rationed everything gave a cast to their psyches.  When the war babies grew up and became rockers they laid out long tables of delicacies and then ignored them letting them go to waste.  The pain was forgotten but lived on in the subconscious.  Andrew was conceived in ’43 and popped out in ’44.  Tragic for Andy, he should have born in ’42 and been 21 in ’63.

His was a special case.  In a country in which the majority of men were US soldiers, normality had flown out the door in ’43;  his mother not unnaturally took up with one.  It was a tough time.  Andrew’s father, Andrew Loog, was a soldier from Texas. He had a wife and son back there.  As a younger man I applied my moral training to people in Andrew Loog’s situation and condemned them but now hopefully wiser and certainly older I understand.  As a soldier in an active war Andrew Loog could die at any time so why not a little happiness?  Perhaps he cringed at violating his peacetime morals.  In any event as a member of a bomber crew he didn’t even make it across the Channel just after impregnating Andrew’s mother with his future self.  Big Andy hoped he’d dodge the bullets but as it didn’t happen at least it resolved what would have been a difficult emotional situation.

Big Andy hadn’t married Little Andy’s mother so that made little Andy the  bastard son of a bigamous father.  Having been in the orphanage myself being a bastard means nothing to me.  But society is unkind to bastards and orphans.  Having read all four of Little Andy’s reminiscences more than once it seems clear that his bastardy left its mark on Andy.  He had stormy relationship with his mother, perhaps beating her frequently while in his late teens.  She said he did but he says he can’t remember doing it while it would have been wholly outside his character, however, he definitely admits booting her out of a moving car while she was pregnant.  Those temper tantrums he had!

Possibly Andrew blames his mother for bringing him into the world as a bastard.  He shouldn’t, better a bastard than not at all.  Now, Andy discusses this from different angles constantly in his memoirs so my purpose here is to try to put his mind at ease.

The war had a devastating effect on social life especially in England which was merely a staging area for US forces in those years.  Churchill was merely a stooge of Roosevelt’s.   Just as in WWI a million or English men died or were incapacitated meaning that just that many women were condemned to spinsterhood or whatever.  Oh, I know that the dyke Gloria Steinem said a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle but Steinem was an unnatural woman.  Andrew’s mother wasn’t.

As she gave Andy his father’s full name, that is Andrew Loog, I’m guessing that given the times and circumstances she really loved the guy so she named what surely must have been her darling Andrew, Loog, tacking on her name Oldham.  Maybe I’m sentimental, but coming from the orphanage, I find that touching.

Now, Celia Oldham, for that was her name, was a Jewish girl.  Andrew Loog I’m guessing from his name was probably of Dutch ancestry.  Probably a Protestant but possibly a Sephardic Jew.  Andy may know but I don’t.

So, here Celia Oldham is post-war  with the little tyke, Andy, and no husband or father for his child.  There is a massive shortage of men after the GIs clear out so while Celia is attractive the mating pool is small.  Celia did the next best thing and probably with Andy in mind did it well; she became the mistress of a wealthy man while including Andy in the equation.  Not only was he wealthy he was a decent man who maintained her and Andy as a second family.  No kidding.  He kept them in relative style while putting Andy through the public schools. (Public is private in England.)

What more could a single mother with no prospects do?  Perhaps Andrew’s schoolmates were typical louts and ragged him continuously for being a bastard.  I know that in the orphanage during and after was hell on wheels but that was the hand that was dealt and I had to play it; four deuces, trey high.  Could have been worse.  I’m not saying my psychology wasn’t affected and as Andy tells it his sure as hell was.

My point is that life being what it is he should be grateful for a loving mother who made the very best of a bad situation.

-III-

Lost In The Ozone Without A Parachute

As noted Celia Oldham was Jewish and while Andrew says that the religion didn’t play a big part in their lives nevertheless the mother is the culture bearer.  The culture she passed on to Andrew must have been Jewish.

Judaism is an identitarian faith.  To be Jewish is to separate oneself from the ‘gentiles’, from all others, the rest of mankind.  As the US Zionist Samuel Untermyer was to proclaim on nationwide radio in opposition to Hitler’s claim that the Germans were the master race:  We, the Jews, are the aristocrats of the earth.  In other words, Drop this master race crap because you ain’t it.

Thus in a country nominally English, as Andrew describes his youth it was lived in an entirely Jewish community.  As he describes it he associated with no one who wasn’t Jewish.  Like the Jewish Bob Dylan he is always surrounded by Jews.  As he set out to find his way in life he chose the record business as his métier.  I think Andrew wanted to be where it was happening and as his antennae flickered about sensing for that taste of honey he perceived that his future lay in records.  The entire music business if not the entertainment business was in the control of his fellow Jews.

Andy took his sense of reality from movies.  There are a couple influential films he refers to frequently.  One is the American film The Sweet Smell Of Success which however is about two Jews, the one based on the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell and the other his sidekick and the other is the British film Espresso Bongo.  Naturally I obtained both movies and have checked them out.  Also naturally at this age and distance I do not see them through nineteen year old eyes.

In Sweet Smell Andrew concentrates on the character Sidney Falco played by Tony Curtis.  Andy identifies with Falco as a hustler in US terms and a Wide Boy in English terms.  Thus Andrew identifies himself as a Wide Boy.  Falco was an unsavory character, a stooge of his boss J.J. Hunsecker played by the repulsive Burt Lancaster.  Curtis played the role well.  One laments Andrew’s fascination with the character.

Espresso Bongo is a pretty decent rock film.  It takes place I believe at the actual legendary 2i coffee house in which English rock was centered.  The film puts you back in the day.  The star is Andy’s all time hero Laurence Harvey who also turns in a stellar role.  Harvey has that downtrodden hang dog look that carried David Janssen through the US The Fugitive TV series so well.  As I lived in a constant depression until I was forty I knew the look and it suited me well.  I identified with both Janssen and Harvey.  Harvey was one of my favorite actors too.  Depression and Laurence Harvey go together

In Espresso Bongo Harvey plays a role of a hapless manager of a singer who gets away from him much as Andrew himself would let the Stones slip away from him.

All the managers were Jewish and all exploited their ‘boys.’  Perhaps the most famous of these, what the English amusingly call manipulators, was Larry Parnes.  As England emerged from rationing in the fifties and the rebuilding of the infrastructure destroyed by the bombing of WWII created a sort of false prosperity those young people who survived the bombing and rationing were coming of age.  The war had caused a generational break.  Young England began creating an England in their own image.  They rejected the pre-war England of their elders.  It was a world they never made.  Of course neither had their elders.

Parnes sensing the direction began creating an image of recording stars to gratify youthful yearnings, especially of young girls.  He found god looking boys giving them great stage names such Georgie Fame, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager and my favorite, Lance Fortune.  There can be but little question that he exploited, not to say cheated, his ‘boys.’  Parnes was both Jewish and homosexual, a killer combination that dominated the industry.

For instance this about Vince Eager from the Widipedia entry for Larry Parnes:

Vince Eager began to wonder why he had never received any record royalties.  ‘You’re not entitled to any.’  Larry Parnes told him.  ‘But it says in my contract that I am.’  Eager protested.  ‘It also says I have power of attorney over you, and I’ve decided you’re not getting any.’  Parnes replied.

Parnes was of course both Jewish and homosexual.  As he had many of these performers on salary he was cleaning up.  Of course he had merely plucked them off the streets and set them up designing their acts, teaching them stage presence, choosing repertoires etc., they may have been little more than employees.  However they did have ‘contracts’ although as the above quote indicates they were more than one sided making the contractees little more than slaves

The whole record scene was exploitative and homosexual.  When London’s leading criminals horned in on the record scene, the Kray brothers, Reg and Ron they were Jewish and homosexual while their older brother Charlie who was straight with no police record managed the business end of the record racket.

As Andrew was coming up through the years this was the situation he perceived.  While he couldn’t have broken into the Parnes style star system once the Beatles hit and the emphasis switched to groups an opening appeared.  Parnes who had his star system going disdained the group thing leaving that open so that the Beatles manager Brian Epstein slid through the opening developing his group and star roster dislodging Parnes.

The market had expanded exponentially since the fifties when Parnes developed his system.  Andrew, then, aquiver with the possibilities had his eye out for the new Beatles.  He was told about the group working in Richmond called The Rollin’ Stones.  He went, he saw, he signed.

-IV-

As Andrew freely acknowledges by his late teens he was experiencing mental problems so I am merely discussing what he has disclosed.  He says he was suffering from manic depression.  Probably so, but he must also have blended in a little schizophrenia.  The stresses of his childhood were taking possession of his mind.  I know whereof I speak.  This combined with his disastrous choices of role models that would be joined in 1962 by his reading of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange issued that year made him something of a phenom.  Burgess, there’s another sicko.

A Clockwork Orange  Boy, there was a Satanic book if there ever was one.  The book took a certain mentality by storm, organized it and gave it expression.  Its history is intimately connected with Jagger and Richards.

As influential in its limited sphere as the book was, Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie was perhaps the most destructive Satanic movie ever produced.  It set the tone for the years that followed.  The movie just tore a certain type of mind apart; Alexes by the dozen, nay, hundreds, thousands moved roved out every night after it was shown, snatching girls off the street.  Clockwork was seconded by the movie The Collector that appeared about the same time.  The book of Clockwork was less powerful but would still influence Andrew and through him Jagger and Richards.  The other Stones led separate lives not involved with Mick, Keith and Andrew’s antics.

So Andrew’s brain is in a complete turmoil as he tries to find his way through the maze of life.  Influenced by the real Larry Parnes and the fictional Johnny Jackson for a modus operandus he went in search of an act to manage and found his way to The Rolling Stones.  Having discovered his mother lode, having a clear vision of what to do he was stymied by being only nineteen in shark infested waters without a cage.

Short of twenty-one he had to team up with a shark.  As he was renting an office from an inoffensive appearing shark, Eric Easton, he convinced Eric to essentially through himself represent the Stones.  Eric may have been a pretty sincere stodge but he was no fool when it came to his self-interest.  He may have been close to a bottom feeder but that didn’t mean he hadn’t learned most of the tricks of the Great Whites.  The ins and outs of contracts presented no problems to him while dizzy Andy and the naïve Mick and Keith probably hadn’t considered the existence of contracts.  Give them a pen and dotted line under their name and they would sign.  But, really, it was never a fair fight.

As Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw is alleged by Woody Guthrie to have said:  Some will rob you with a six gun; some will use a fountain pen.  Oh boy!  Those contracts.  The advantages are all on the side of the contractors; contractees beware.  As Larry Parnes said:  I’ve also got your Power Of Attorney and I say you don’t get anything.  Revoking a Power Of Attorney is simple but how many amateurs think of it.

 

But legally contracts don’t really matter unless money is involved.  There wouldn’t be a lot of money for a few years but when there was Andrew and the Stones not unsurprisingly got the bum’s rush.

Andrew’s brain was a regular pinwheel especially as in addition to his youth and mental condition he imbibed drugs freely.  If your brain’s not already a mess drugs will certainly paint it black.

Even though Andrew chose poor role models he got the drift of what had to be done to make stars of random stones.  Very few performers, they only become artists after success, know how to get from point A to point B and beyond.  That’s where the manager, if he’s any good, comes in; he recognizes the possibilities of the raw talent and nurses them through the actual birth process.  Believe me: this is worth a lot.

It is somewhat like Larry Parnes.   He sensed what the teen public wanted and rather than wait for it to come to him, he created it from the rawest material and then took more than the lion’s share or the benefits.  But then, he also inadvertently gave his ‘boys’ lives.  There were actual careers awaiting them after Parnes had scraped off the cream.

The question then is were the Stones too talented to fail?  I don’t think so.  Not without Andrew to shape them and point the direction anyway.  Andrew couldn’t sing or play but he could turn dross into gold not too much differently than what Larry Parnes had done with his ‘boys.’  The Stones were the evidence.

The key to the Stones’ success was when they learned to write songs.  Would they have learned to write songs if Andrew hadn’t literally forced them into it?  I would answer with a clear cut negative.  The Stones playing nothing but crappy old Chicago blues and would have sank without a trace.  In that sense Brian Jones insistence on playing ‘pure’ R&B would have led to dismal failure.  But then, maybe that is what Brian wanted.

Let me point out here that in the US all this crappy old blues stuff was unlistened to but by a very small minority.  Nor would the stuff ever have gained popularity without the English influence.  Even today very few listen to that junk.  ‘I woke up this morning, lordy, lordy…’

While Mick, Keith and Brian were boggling their minds concentrating on the ‘music’ Andrew realized that teen age girls (the Parnes influence again) weren’t going to get too enthused about grizzled old Negroes complaining about how their mama wouldn’t drop down.  Does anyone think sprightly young teenagers looking for a good time are going to wallow in anybody else’s misery?  Not likely.

So Andrew directed his ‘boys’ toward a more pop sound alienating the ever insistent ‘purist’ Brain from Mick and Keith.  Bill and Charlie were pretty much just boys in the band.

Thus faced with the overwhelming competition of the Beatles, the lovable Mop Tops, Andrew made the fatal choice of turning Mick and Keith into his criminal Droogs, taking the low road and leaving the high road to the Beatles.  Alex in A Clockwork Orange called the members of his gang Droogs.  In a sense Andrew tried to make the Stones Andrew and the Droogs.

All very well but as Andrew got a little money his brain went from a pinwheel on a stick to real fireworks where pinwheels shoot flames.  His brain was really in a whirl.  He was passing out at parties.   He became self-absorbed.  He became interested in other projects that took his time, setting the Stones more or less adrift.  His protégé Mick was no fool while being a quick learner.  Why, Mick said to himself after becoming successful should I pay all these dufuses for what I can do myself.  He couldn’t of course do it himself but it seemed like it at the time.  He slammed the door in Andrew’s face.

-V-

Where’s Strength And Wisdom When You Need It?

The four years Andrew was with the Stones could have been a couple three or four lifetimes for the changes Andrew was forced through.  Success is rightly called the bitch goddess.  You’ll never know until you’ve said hello.  The time from when he and Eric Easton signed the Stones to the time Andrew sold the Stones out to that Devil In Disguise Allen Klein nearly destroyed Andy.  Allen Klein wasn’t in that much of a disguise either.

The trajectory of Andy’s career was so rapid it was hard to follow.  It wasn’t so much that he bit off more than he could chew as that he tried to chew without biting it off.  First things first, Andrew.

Obsessed with A Clockwork Orange he moved in with Mick and Keith where he gave them lessons in Droogism.  Both were apt pupils.  This is difficult to follow but his brain captured and sensing what seems to have been the book’s importance Andrew approached Burgess to buy the movie rights.  Burgess told him the rights had already been sold but he wouldn’t tell Andy to whom.

It turns out that the rights had been sold to David Bailey the fashion photographer who had made Mick his ‘mate’ and possibly bought the rights jointly with Mick.  If so, one wonders where Mick got the money.  Sometime in 1963 the pair split with their rights to New York City to interest Andy Warhol in a film project.  This also is rather remarkable because Andy was not yet that prominent while he hadn’t made any kind of stir with his puerile movies as yet.  Somehow the rights passed to Warhol and finally to whoever acquired them to make Kubrick’s movie.

Warhol did make a film based on the book although the connection seems tenuous while not being worth watching.  More importantly Alex and his Droogs had a profound effect on members of Warhol’s group.  The group left Warhol’s atelier, the Factory, at night on their predations a la Alex and his Droogs.  I believe Bob Dylan is referring to them in this lyric from his 1965 song Desolation Row:

Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew

Come out and roundup everyone that knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the [F]actory were the heart attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders...

For some reason both Oldham and Bailey thought Mick was the perfect Alex while the Stones could be the Droogs.  It didn’t work out but Mick and Warhol bonded like superglue.  They would be very close friends until Andy died in 1987 when Mick flew to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  Not only did the Stones practice Black and Blue at Warhol’s Montauk compound but Andy did two or three covers for them most notably Sticky Fingers.  As a result of Mick and Warhol’s friendship the Stones always had the key to Greenwich Village.

So Andrew lost out on his bid for A Clockwork Orange.  But then his brain racing a mile a minute and wanting to be a record magnate he founded Immediate Records.  Not one for details Immediate stretched him pretty thin.  I know we’re talking ancient history here, or at least ancient technology, so the reader will have to let go of the present to imagine the impact of Immediate Records on the cognoscenti of the time.  I modestly include myself in that number.

Andrew was on the far edge of flamboyant; his ideal Larry Harvey who he met about this time thought him arch camp so Andy in his eye makeup and fey manners must have cut a startling figure.  A lot of people thought he was queer and not just ambiguous.  The Immediate label was an astounding pink, almost fluorescent seemingly confirming homosexual tendencies.  It got your attention but in those days you almost had to apologize for buying a record with such a label.  His covers were all good, in a class with the best and perhaps….  He signed and produced a lot of very good groups.  The label’s production values may have prevented him from having any smashes, at least I don’t remember any.

I’m sure few will remember the Nice or even have heard of them but the first Nice was a pretty good record while the members went on to greater things.  The sound wasn’t as immediate as it could have been.  I worked it in my store but couldn’t get anywhere with it.

In those days British imports were all the rage on the West Coast while US records were despised.  When I first went to England in the early seventies I was astounded to find the fans waiting for American pressings because they were thought better.  Oh, I said, how strange.  What makes them better?  In so many words they said production values.  In still other words they thought they had more immediacy.  So Andy’s Immediate records lacked immediacy.  I thought they were great anyway and they were always the first of the new releases I auditioned.

But, the devil is in the details, and Andrew wasn’t much on details so he went broke although he did hang in there until 1970.  Not a bad record for an independent.    He doesn’t tell us what happened to the masters but they must have been worth something.

By that time Andy was not only deep into drugs he was legendary.  In Stoned and 2Stoned he has some great descriptions of being out of it if you like that sort of thing.  His first two books were based on the oral biography method of Jean Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick called Edie.  In that book acquaintances were interviewed and then cut and pasted to form a continuous narrative.  Knocked out by ‘Edie’ Andrew did the same with the exception that he commented on the interviewees’ comments.

Rolling Stoned begins in a straight autobiographical style then begins to wander and meander.  Andrew is always a good read but unless you want to read three different four hundred page books covering the same ground with variations I would recommend his most recent, Rolling Stoned, or perhaps 2Stoned.  Still, I don’t mind…

Chap. 15 Edie Sedgwick: Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick: Maid Of Constant Sorrow

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Chapter 15

Edie

We are now at the beginning of June 1966. Life was careening very fast for Edie, Andy and Bob. Oddly enough all three were headed for life threatening experiences. The first to take a hit was Dylan. He had his famous spill from his motorcycle in July of that summer. His back wheel locked up sending him flying over the handlebars. It has never been made clear how badly he was hurt or if he was even hurt at all but he was observed in a neck brace so a report that he had a cracked vertebra in his neck may be accurate. He may have come within an ace then of being paralyzed from the neck down or killed.

It seems to me unlikely that the rear wheel accidentally locked up. As Dylan was one whose conduct from, say, ‘63 to ‘66 should have made him a lot of enemies it seems likely that someone was seeking revenge. There are strong indications if not evidence that Andy Warhol was the most likely candidate.

Andy was not one to wear his heart on his sleeve but my thinking after reading extensively and thinking deeply is that in his own way Andy was deeply in love with Edie. Given his homosexuality there was apparently no way for him to express his feelings to her. Edie on her part remarked to Dylan that she had really tried to get close to Andy. While Andy strove to appear indifferent he express his resentment at David Weisman and his movie Ciao Manhattan that exploited Edie’s fame while destroying whatever was left of her reputation.

At the same time too he resented Dylan for purloining Edie and then discarding her. Andy was controlled by the notion that there was no stopping a person from following their bent or as he put it: How do you stop someone from doing what they want to do. Indeed, all one can do is step out of the way and let them do it. Thus, while the attitude is callous he was heard to remark that if Edie was going to commit suicide he hoped that she let him film it. The logic is not unreasonable but the attitude comes across cold.

As Edie seemed intent on going with Dylan Andy felt that there was no way to stop her. It never occurred to him that he himself was exploiting her by using her in his movies. As he saw it he was creating avenues to success for his people and it was up to them to create their own opportunities from that fame. Not too much different than he was doing for himself. It apparently never occurred to him that none of his people had the talent to do anything on their own although some did try.

He does not seem to have been aware that what was fame for him was mere notoriety for them. He had merely created a clubhouse for drugged out buffoons. Thus when things began to fall apart in mid-’66 when the mise en scene was broken up by Andy’s trip to Hollywood his entourage was merely dispersed with no direction home.

The case with Ondine was as pathetic as that with Edie. With the accession of Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes who encouraged Andy to drop the whole A-head and Silver Factory crowd which they correctly saw as a liability. This was made easier by the end of ‘67 when Warhol was advised that his lease would not be renewed. Everyone was told there would be no place for them at the new quarters. The Factory building was subsequently torn down in 1969 to make room for the Dag Hammerskjold project.

For Ondine who was completely burned out by the amphetamines this was disastrous. He ended up at the post office for a while then tried to capitalize on his notoriety by stealing a film in which he starred trying to make money by exhibiting it while lecturing on his Factory days. He was apparently pathetic while Andy turned his back on him without a thought.

The same was true of Gerard Malanga who was dumped in 1967. Andy’s treatment of this most competent and valuable assistant is a real blot on his record. Malanga was a man of some talent and ability. I don’t think much of poetry but Malanga has a position in the NYC poetry scene. He introduced Andy into a milieu beneficial to him that he would not have known otherwise.

At a time when Andy was turning his art in the direction of multiple copies, essentially posters, Malanga who was knowledgeable in silk screening taught Andy the process. I am of the opinion that Gerard was essentially a collaborator in Warhol’s art. He assisted in the screening contributing skill and know how while undoubtedly making good suggestions. Of course he followed Andy’s lead. All this time he was paid only the minimum wage so, in a sense, he sacrificed a half dozen of his most valuable years for little recompense and as it turned out nothing in the way of thanks. In 1967 he went to Italy in an attempt to further his fortunes. While there he ran out of money having no way to pay his fare home. Andy refused his pleas for help, so Gerard who was completely familiar with Andy’s process of selecting photographs, such as the Presleys, selected a photo of Che Guevara and screened a few copies representing them as genuine Warhols. From my point of view they were authentic Warhols produced without the Master’s hand but still, perhaps, genuine.

When art authorities checked with Warhol, Andy dropped the ball. He should have confirmed them as no one could tell the difference and rescued Gerard. Instead he made Gerard guilty of art fraud which gave Gerard some very trying moments with the Italian authorities. Gerard made it back to New York but now having served as Warhol’s apprentice during his twenties, at thirty he had no marketable skills while being essentially a convicted criminal. Having no other recourse and some rights in my estimation he expropriated, as the Leftist criminals used to say, some of Andy’s multiples and sold them. In a way in Andy’s mind this acknowledged his primacy and he didn’t press charges but he did disavow authentic prints as genuine.

We now move to ‘68, Andy under the influence of Morrissey and Hughes qhile forced to change quarters as his former space was condemned, disavowed the whole former Factory crowd telling them to get lost, that they were no longer welcome at the new Factory.

You can’t do this without making a large number of enemies. Andy just before his shooting was not so popular a fellow. And we are not quite there yet.

Edie going into the last half of ‘66 and into ‘67 was in dire straits. She was now completely unable to function without amphetamines. Cut off from all sources of income she was forced into thievery to support her habit. She was caught and did time. She was to spend more time at public mental hospitals that were quite unlike the posh Silver Hill of Connecticut. One can only guess the effect this disastrous series of events, a series with no seeming end, had on her psychology. Or perhaps we can get a glimmer from the biker group she hung out when she returned to Santa Barbara after the stunning humiliation of Ciao Manhattan. There she became a biker chick offering herself to all comers for a dose of drugs. Certainly her self-respect had been obliterated. Certainly she no longer thought she had any value as a human being. The mind can only be battered so much before it gives way. The men in her life had treated her shamefully. Her father, Fuzzy, Warhol and Dylan as well as her evil mentor, Chuck Wein.

If, as claimed in the movie Factory Girl, her father had sexual relations with her as a young girl then his obligations extended much further than a paltry allowance that he cut off . Then he is morally liable for her degradation. If as Warhol thought there was no way to stop someone from doing what they want to do, then he was under no obligation to provide the ways and means. In all probability in the environment of NYC of the early and mid-sixties Edie would have drifted into amphetamines anyway. Indeed, as Andy said, Edie was a regular patron of the feel good doctor, Roberts.

Roberts was a licensed physician as was that other chief Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson. Doesn’t society have to obligation to protect its citizens from charlatans and quacks? Didn’t they throw some poor innocent Jim Bakker in jail because they disliked his religion? Didn’t society pursue hapless marijuana smokers and criminalize them by the thousands? Can the doctors actually claim they didn’t know the deleterious effects of amphetamines when they had the example of the most notorious amphetamine user ever, Adolf Hitler, before them?

Even if they tried they were still were medical malpractitioners and criminally liable. Read this quote from Edie by Jean Stein for an account of these doctors’ methods and practices. This is absolutely terrifying. There is a problem with Stein and Plimpton however. Apparently there was no Dr. Charles Roberts; Roberts is a name substituted by Stein to ‘protect’ the real doctor, who in any event would likely have been discredited c. 1968 when the Dr. Feelgoods were finally discountenanced. Also there may be confusion with the Dr. Robert, without an ‘s’ of the Beatles song. He was apparently Dr. Roberty Feynman, a sixty year old man who was discredited in 1968. In any event since Stein and Plimpton didn’t announce the name change their whole history of Edie is compromised more than somewhat. Who knows what edit’s the two authors made. To quote the account, p.261, Edie:

Joel Schmacher reporting:

I’ll give a description of what it was like to go to Dr. Roberts. The time is two-thirty in the afternoon. I’m going back for my second shot of the day. I open the door. There are twenty-five people in the waiting room; businessmen, beautiful teenagers on the floor with long hair playing guitars, pregnant women with babies in their arms, designers, actors, models, record people, freaks, non-freaks…waiting. Everyone is waiting for a shot, so the tension in the office is beyond belief.

Lucky you, being a special Dr. Roberts person who can whip right in without waiting. Naturally there’s a terrible resentful, tense moment as you rush by because you’re going to get your shot.

You attack one of the nurses. By that I mean you grab her and say, “Listen, Susan! Give me a shot!” You’re in the corridor with your pants half off, ready to get the shot in your rear. Meanwhile Dr. Roberts comes floating by. Dr. Roberts has had a few shots already, right? So in the middle of this corridor he decides to tell you his complete plan to rejuvenate the entire earth. It’s a thirteen part plan, but he has lots of time to tell it to you, and as the shots start to work-Susan having given it to you- you have lots of time to listen.

In Dr. Roberts’s room would be Edie…so thin that she cannot be given her shots standing up; she has to lie down on her stomach. It was a big shot- all those vitamins, niacin, methedrine. God knows what else- for a little girl she has had to take it lying down.

Meanwhile everyone who’s back in the corridor for the second or third time that day complains that the shots they received that morning haven’t worked. Out in the waiting room you can hear the people complaining that they haven’t even received their first shot yet.

And Dr. Roberts is still going on. In the middle of his thirteen-part plan he decides to tell you about a movie he saw on television…in detail. You however, are telling him your ideas for whatever you are going to do. But then Dr. Roberts begins to describe his idea for a plastic Kabuki house. Someone else is showing his sketches for redesigning the Boeing 707 with a psychedelic interior. Big doings at Dr. Roberts all the time.

Now you decide to go back out through the waiting room, right? Now you have all the time in the world. Life is a breeze. You’ve used the sun lamp, I mean, you were in a great rush when you came in; now, finally, you decide you’ll leave.

But there in the room are all these people who are not Dr. Roberts special people and who still haven’t been served. They’re there to spend as much money as you have, but they’re not part of the “in” crowd. So they’re drifting off into craziness because they haven’t gotten their shots. A couple of people are wandering around…their poor systems are so riddled with the methedrine they got half an hour ago they feel is not working that they’ve come back for what Dr. Roberts call “the booster.” The basic Dr. Roberts shot goes for from ten dollars to fifteen dollars. As your resistance to the drug gets to the point of diminishing returns, you move on up. There is a big shot for twenty-five dollars, and if it doesn’t work you go right back and get the “the booster’ for five dollars. That’s what some of these poor people are doing- standing out there waiting for the booster. But you …you are flying high, having just had your twenty-five dollar special, and you walk out ino the outer office and say: “Hi, Oh, hi! What a beautiful sweater! Gee you look wonderful! How are you? Oh, hi! Isn’t it wonderful to see you! What’s happening?”

Before leaving, I’d often go and find Edie in Dr. Roberts’ sauna. If we’d been up all night on drugs, the sauna and steam-bath were wonderful things. We’d go and walk for blocks and blocks…just be together, because we didn’t know what we were saying half the time.

The speed thing was so wonderful because everyone was walking around scared to death…scared because they couldn’t sustain the pace. And so these shots from Dr. Roberts and all those other speed doctors gave you a false sense of being together. You cold face everybody when you went out at night. You could dance all night. It was like “the answer.” Nobody knew much about speed in those days.

Once Edie’s mother came to Dr. Roberts! I remember she was on crutches. He looked like Betty Crocker-gray hair with a little hairnet, a blue print dress, and little glasses. She looked like a librarian from the Mid-west standing next to Edie with her cut-off blond hair with the dark roots, thigh-high boots, and mini-skirt, and a kind of chubby fur jacket that looked like it was made out of old cocker spaniels. There they were- the two of them. Mrs. Sedgwick had come to see if Dr. Roberts was taking good care of her little girl…and I guess the parents paid for her treatment. It cost a lot for those shots.

I’m not sure I trust Joel’s memories but that is sure good speed freak talk. Love it. And then there’s this from Cherry Vanilla, p. 265:

Quote.

I became like an acid queen. I loved it. My looks got crazier and crazier. I started getting into things like pink wigs, teasing them up to make them real big and like bubbles. I’d wear goggle glasses and real crazy make-up: spidery lashes and white lips, and micro-minis. I saw a micro-mini on Edie and immediately started cutting everything off. Kenneth Jay Lane earrings. Big Robert Indiana LOVE earrings, giant love paintings on my ears. Little bikini undies, a band around the top; and we made these silver dresses that were just silver strings hanging on us. I was surrounded by a lot of gay boys in designing and decorating who would always give me a hand in pulling some look together. I would go out half-naked with see through things. You took a scarf and wrapped it around you and thought you were dressed.

I gave Dr. Roberts a shot once. In the ass, in his office about five o’ clock in the morning. I had been playing records at Aux Puce- I was the disc jockey there- and he had some around to visit and said, “If you come back to my office with me, I’ll give you a shot.” It was a freebie, which was nice because those shots were not cheap.

 I really got into having a needle in my ass. Just the feeling of it. You get the shot, then this taste in your mouth, and you get a rush and you knew you were getting high. It was all very sexual in a way, and very “in” and social and stylish to do it. So I went back to his office with him and I gave him one and he gave me one.

I don’t know what he shot me up with, but it was something I had certainly never had before. I was really very numbed. Maybe it was cocaine. Sometimes he would shoot you with LSD. You never knew what he was going to shoot you with. So we got involved in a rather heavy sex encounter.

All of a sudden there was blood everywhere. I was bleeding like crazy. He laughed and said, “Oh, I think you should go and see a doctor.” Very bizarre. I started freaking out. I thought, “Oh, my God, this man has done something to me.. He’s killed me. I’m going to die here in his office, all shot up with drugs, and it’s going to be a disgrace and terrible..” I told him I had to get out. He said, “No, no, you can’t leave. I’ll fix you. I’ll give you a shot.” I said, “No, no, no more shots!” I got dressed. I never thought he was going to let me out. Perhaps he was scared I would go to the police.

When I did get out, I ran around the corner to Aux Puces. Some of the staff used to hang out there very late at night taking LSD. Sure enough, they were there. We called doctors. We couldn’t get anybody. Then the bleeding began to subside suddenly- about seven in the morning. I never actually knew what happened. I had been cut inside- scratched with something, fingernails or jewelry…probably by accident. I think we both just got carried away. 

Exciting times. And finally we have this from Edie. This is a transcript from Ciao Manhattan.

It’s hard to choose between the climactic ecstasies of speed and cocaine. They’re similar. Oh, they are so fabulous. That fabulous sexual exhilaration. Which is better, coke or speed?” It’s hard to choose. The purest speed, the purest coke, and sex is a deadlock.

Speeding and booze. That gets funny. You get chattering at about fifty miles an hour over the downdraft, and booze kind of cools it. It can get very funny. Utterly ridiculous. It’s a good combination for a party. Not for an orgy, though.

Speedball! Speed and heroin. That was the first time I had a shot in each arm. Closed my eyes. Opened my arms. Closed my fists, and jab, jab. A shot of cocaine and speed, and a shot of heroin. Stripped off all my clothes, leapt downstairs, and ran out on Park Avenue and two blocks down it before my friends caught me. Naked. Naked as a lima bean. A speedball is from another world. It’s a little bit dangerous. Pure coke, pure speed, and pure sex. Wow! The ultimate in climax. Once I went over to Dr. Roberts for a shot of cocaine. It was very strange because he wouldn’t tell me what it was, and I was playing it cool. It was my first intravenous shot, and I said, “Well, I don’t feel it.” And he gave me another one, and all of a sudden I went blind. I just flipped out of my skull! I ended up wildly balling him and flipping him out of his skull. He was probably shot up…he was always shooting up around the corner anyway.

It would appear that Edie was very familiar with drugs and very welcoming to them. The quote doesn’t tell us whether Edie was first introduced to amphetamines at the Factory and then found Dr. Roberts or vice-versa but we do have an environment at the factory in which Brigit Berlin walked around injecting people with or without their consent. The question then is how innocent is Andy really. What sort of milieu had he created for his amusement.

The Factory was a clubhouse for what were essentially lowlife homosexual drug addicts. (insert Time article) This must have been the overriding first impression. As such the women had to be accessories to attract men and outsiders. They were there essentially to be abused. They put the Factory in bad odor. As Andy says the police were through the Factory so often it might s well have the precinct house. Warhol himself was generally known as ‘that creep’ while the more respectable people thought the place poison.

Andy’s genius however did turn it into an ‘in’ place by 1966 where certain celebrities with cachet found the place exciting and for a short period gave it a certain status.

As I have pointed out Warhol was a leader in both the Homosexual Revolution and the Underman Revolution. By late 1966, early 1967 we are not too far from the Stonewall Riot of ‘69 that ended restriction and harassment of homosexuals in NYC and the rest of the country. It was the end of rock n’ roll. After Stonewall the period began that homosexuals called the Candy Store Era. It was a time when anything went that ended about ten years later when AIDS made its appearance on the scene. Of course if any of us had heard of the Stonewall Riot we would have missed its significance nor did anyone understand the astounding change that was the Candy Store Era. A sub-text of the Homosexual Revolution is the subversion of heterosexuality which goes without saying. Thus the Factory was a prototype of the nightclub that would realize the ideal of absolutely promiscuous sex- Studio 54. Thus as the homosexually led nightlife of the Candy Store Era developed Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager created the ultimate Factory in Studio 54. That club was everything Andy wanted the Factory to be- a celebrity paradise. The place was filled with celebrities, sexual perversion and drugs. All inhibitions were down. Studio 54 became Andy’s clubhouse where he spent his nights as a voyeur.

Rubell and Schrager were not overly discreet so that the Feds, at least, were onto them from the beginning although NYC authorities must have been paid off as they didn’t harass the club. At Studio 54 the Undermen forged a very destructive attack on elite White America. According to Anthony Haden-Guest in his book, Studio 54, a concerted assault was made to corrupt prep school youth- boys and girls using drugs, liquor and sex. According to Haden-Guest the conspirators were quite successful in debasing both boys and girls in much the same manner Edie had been debauched under Warhol’s tutelage.

This raises the question again of how innocent Andy really was. His competitor Bob Dylan is supposed to have hated Andy for debauching Edie but that may have been the pot calling the kettle black.

Andy’s record of the treatment of women is not good but in keeping with the homosexual ethos. The gays dislike women as competitors, as they believe, for men’s favors. While not considering themselves psychotic they believe that if there were no women all men would be theirs. The irrationality of the belief shall pass without comment. Hence they imitate women to attract men. An inevitable consequence of their attitude is the need to debase and humiliate women.

While being of this mindset Andy as the little Ruthenian immigrant boy who was himself humiliated and rejected by the upper crust of Pittsburgh found delight in debasing and humiliating upper crust women. This runs through his whole career. Edie came from a very old American family that was very prominent in both Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Boston, from whence they arose and New York City. Her father had moved West from New York only shortly before she was born. Although raised as a half wild girl on a vast ranch near Santa Barbara Edie could claim to be a New York society girl. Indeed, her grandmother still maintained her position on the East Side.

While Andy may indeed had loved Edie it was probably more for her background than for herself. The prized of an Anglo-American princess must have been beyond Andy’s juvenile dreams. Indeed, it was through her that Andy first tasted any social success. If they were inseparable during that glorious summer of ‘65 it was because Andy was basking in Edie’s social glamour. And yet one doesn’t find reverence or respect for Edie as a person. Andy allowed her to pick up the check at expensive restaurants not only for himself but his whole entourage of freeloaders. As these were all Underclass people you may be sure they took full advantage of her largesse. I am perhaps a trifle old fashioned but to me this is unforgivable in Andy.

While Andy may have been hard pressed financially to maintain the large and growing establishment there appears to have been no gratitude for Edie relieving the strain. As his entourage grew Andy began to yearn for a restaurant where he could exchange art for food and drink. This was provided in 1966, after Edie was out of favor, when Mickey Ruskin opened Max’s Kansas City in December of ‘65.

The rest of women at the Factory were treated with disrespect although they submitted to it with stoic resignation. One reads with horror the treatment of Viva in Tucson during the filming of Warhol’s cowboy parody and putdown, once again a homosexual extravaganza.

And then there was the ever present sado-masochism that permeated the Factory. An acceptance and celebration of the perversion. The attitude was expressed successfully in the films of Paul Morrissey begun while Warhol was recuperating from Valerie Solanas’ assault. With Andy unable to interfere Morrissey quickly turned out the movie Flesh with Joe Dallesandro which turned out to be a success in Germany. This gave Andy confidence and Morrissey produced several more movies among them Flesh For Frankenstein. I have no intention of reviewing the movie here but certain barbarities of the French arch-sadist Gilles de Rais were celebrated.

Women of some prominence played roles in the nude while performing sexually deviant acts. This rather negative attitude toward women was reflected all through the history of the various Factorys carried on in the most degrading circumstance.

To add insult to injury when Edie was actually falling into her psychological abyss Andy shot The Andy Warhol Story with Rene Ricard and Edie in which both expressed their hatred and revulsion of Andy. ( http://.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/warhol1f/warhol.html )

So by this time she had bad been debased more than any man or woman should ever be debased. Edie herself lay her destruction at the feet of Andy, the great facilitator, the sado-masochistic doyen of New York. I think Andy, then bears a feat deal of responsibility for Edie’s shame.

Now, it will be noted. The Andy Warhol Story was filmed at about the same time as his Bob Dylan Story so Edie and Dylan were connected in Andy’s mind.

As I said Warhol and his troupe left for LA in May of ‘66 after a successful month of the EPI. When he returned to resume this lucrative enterprise he found that his hall, the Dom, had been leased from under him by- Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan. They turned it into a venue inanely named The Balloon Farm. Another act of plagiarism by Dylan. I think this was too much for Warhol. First Edie and then the Dom. This was surely provocation asking for trouble.

Now, if you’ve watched the post-1968 Warhol movie Bad how far is it from Bad to conjecture that Andy and his crew were responsible for Dylan’s accident? Bad concerns a woman who runs a clearing house for dirty deeds written by Andy’s amanuensis, Pat Hackett. Andy had to have been angry at Dylan and Grossman and indeed he filmed a put down of the two. Quoting Warholstars.org:

Sterling Morrisson of the Velvet Underground:

“Dylan was always around, giving Nico songs. There was one film Andy made with Paul Caruso called The Bob Dylan Story. I don’t think Andy has ever shown it. It was hysterical. They got Marlowe Dupont to play Al Grossman. Paul Caruso not looks like Bob Dylan but as a super caricature he makes even Hendrix look pale by comparison. This was around 1966 when the film was made and his hair was way out to here…On the eve of the filming, Paul had a change of heart and got his hair cut off- close to his head and he must have removed about a foot so everyone was upset about that. Then Dylan had his accident and that is why the film was never shown.”

So, in July smarting from the indignities imposed on him by Dylan and Grossman Andy was making a ‘hilarious’ film about the two. Perhaps Andy thought that was not enough so somewhere during the filming, one conjectures, he conceived this motorcycle rigging. Thus, in late July Dylan went over the handlebars when his rear wheel locked. Anything could have happened to him from paralysis to death. As it was he fractured his neck coming within an ace of serious injury.

Andy hadn’t finished with The Bob Dylan Story. He wanted to work in the accident. Probably aggrieved at Dylan’s survival Andy recommenced the film in October of ‘66 probably with the Andy Warhol Story starring Edie in mind.

Warholstars once again:

  Susan Pile speaking:

Andy filmed the Bob Dylan Story starring Paul Caruso…Ingrid Superstar and I were folkrock groupies who rushed in (to Paul Caruso) attacked his body and taped him to the motorcycle…Paul Morrissey suggested all of Paul Caruso’s lines be from songs, but Andy, knowing it was a good idea (this is a direct relay from Paul Morrissey) vetoed it…My one line (what I wasn’t supposed to say; I was to remain mutely sinister) was “You’re just like P.F. Sloan and all the rest- you want to become famous so you can get rid of those pimples.” (accompanied by quick slaps to P. Caruso’s acne remnanted cheeks.)…

So, what do we have here? Bear in the mind the subject matter of Bad which is a very violent movie of revenges made in the most casual treatment. Morrison’s account is given before the accident while Pile’s is after.

Pile and Ingrid attack Caruso/Dylan and mockingly tape hi to the motorcycle so that he can’t fall off. (ha, ha, ha). Pile the delivers a devastating putdown comparing Dylan unfavorably to P.F. Sloan. Sloan was the guy who wrote the puerile Eve Of Destruction that was very near to being a humorous parody of Dylan’s songs such as Blowin’ In The Wind. If Dylan had seen the film he would likely have been enraged. Pile than calls Dylan’s song ‘pimple music’ another put down as rock n’ roll was derisively called pimple music because teenagers had pimples. And then Caruso/Dylan is physically abused by having his face slapped while being unable to retort because he is taped to the bike.

Psychologically then what Andy is saying is that he felt the filching of Edie as a slap in the face while when he was in LA he was unable to foil the filching of the Dom.

This combination of Dylan and the motorcycle in a film called The Bob Dylan Story points clearly to Andy as the perp.

And so the final chapter will concern the filming of Ciao Manhattan and the demise of Edie. I have some other work to be done so there will be a delay before Chapter 16 appears.

A Review: Ed Sanders, An Informal History Of The Counterculture In The Lower East Side

A Review: Ed Sanders:

An Informal History Of The Counterculture

In The Lower East Side

by

R. E. Prindle

 

Ed Sanders- Chief Fug

Sanders, Ed: Fug You, An Informal History Of The Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, And Counterculture In The Lower East Side, 2011, The Da Capo Press, 424 pages.

Tuli Kupferbeg

 

Ed Sanders? How few out of a hundred have even heard of him? Yet, Ed had an effect on society of the Sixties not inferior to Andy Warhol. Perhaps a few more have heard of his recording group The Fugs. Originally the Village Fugs, and aptly named.

 

While never much of success out of the East Side Bohemia of NYC Ed nevertheless merits attention. Ed was born in 1939 making him a graduate of high school class of ‘57. I was class of ‘56 making Ed one year younger than me. But, what difference a year makes. Let us do a little demographic study.

 

The swing years between Greil Marcus’ ‘old weird America’ and the ‘new even ‘weirder America’ were the years of 1955, 1956 and 1957 with ‘56, my year, being the transition year between old and new. The key events of the turn was the effect of television and the destruction of network radio that resulted in teen oriented all music Top Forty radio. The class of ‘55 was the last year of ‘old weird’ America while ‘56 was maybe 70-30 the old and new with the old part the largest. Fifty-seven began ‘new’ weirder America. Thus while Ed and I are only a year apart we still come from two different social outlooks as do all who followed after.

 

Demographics are important. By 1955 older teachers were fifty-five or sixty years old so they were born in say, 1890-95 to 1910. Not quite frontier but in the transition from horse and buggy to automobiles and airplanes. They were born into an America of the introduction of new technological wonders the actually went well beyond their imaginations. I mean, the fantasy of men flying came true. They saw Victoriana die and the modern world born. I mean, they saw biplanes turn into jet planes. They lived through two world wars witnessing the incredible changes succeeding those two wars. They were teens or in their twenties during the New Era of the Twenties. They were in their thirties in the Depression and Dust Bowl of the thirties. After enduring WWII they were hit by the Korean War and the struggles between the Communists and Honest people that ended in the defeat of their champion Joseph McCarthy. The three years in question were lived at the beginning of the on-going Negro revolution following the Brown vs. The Board Of Education decision that led to the unimaginable fact of Army troops invading Little Rock to cancel the rights of the majority in favor of a minority. Full lives to say the least.

 

They had some strongly held opinions about life and America they passed on to us or attempted to do so. It was a clumsy attempt. The chaos of the Sixties and subsequent decades stemmed from that teaching. Most of them were rooted in pre-1920 attitudes as was to be expected. No matter how hip we are to the NOW our outlook is always conditioned on the past, near or far.

 

Teddy Roosevelt’s politics seem to have been the basis of their outlook. The twin themes of freedom and revolution were uppermost in their minds. Freedom was always ill defined if defined at all while revolution was held up to us as the highest ideal especially the American Revolution which was sort of the apex of history although Simon Bolivar who rode throughout Spanish South America bringing revolution to every colony on his way was a very close second. Of course the success of the countries he established failed to measure up that of the US. The French and Bolshevic Revolutions were never mentioned and were disregarded as they didn’t fit the fantasy. As these teachers were in place post-war through the fifties whole cadres of students were indoctrinated in this nonsense.

 

Basking in the fairly incredible triumph of the US in a two front war against very formidable enemies the teachers fairly glowed with the glory. Perhaps influenced by that achievement they made the incredible statement that each and every one of us could be whatever we wanted to be. The idea perhaps astonished us more than any other. It was obvious that some were smarter than others, all were of different physical stature, some had social disadvantages that meant denial by those that had them. Some had already made decisions that closed off vast areas of achievement and there was room for only so many at the top. Still, I suppose, that if we had the proper attitude there was a modicum of truth in the statement. Really, if you don’t try you don’t get anywhere. However rooted in a past now thirty or more years distant all the teachers were not dealing with current realities. The were not living in the NOW enough as we were in the Sixties.

 

There was a basic insecurity with Americans. Even though we were taught to believe we were the greatest. A silly novel by Eugene Burdick of 1958, The Ugly American, turned that idea on its head. The idea of the novel was that in their foreign relations Americans were clumsy and inept compared to the smooth Communists of Russia, we antagonized the Third World despite sending wads of money and tons of food for free. I do suppose it’s true that you can’t buy love and Burdick seemed to revel at the thought.

 

As a result of Burdick’s novel Americans high and low embraced the notion that he or she was an Ugly American thus becoming inferior in their minds to every other people of the world. Just as the American South condemned a portion of their people to be White Trash, so Americans became the White Trash of the world. It was something to witness. Forty years or so on some nitwit rocker sang: ‘I’ll be your Ugly American if you’ll be my Asian Rose.’ Is that a deal or not? Blows your mind, doesn’t it? Blew mine.

 

I’m sure that most of us in the fifties had never heard of the CIA and if we had the initials conveyed little meaning. By the early sixties after the incident of the Bay Of Pigs not to mention the Kennedy assassination we had all heard of it but with little comprehension. Ed Sanders as well as the whole Left would fixate on the CIA as the epitome of evil. Of course they were either Communists or Communist sympatizers, Ed claimed to be a socialist, and hence were trying to divert attention away from the KGB and Communist activities. The James Bond movies beginning to appear in 1962 were metaphors of the cold war between the ‘Free World’ and the captive nations.

 

With some variation of this indoctrination under his belt Ed graduated HS, spent a couple semesters at UMissouri-KC then headed East to attend NYU. He say his intent was to become a rocket scientist but once in NYC he gravitated down to the Village which gradually enchanted him so that he abandoned solid propellants and took up ancient Greek, Latin and Egyptian because his mother told him the classical languages were the accoutrements of a gentleman. Perhaps so but there was no danger of a Village Fug ever being mistaken as a gentleman. Ed never was.

 

Once settled in the Village Ed involved himself with Village politics as he sought a place for himself under that black sun as a poet. The late fifties and early sixties were a time of the Beatnik poet. Coffee houses sprang up where the ‘poets’ could read to an eager audience, mostly of other would be poets. I was in the Bay Area of San Francisco at the time and while I wouldn’t call myself an habitué of North Beach I did attend a couple readings in 1964 where Ferlinghetti and a couple others read. Apparently it was the Coffee and Confusion Coffee House as I see from the web, but I don’t remember the name of the place. By 1964 things were pretty commercial and, at least, in SF the place was packed with employed weekend wannabe Beats.

 

Ed himself writes a humorous piece about a poetry reading in his Tales Of Beatnik Glory. While fiction the tales accurately portray the life. I have never been a big poetry fan and my expectations were not disappointed. Ed is an accurate barometer of his time and life on the Set.

 

On his quote page at the beginning of the book he quotes Maxim Gorky who said: ‘I was typing with all my might to make myself “a potent social force.” That pretty much sums up Ed’s career in ‘Beatnik heaven’ on the Lower East Side. His approach as he puts it was ‘A Total Assault On The Culture.’

 

Which culture isn’t exactly clear. Ed was a Catholic boy and he acquired and exhibited all the neuroses that the Catholic confession induces especially the rebellion against sexual repression, hence he turns to the pornography peculiar to Catholics. While there are some maybe many who were or are in full sympathy with Ed’s sexual neuroses I find them repellant while at the same time liking Ed.

 

Ed gives no indication that he himself indulged in licentiousness preferring the role of voyeur. He was a heavy drinker while going on dope binges. While sympathetic to homosexuality he says he passed on a night with his great hero Allen Ginsberg while he married young to his wife of fifty years now, Miriam. He had a couple kids and approximated a normal sexual life.

 

He did become a voyeur par excellence. In the enthusiasm of the time he became an underground film maker (read pornographer) with his hand held Bolex camera. He took up filming at the same time as Andy Warhol. He and Andy became acquaintances.

 

At the time that Andy began to create his Factory populated by an assortment of criminal amphetamine heads Ed did the same. During the late fifties and early sixties New York City was awash in amphetamines at all levels of society. One Dr. Max Jacobson otherwise known as Dr. Feelgood was busy administering massive doses of his amphetamine and vitamin cocktails, himself freely using it nearly on 24/7 basis. At one point he is said to have gone sleepless for thirty straight days.

 

While amphetamine used on that scale is destruction Max said and people believed that the vitamins destroyed the destructive qualities of the drug. Maybe so but within a few years there were burned out cases walking all over NYC.

 

Ed had his own reasons. I make an extensive quote interspersed with commentary. As Ed says the hips called the Village ‘the Set’ as in movie set. As would develop during the decade the notion that one was a mere performer in your own movie became prevalent if not endemic. Anyone’s life was a role. One could do anything without the loss of self-respect. The notion was that when your movie role was over you could revert to your former condition. People went to prison without any idea they were affecting their psychology and subsequent social position. I watched slack jawed.

 

In this passage Ed seems to see himself as a sociologist, pp. 54-55:

 

Another of my projects I called Amphetamine Head…Since 1959 I had been studying a group of artists and bohemians known around the Lower East Side as “A-heads,” amphetamine heads.

 

 

 

In those days people were called ‘heads’ as in he was a good head. A-heads means full time amphetamine freaks, vitamins or no vitamins.

 

 They shot up amphetamine and often stayed up on A for days. Warhol said that he never slept more than two hours a day for years. There were plentiful supplies of amphetamines, sold fairly cheaply, in powder form on the set.

 

Amphetamine was legal at the time.

 

 That fall I began filming Amphetamine Head. I decided to focus on the A-head artists, mainly painters, but there were some poets and jazz musicians as well who could be put under the banner of A. Anyone who lived on the Lower East Side and spent much time mixing with the street culture encountered A-heads. They roamed the streets, bistros, and pads compulsively shooting, or gobbling unearthly amounts of amphetamine, methidrine, dysoxin, bennies, cocaine, procaine- all of this burning for the flash that would to FLASH! It was almost neo-Platonic, as beneath the galactic FLASH! Were subsumed the dime flashes all urging toward FLASH!

 

Everybody from Washington Square to Tompkins Square called the street “the set”- “I’ve been looking for you all over the set, man. Where’s my amphetamine?” With a generation of folks readily present who viewed their lives as taking place on a set, there was no need to hunt afar for actors and actresses. What a cast of characters roamed the Village streets of 1963!

 

So there we have a set of fully blown minds. People who were out of it, insane for all practical purposes, Ginsberg’s ‘best minds of his generation,” running from fix to fix. These were us who back in ‘56 were billed as the hope and future or America with a capital A- no pun intended.

 

 I’d heard rumors about a doctor [Max Jacobson- Dr. Feelgood] giving President Kennedy shots. Uppers. It turned out…that the rumors had a basis in truth. So there was plenty of gossip at the time that the President used amphetamines and that his doctors [actually only Max] injected him every morning. There were further speculations that the generals who met in the Pentagon war room every day planning atomic snuffs were a bit A-bombed themselves.

 

Possibly true. When I was in the Navy in ‘58-’59 bennies were commonly used while the Marine Camp Pendleton was awash with everything heard and unheard of.

 

I was fascinated with an amph-artist named Jim Kolb…I had observed the violence of the amphetamine heads and the raw power grabs that occurred in their glassy eyed universe after a few months of sleeping just twice a week.

 One can compare this to Dylan’s Desolation Row in which he portrays Dr. Filth, that is Andy Warhol, and says:

 

 

 

Now at midnight all the agents

 

And the superhuman crew

 

Come out and round up everyone

 

That knows more than they do

 

Then they bring them to the Factory

 

Where the heart attack machine

 

Is strapped across their shoulders…

 

It was true that Warhol’s A-heads who were strung out on A would emerge from the Factory at midnight and predate on the streets. Dylan who was strung out on A himself would encounter them on the streets where there were undoubtedly stand offs between them and Dylan’s own crew.

 

While at the time we were attributing all kinds of fantastic interpretations to Dylan’s lyrics they can all be explained by what was going on in the Village. As the years progressed the clubs would become more vicious and violent until the apex of club land Studio 54 opened in 1977 giving the diamond glitz to that movie set of violence.

 

It was also commonly accepted on the set that the Germans had invented amphetamines and that the Nazis had shot up amphetamine during campaigns in WWII inspiring tales on the Lower East Side of futuristic battles involving fierce-breathing amphetamine humanoids, babbling shrilly like rewinding tapes, in frays of total blood.

 

It is true that a German did first synthesize A but at the end of the nineteenth century. A was further developed by a Japanese in 1919. In the early thirties Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson a Jewish German put together amphetamine and newly discovered vitamins to make his potent cocktail that he brought to the US in1936. Actually all combatants in WWII hopped up their troops on A, most notably the US and British pilots flying long bombing raids over Germany,

 

The heads also seemed proud that A-use destroyed brain cells. One of the A-heads might shout, “I lose trillions of cells every day, man, grooo-vy!”

 

Amphetamine altered sex. Some under A’s spell waxed unable in eros or sublimated their desire beneath a frenzy of endless conversation or art projects. Others with strong natural urges experienced this: that the erogenous areas became extended under A to include every inch of bodily skin. Men could not easily come, and women loved it forever. The image of amphetamine driven Paolos and Francescas writing for hours on a tattered mattress was humorous but true.

 

The Village has been described as the independent Republic of Bohemia. Certainly within the boundaries of the Set a certain hot house atmosphere prevailed. Ed is representative of that ethos of film makers, artists, musicians and hangers on. Ed was quite famous on the Set developing an opinion of himself quite at variance to what his influence was off the Set.

 

Ed’s attitude toward the A-heads while couched in sociological terms was also somewhat sadistic and perverted. He observed that may of the A-heads became compulsive drawers covering their apartment walls with drawings. Combining the art with his prurient sexual needs Ed conceived the idea of buying four ounces of A for about thirty dollars, renting an apartment then allowing A-heads to shoot up freely on the condition that he be allowed to film them at lovemaking and other activities. Through this approach at what must be considered pornography Ed amassed a couple thousand reels.

 

Unfortunately they were confiscated by the authorities during a raid and never returned. Maybe the CIA studied them in their search for a mind control drug.

 

Time flows along while Ed’s brain was hyper active. The idea of being a poet was paramount at the time. People who thought that they were poets were everywhere. Of course, that meant denying that anyone else was a poet. Heck I even flirted with the notion but realized that I much preferred prose. Ed developed a fair reputation as a poet. He can be seen reciting on videos on the internet. I would say he was a cut above the ordinary however I have little use for poetry.

 

Combining his interests in sex and poetry Ed decided to start a poetry magazine. For whatever reason he may have had he decided to name the magazine Fuck You- A Magazine Of The Arts. Had Ed consulted those with a little market savvy he might have reconsidered. While Fuck You is certainly an attention getter it makes buying it without a brown paper sack or even displaying it in your home a chancy affair. In fact, Ed gave most of them away. A non-Bohemian could go down to Soho for a laugh.

 

Ed was industrious and applied himself. He canvassed the big NYC poetic names and compiled an impressive list of contributors beginning with the arch freak, best mind of his generation, Allen Ginsberg. So, if you’re into poetry especially the sex obsessed Boho kind you would probably like Fuck You. Ed should have started a second magazine titled Fuck You Two.

 

Rapidly moving into retail Ed found a space in the center of things and opened his Peace Eye book store modeled on City Lights in San Francisco that Ed had not yet seen. I was familiar with City Lights and personally I wouldn’t have modeled anything on it. I can’t believe they actually sold enough to pay the rent. Who the hell buys poetry?

 

Ed aggressively promoted his sexual agenda in his Assault On the Culture drawing unwonted attention to himself from the authorities. Time was moving along. The hand on the dial was pointing to 1964. That year was the year of the World’s Fair. As should be obvious the social life on the Set had become fairly raucous and actually offensive to those not on the Set. Mayor Wagner determined it was time to tone things down on the Set lest tourists be offended. On the other hand maybe they would have come downtown to sample the outrageousness.

 

The hounds were on Ed’s trail. He experienced some difficulty as his ‘secret location on the Lower East Side’ was raided, the authorities illegally removing Ed’s precious porn flicks and anything else suspicious looking, naturally that included everything in their eyes. No receipts, no returns. Well! Who wouldn’t be offended? There was little Ed could do about it except try to stay out of jail. That became a struggle. After harassing the bejesus out of him the authorities declined to press charges. All those dirty movies were probably prize enough.

 

For Ed though his Total Assault On The Culture was going swimmingly. The great so-called Free Speech Movement began its course in 1964 on the campus of UC Berkeley in California. This was the turning point of the US group of revolutions. Trained from childhood to believe in revolution, any revolution, was good, Ed and several age cohorts enthusiastically applauded all revolution.

The Sixties As They Were

 

As part of the revolution a thing so small as a possible minute change in a detergent was described as a revolutionary new product. The idea of revolution as a positive thing was everywhere. It filled people’s minds. After the revolution, so to speak, occurring in the sixties commercial products shifted from revolutionary to ‘new and improved.’ The revolution was over; no new ones were to be entertained. Today detergents are just detergents, no need even for anything new and improved.

 

Ed’s description of his own revolutionary program was ‘a total assault on the culture.’ The Negro revolution well in progress of which Ed was part was a total assault on the culture; the Jewish revolution to which Ed was sympathetic was brought into focus by the so-called Free Speech Movement of which it was the leading edge. The sexual revolution encompassed both the Homosexual revo and women’s lib both of which fit into Ed’s total assault and he backed the Yobbo revo.

 

None of these revolutions could have taken place as they did without the US constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly etc.. Indeed Ed ingenuously celebrates that freedom, without which all other freedoms are meaningless, explaining that he was making unlimited use of it.

 

That he and the Negroes, Jews and others were able to do so was because all Americans believed in freedom of speech. Sharing that belief was to cause me all sorts of problems. Even though the concept was being stretched to the breaking point, that is turned against itself, the mantra at the time was ‘ I may disagree with what you say but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it! You don’t hear that mantra anymore; now you hear ‘Words can kill’ or hurtful things should be censored as they are so offensive. We are post-revolutions.

 

Ed himself began to become bitter when it slowly dawned on the government that indeed a violent assault on the government was taking place. At that point security agencies such as the FBI and CIA began serious surveillance. After all at the same time all these revolutions were taking place domestically we were becoming totally committed to the war against Communist Viet Nam. Ed claims to have been a socialist so that the backed that subversion too.

 

Since he vocally proclaimed his position in Fuck You Magazine, the name itself was intended to enrage, it can easily be understood why the authorities placed him on their list of desperadoes. It just seemed like fun at the time but it was more serious than we thought.

 

Obviously freedom of speech was no more threatened in 1964 than it ever had been, perhaps less. The lines between the various thems and us had just been drawn. The revolutionaries meant to deny freedom speech to the other, or bury it, as in these latter days has been nearly done.

 

Indeed in 1960 when I was attending Oakland (Calif.) City College anti-free speech limitations were in use by Liberals. We were forbidden to even mention let alone discuss what have become ‘protected’ minorities today. Crimes were committed in the name of what is now called diversity. In one class I had the misfortune to be sitting next to a Negro. A test paper came back on which I got a C while I noticed the Negro got a B. Then I noticed my score was a 78 while the Negroe’s was a 64. I objected saying I didn’t care if he got a B or not no matter what his score but since I had a higher score I should have an A or at the very least a B.

 

In full arrogance the teacher said he had only so many Bs to give out and since I had been the recipient of White Skin Privilege it was the Negroes turn and I would have to pay the debt. So obviously the revolution was prepared to lie, cheat and steal to succeed no matter who or how many get hurt.

 

Ed may have bought into that revolution and freedom crap as taught in schools but I obviously would have to be a counterrevolutionary.

 

So while Ed, absent from the scene, applauded the Berkeley Free Speech Movement I was on the spot viewing things somewhat differently. As I said the Free Speech Movement was part of the Jewish Revolution. There was no denial of free speech at UC before 1964 but by 1966 when the dust had settled the Jews were in control of the university and free speech was definitely curtailed.

 

As I entered the campus at Sather Gate in the summer of ‘66 a Jewish commissar sat at a table just inside the gate where we were to be vetted as to our politics which meant were we philo-semitic or not. Obviously one was not welcome if it was determined that one was ‘reactionary.’

 

Whatever Ed believed he was doing it was neither revolutionary in a positive sense nor was it furthering freedom of speech.

 

 

 

 

 

Into The Music

Sanders, Kupferbert, Weaver- The Core Of The Fugs

Busying himself with his poetry, at which he was very successful as poetry goes, and running his Peace Eye bookstore, Ed conceived the idea of forming a musical group and why not? Musical groups were the generation’s mode of expression. This one he would give the most offensive name he could think of, The Fugs. The Fugs! Everyone in the world knew that fug was a euphemism for fuck. The ’comedian’ Redd Foxx had a punch line that went ’if you can’t fugg your can sugg it.’ So Ed calls his group the Village Fucks. Alright. So we know where that’s at. Nevertheless this low level pornography would get him national exposure. It even got his picture on the cover of Life Magazine in 1967 as part of the world wide cultural revolution. The Total Assault was working. He came to my attention out on the West Coast.

 

Ed thought of forming the Fugs interestingly enough at the same time that Andy Warhol had the idea and adopted the Velvet Underground as his house band. Both were influenced by Albert Grossman’s success in promoting Peter Paul And Mary and Bob Dylan. PP&M were already a big success in 1964 making barrels of money so why not go for the golden ring?

 

From 1964 to ’67 Ed and his Fugs scored a major success within the Set. After a fashion the Fugs became a sort of cabaret or burlesque act somewhat after the fashion of the theatre in the French movie The Children of Paradise. That movie served as the East Village model. The Great Boogie Woogie Dylan himself would imitate it in his film ’Masked And Anonymous’. A slight redundancy as to be masked is to make oneself anonymous. Bob was a poet.

Players Theatre, Café Wha? In Basement

 

As a sort of off Broadway act at the Players Theatre on the heart of Bleecker Street the Fugs may have appeared to be giving Dylan and the whole folk scene a run for their money. Café Society that was finding its way to Warhol’s Factory midtown also called on the Fugs at their theatre dropping back stage to pay their regards. Heady stuff, and I’m not being sarcastic.

 

At the same time Ed was negotiating with major labels Atlantic and Reprise. He was already on the local label ESP but that was run by a less than astute businessman. Terrific catalog of records though, perhaps the most interesting label in existence on many levels. The two major labels were soon to be subsumed under the Warner Bros umbrella. Atlantic fearing that Ed’s content might block its chance to be acquired by Warner’s dropped the group but they were picked up by Reprise. Reprise was owned by Frank Sinatra. When label Pres. Mo Ostin presented the deal for Sinatra’s approval Frank remarked sarcastically “I guess you know what you’re doing.” Frank hopped on the wave of the future as he rode the rock surf board into shore. Mo didn’t know that much as the Fugs were much less than a stellar act for them.

 

As 1967 ended then Ed and his band seemed poised for the major break through. However the year 1967 was unfortunate in being followed by the year 1968; the year of the Big Change. Ed’s total assault on the culture would be a success but he would be left behind.

 

It was a long way from 1960 when the decade began to 1968 just a year before the whole decade crashed at Altamont. The Snark the 60s pursued was a boojum you see.

 

Nineteen sixty eight was the year China stepped center stage with its and the world’s Cultural Revolution. Didn’t seem terrifying on this side of the Pacific but it sure was in retrospect. Ed might have thought that his Total Assault On The Culture was a success but he seems to have missed the year’s impact. The ethos that had carried he and his Fugs from ’62 to ’68 was exhausted. The year would see the shootings of Andy Warhol, M.L. King and Bobby Kennedy. Only Warhol would survive and that only through the miracle of modern medicine. Andy was actually brought back from the dead living on borrowed time for another twenty years.

 

The death of Bobby Kennedy killed Ed’s spirit while the course of events had grown far beyond his ability to deal with.

 

The Fugs had done well in the hothouse atmosphere of the Lower East Side but Ed was to find that that success couldn’t be exported from Bohemia. Even if the group succeeded in playing a venue they were frequently advised that it would be dangerous for them to try again.

 

Perhaps this was nowhere more obvious than when the Fugs were booked into the college town of Eugene, Oregon on May 4^th of 1968. That was the day the revos went over the top in Paris. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year Mao kicked off the worldwide Cultural Revolution. The Chinese even financed the revolution in the small college town of Eugene, the home of the UofO. The Hippie invasion that Ed also represented had erupted, in the Eugenians’ eyes leaving then on a sharp knife edge of anxiety when the Maoists arrived. Wait, we’re not finished yet. In addition to those irritants there was the invasion of the SDSers, Students For A Democratic Society led by New York City Jews in denims who hit town like a small tsunami adding to the disruption.

 

As if the phony Free Speech Movement hadn’t been enough, the arrival of the phony Students for a Democratic Society added insult to injury. We all, at least myself, believed we had freedom of speech in a democratic society but then along came these freaks redefining terms. Got away with it too.

 

Eugene’s home grown hippie ’cancer’ that wouldn’t go away was a record store by the name of Chrystalship. You are free to guess who owned it. That’s right, me. I am not now ever was a revolutionary or even a Liberal, discontented but no revo, card holding or not. I just wanted to get to Paris in some style. As it was the town fathers determined that I was behind everything. I almost had my own personal FBI agent. I was followed, my mail was opened, phone tapped and had my shipments illegally searched with no attempt to conceal what they were doing and no recourse. Some democracy.

 

Even they couldn’t stop the Cultural Revolution or keep the SDSers out of town but they sure as hell weren’t going to let some pornographic group with the name of Fugs, short for Fucks, play in town. Mao was one thing, Ed Sanders was another.

 

On May 2^nd the door was slammed shut in Eugene, the venue denied. Acting quickly the promoters found a spot twenty miles out of town in the still smaller village of Creswell. A phone call scuttled that plan. At that we ticket holders thought the jig was up but, not so. A secret location on the east side of town was found that was so secret I’m sure that half the ticket holders couldn’t find it and gave up.

 

Ed’s memory is fairly clear on this. I’m comparing his notes with mine to reconstruct the scene as accurately as possible. About ten miles to the South of Eugene, maybe a few miles further, was a new motel, fairly glitzy for Eugene, maybe built by drug money, named The Lemon Tree. Obviously the owners were Peter Paul and Mary fans because there were no lemon trees in Oregon. Ed remembers playing at the motel but I respectfully disagree with him. He stayed there but he didn’t play there.

 

I honestly can’t say where the place he played was except that it was out in the country turn right here turn left there and when you got there you couldn’t be sure that was it plus there was only a fifty-fifty chance you could find your way back to the highway in the dark. Once arrived you drove over a cow pasture out to this largish barn and parked in the high grass.

 

There were no lights in the barn except for a couple spots jury rigged over the stage, if there was a stage, hard to see in the dark. For some reason there were actual bleachers three or four tiers high arranged against the back wall. All fifteen attendees strung out on the benches in the dark. We could barely see each other. I held on tight to my wife so that we didn’t separated and have to stumble around trying to find each other. ’Hello, over there, over here.’

 

Way across the barn on the opposite wall was this stage faintly illuminated on which the band would and did stand. Thus, unless we made some noise the Fugs had no way of knowing that they were not playing to an empty barn. We were forbidden to get any closer, nor did we know whose hands we were in. Could have been plain clothes cops for all we knew.

 

So, away over there the Fugs stepped up to the microphone. They were a mangy looking group, voluntary poverty was in evidence. As a child were asked to pray for the poor heathen Chinese before dinner but we should have been praying for our poor heathen selves. The Chinese are doing OK. But Ed and the boys could sing joyfully in their rags. At the time we thought they were trying to be as far out as possible. They weren’t doing a bad job. Tuli Kupferberg, the absolute weirdest of the lot, Tuli had mastered weird, and remember we in the audience had nothing to brag about, was playing an eight foot long staff. It had six or seven clatter devices on it so he could keep a semblance of a beat. He lifted it up and slammed it into the ground to some effect. Beyond that I can’t even remember if they played Ah, Sunflower Weary Of Time or Boobs A Lot, Slum Goddess Of The Lower East Side which is what I came for. I may have been the only one of the Eugene Fifteen who had ever heard the Fugs on record. I sure as hell hadn’t been able to sell any.

 

When the concert ended we tripped and stumbled out of the barn, hopped in our cars and hoped the hell we could find our way back to I5. The concert was the high point of my concert going career. It was what one calls an adventure. I have relived it over in my imagination many times over the years. An evergreen if there ever was one. Ed recalled it in his pages with good reason. It was a turning point in his career.

 

Ed tells it this way, page 312:

 

We flew up to Portland, Oregon, May 3 after our fun in LA for a gig there and the next day drove to Eugene, the very day protesting students were occupying the streets of Paris. We played a club called the Lemon Tree next to a beaver pond. Before the performance I walked out to the water’s edge, where I experienced a great transmission of peace. I had to go back in my mind to the lakes of my Missouri youth or Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Peace In The Valley”, which helped me through the grief from my mother’s death in ‘57, to find much consolation as I had during those moments. The beaver pond by the Lemon Tree was the best time for me in ‘68.

 

That wasn’t a beaver pond Ed. That was an artificial pond the owners dug to glitz up their motel. It was situated between the motel and I5. There hadn’t been a beaver in those parts since John Jacob Astor founded Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. If there had been it would have been killed as a nuisance. Beaver’s chew down saplings Of course saplings spring up all by themselves by the millions but we don’t want no beaver felling even one.

 

My memory could be wavering but I think that on the way out from the barn I saw Ed after the concert squatting beside the pond. I’m sure he must have been crushed by that bizarre performance to a seemingly empty barn. It had to have been hard after four years of very hard work. It appears that he did have an epiphany of some kind. If he had known he was going to be playing to fifteen people he couldn’t see in a dilapidated barn I’m sure he would have thought of retiring and he did then. As his mind was made up to end the Fugs at the beginning of ‘69 I suspect that that dismal concert set his mind on the track.

 

Well, Ed, I really enjoyed the show.

 

 

 

 

 

It Is Impossible To See Where You Are

 

When You’re There

 

While Ed was living his life time was passing and circumstances were changing. When Ed began the Fugs in 1964 what he was doing was fitted to the time and was possible. By the end of 1968 when he determined to end the group he was still acting on his 1964 impulse while by 1969 he would have had to adjust to new conditions. Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues and a host of other bands were more contemporary than the Fugs. The Fugs were old hat.

 

Even Ed’s solo album, Sander’s Truck Stop, of ‘69 was a stale joke. I thought it was OK myself and I liked his second effort Beer Cans On The Moon but they also were out of time. Ed and his Fugs were part and parcel of the Sixties. A very few if any of the Sixties groups made it into the seventies and those that did reinvented themselves. The Jefferson Airplane became the Starship. Other split off and went solo. Donovan just evaporated although he was as talented in the seventies as before.

 

The Rolling Stones adapted despite themselves. When their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham sold them out to Allen Klein it may have been their saving. With Klein in control of their outdated sixties output the Stones were forced to change. Jagger found a financial manager in Rupert Loewenstein who turned them into a prosperous stage act, sort of performance art, cabaret or burlesque, along the lines of Yoko On or Andy Warhol or even the Fugs. Jagger certainly saw the Fugs on Bleecker and may have picked up an idea or two. They were able to successfully adapt their musical style to the seventies.

 

As a Sixties group Ed and the Fugs were finished. You can never go home again; when they left the East Side to assault the culture of the entire United States their East Side base was destroyed.

 

Out in the real world what were record stores supposed to do with a band called the Fugs and a record titled It Crawled Into My Hand Honest? Ed was a vaudeville act, soft porn, how could a store recommend stuff like that to the underage person who formed a large part of the business? Who wanted to bring the law down on themselves. Couldn’t be done. Hell, The Rolling Stones nearly got me clubbed down with their sado-masochistic cover for their record Black And Blue, as in welts and bruises. It got ugly in the seventies, post Stonewall.

 

Ed closed up shop and returned to civilian life. Civilian life had changed a great deal too. A lot social errors were accruing. The generation hadn’t done such a great job. The influx of Puerto Ricans and Negroes into the Bronx combined with the efflorescence of hard drugs, heroin, was turning the Bronx into a hell hole or worse; even an abandoned hell hole as the turmoil drove peaceable citizens out. And then they burned it down. Ed even left to move to the Lower East Side. Even there things were turning violent. The streets were no longer safe. Near Ed’s apartment a well known Hippie couple around the Set were murdered in a basement, the girl after being raped repeatedly. The perp was a Negro living upstairs from them. He felt obligated to commit the crime because of his religion which was described as the Yoruba religion.

 

Probably not one in a thousand knew who the Yorubas were and that they migrated from Nigeria in Africa and that their so-called Yoruba religion was actually a form of Voodoo called Santeria. Santeria was popular with Negroes and some Whites along the entire Eastern Seaboard yet few knew of it then and few do today.

 

Ed had moved from the Bronx to the Lower East Side and from there to the West Village where he was greeted with another double murder outside his front door. Where next? Where any reasonable person would go. Ed moved to the country and painted his mailbox blue, up in Woodstock, the feudal estate of Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. And then the Tate-La Bianca murders occurred out West in LA. Ed decided to investigate Charlie Manson and his Family. Write a book.

 

Actually the murder of the Hippie couple by the Voodoo killer on Ed’s former block was as horrific as the Tate-La Bianca killings but no one had ever heard of the dead Hippies on the Set and if they had they wouldn’t have cared.

 

So Ed went West where he stayed a couple years pretty thoroughly investigating Charlie’s shenanigans. He did a good job of it too. Of course he had to pull his punches somewhat to avoid lawsuits but he apparently lowered his guard at the wrong time. Some Satanist group called the Process Church Of The Final Judgment, these were apocalyptic times, not wishing the truth of their organization to surface threatened legal action on the publisher. They gutted Ed’s book. It was probably a publicity stunt as the Process made no objection to the English edition.

 

At this point in Ed’s memoir he folded his tent and quietly slipped away remarking only that all his Fugs tapes and artefacts lay neglected in boxes for the next fifteen years until the Hippie romantic revival began.

 

Ed had created a legacy of sorts, intellectual properties, that he could exploit after 1985. So he was restored to some significance in the aftermath.

 

Ed does not let grass grow under his feet however. When he wearied of running a rock group he returned to his scholarly roots as so many of us did when the Sixties vanished into thin air. He did have a solid education in the Classics. Since then he has written extensively although with the same level of popularity as the Fugs.

 

However no matter how audacious a nine volume history of the United States in verse- in verse!- may be, epic poetry of that kind has a very low threshhold of sales. I’m sorry Ed, I’d like to but I’m just not going to do it, I’m not going to read American history in verse, especially not a socialist interpretation.

 

 

 

Social Redemption And The Fugs
 

So forty years on Ed tells all. I’ve read the book twice now while I’ll read it at least a third time. Many of the nuances pass over one’s head the first and even the second time. Ed has a direct style as though one on one and as an document explaining a part of the Sixties the book is essential. Presented in a chronological form probably patterned after Andy Warhol’s Popism: The Warhol Sixties Ed avoids any intellectual pretensions laying things out as they were street level. Deceptively simple as they say. Well worth picking up if you have a love affair with the Sixties going, or are a student of the times. An essential document as I said.

 

But what were the results of Ed’s ‘total assault on the culture?’ Of course Ed was only part of the assault which was endemic to the time. Everyone had been reared on the notion of romanticized revolution and unrestricted freedom. Warhol was a key figure on the Lower East Side, although midtown and uptown himself, as was Jonas Mekas of the underground cinematheque. The filmmakers impact would have been nil without Mekas. I can only tolerate underground stuff because I’m a dedicated scholar. Kenneth Anger may have been the best of the lot and that is not saying much. Still, there are believers and so much of the corpus is stored at MOMA.

 

Drugs have turned into a way of life a la Brave New World although others than Ed were responsible for that. Today it’s not do you use drugs but which drugs do you use. Ed’s fixation on sex has developed as he would have liked. There are few mainstream Hollywood films produced today without an obligatory fuck scene within the first ten minutes, full frontal nudity female and male with fellatio and cunnilingus scattered here and there. Homosexual and Lesbian movies are readily available for the interested and show on TV. On that level Ed’s assault was a total success.

 

Plus there are forty or fifty thousand reported female rapes a year. Gangs of youths roam the streets practicing their game of knockout king; that is sucker punching pedestrians seriously injuring many and killing not a few. Huge riots take place at fair grounds where wild youths exercise their freedom by assaulting fair goers. The police make little effort to curtail their activities. So some people are exercising their total freedom at the cost of others.

 

We have a socialist redistributor of wealth, also a Negro, as our president so all that marching down South Ed participated in paid off handsomely.

 

In addition his oppressed Negroes are now in control of some pretty impressive real estate where they are so oppressive that White people run screaming for the suburbs Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Montgomery, Atlanta, Philly, half of New Jersey and beginning November 5, 2013 New York City are Negro towns as well as many many more not to exclude the capitol of the Confederacy itself, Richmond, Virginia. So, Ed gets an A+ for his efforts there.

 

And of course homosexuality is a ‘protected’ activity in which they have obtained the right to teach pederasty to kindergartners in public schools. Also any girl a virgin past fourteen or sixteen at the latest is considered a freak who had better get promiscuous or else.

 

Over all, I would say Ed’s total assault on the culture has been a roaring success. There are some though, myself included, who consider Ed’s success a crime against humanity. Illiteracy is on the rise, diseases once though eradicated are returning with a vengeance. Bedbugs, once thought eradicated have returned with a thump infesting half the country with solid prospects of infesting the rest.

 

Well, nobody’s perfect. I’m sure Ed sits back, Guiness in hand, smiling to himself and thinking job well done. Well, handsome is as handsome does as my old high school teacher used to say.

 

And then that other guy said: If you can’t fugg it, sugg it.