Part V: Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Yobbo Revolution

Mick Jagger The Rolling Stones

And The Yobbo Revolution

Part V

by

R.E. Prindle

Rolling Stones- Brian Up Front

 

…they’re just war babies with the bell bottom blues.

==Robert Christgau

Along about 1968 Jagger among the Stones, at least, became disenchanted with his and their new manager Allen B. Klein of notorious fame.

By 1968, counting 1963 as the beginning of their labors the Stones had been working hard.  Jagger and Richards had emerged as successful songwriters giving them a financial advantage over fellow stones, Jones, Wyman and Watts.  By that time the band was said to have earned millions  but had virtually nothing to show for it except for a heroin habit and several cases of VD.  When one says heroin habit one reduces disposable income considerably.

The Stones last effort Their Satanic Majesties Request seemed to indicate a loss of direction.  Their initial impetus had been expended.  The impetus that began in 1963 had then played out.  The good part of the Sixties was over and the bad part had begun with the ’66 release of the Doors first album containing the appropriately named song The End.  The Rock scene had turned dark while turning the volume up.

The Stones knew dark so they quickly reinvented themselves as a Dark band turning out Beggar’s Banquet in 1968.  Out there on the buying end of rock and roll I groaned.  The new Stones were born as the Hounds of Hell emerging from a drug fueled Freudian unconscious.  Just what the world didn’t need.

Rolling Stones- Brian Odd Man Out

 

While Jagger and Richards engaged the world with their follies the other three members had to suffer enduring the ignominy in silence.  Richards would go on to astound the world with his drug offenses.  While Jagger himself descended into darkness as a Satanist carrying his inamorata Marianne Faithfull along with him.

While both deny other than a titillating passing interest in Satanism the facts imply a more serious involvement.

These years that should have been bright were the beginning of dark times, darker than the Communo-Nazi era for the world.  Deny it if he can, Jagger was a leader on the downward path.

Undeniably the Fifties and Sixties were a trying period but which decade of the century hadn’t been?  Fear of both Communism and the A-Bomb, not to mention the Neutron Bomb, kept people tense.  There was a disturbing lack of balance in which TV, newspapers, and magazines presented developments.  Nevertheless the beginning of the post-war period was one of astounding advances in knowledge both in Science and the Liberal Arts.  Huge layers of ignorance were sheared away.  For instance the knowledge of geological tectonic plates that demonstrated how the planet evolved was, shall I say, earth shaking.

In 1950 the highest an object had been was measured in feet; the atmosphere hadn’t been penetrated.  Seven years later the Soviets put the Sputnik in orbit.  Telstar went up in July 1962 to tremendous astonishment and acclaim opening the way to the future and the fabulous prosperity of the late Sixties and the Seventies.

Medicine cured syphilis and all venereal diseases, killing and disabling diseases were gone and even TB and polio were ended.  At the beginning of the Fifties a child had to ponder being debilitated by both as a probable occurrence.  The diet was improved immensely and made more varied.  But, as life improved the psyche grew darker, dissatisfaction with virtual perfection was endemic.  Murder and crime increased dramatically.  Charlie Whiteman in his UT tower, Richard Speck’s ritual murder of the Chicago nurses.  While the good genie let many good things out the bottle at the same time a cloud of darkness followed.  The country chose to embrace the darkness rather than the light.

During the Sixties Satanism was on the rise.  We all know there is no existing entity called Satan but Satanism is a fact of the psyche.  First truly released by Freud in 1900 Satanism had been emerging as a social force.  A 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked the question Is God Dead?  This sparked a fair controversy at the time.  That same year, less conspicuously and metaphorically saw the birth of the Son of Satan, Andy, in the book Rosemary’s Baby by the Jew Ira Levin followed by the movie of the same name directed by the Jew Roman Polanski.  Rosemary’s Baby was followed by a spate of Satanic novels and movies.  The shift from God’s Son, Jesus, to Andy was quite noticeable but we were slow to comprehend.

Andrew- Two Fingers, Middle Finger and Lifted Eye Brow?

 

The Satanic movement had been building since the middle of the nineteenth century when the Frenchman, Eliphas Levy, reorganized the occult along modern lines.  The Golden Dawn brought Satanism into prominence in the English speaking world.  The Golden Dawn was captured by the pervert Aleister Crowley who guided Satanism through the first half of the century.  He died in 1946.  A druggie and sex fiend, his sex magic in the Sixties was joined by that of the Jewish sex madman, Wilhelm Reich, also a notable Freudian.  Reich had even had his books burned by the US government but like a phoenix his sexual ideas rose from the flames during the Sixties.  ( See the movie WR, The Mysteries Of The Organism, read organism as Orgasm.  This movie is not for the weak of mind.)

The magical crowd had coalesced in the beginning of the Sixties.  In England it was led by the Satanic Process Church that emigrated to the US, LA based, and back to England.  In the US the chief Satanist was the San Francisco based Anton Lavey with his acolyte in Los Angeles, Kenneth Anger.  It is to be noted that the sex magician Charles Manson was associated with all these people in one form or another.

Jagger and his consort Marianne Faithfull were drawn into the flames through their friend in London, Groovy Bob Fraser who seemed to be the clearing house for all strange in London.  He introduced Mick and Marianne to Kenneth Anger while they found their own way to the Process Church. Mick was recruited by the Crowleyian Satanist and filmmaker Donald Cammell.  Cammell’s father had been a Crowleyian having writing a biography of him.  Cammell’s mind thus had been corrupted from childhood.

Cammell starred Jagger and Keith’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg in his ’68 movie Performance.  Pallenberg was a long gone cutie deeper into Satanism than probably anyone in the crew. 

Mick had become acquainted with the fashion photographer David Bailey in late ’62 or early ’63.  Anthony Burgess published his Satanic novel A Clockwork Orang in 1962.

In ’62 and ’63 Jagger was a nobody, a student at the London School of Economics while doubling as frontman for the unknown Rolling Stones, or Rollin’ for the purists.  The two apparently bonded on sight as the two bought the movie rights to A Clockwork Orange.  This strange situation has never been explored.  As far as we know Mick had no money or anything really to recommend him to Bailey who was a very successful photographer and the model for Fellini’s movie Blowup.  Yet while a student and singer for a grungy R&B band Bailey took him under his wing, or perhaps Andrew Loog Oldham that inveterate man about town introduced himself to Bailey, then introduced Bailey to Mick with whom he was palling.  It would seem that Andrew first discovered A Clockwork Orange in mid-62 talking it up with Bailey and Mick.  Andrew and Bailey saw Mick as the hero of the book, Alex, leader of his band called The Droogs.  The idea of the Droogs exerted a fascination over the minds of Andrew, Bailey and Mick and through Bailey and Mick the Warhol crowd of NYC.  As a photog for English Vogue Bailey would have had an intro to New York and the American Vogue.

For those who aren’t aware, Vogue Magazine is a huge global presence.  There are many ‘local’ editions of the magazine published for Germany, France, Russia, Italy and even Japan.  It is really extraordinary.  I subscribe to the English edition and buy Italian, Parisian, German and the occasional Japanese copy from a news dealer in my own city.  Globalism takes on a real meaning.

In reading Stone’s histories there is no mention of Jagger being absent from London in 1963 but Bailey scooped him up and took him to New York, presumably at his own expense or perhaps that of Vogue to shop for a movie maker for their book.   Bailey who was very up on things may have thought that Andy Warhol would be interested; in fact Warhol did make a movie that purports to be based on Clockwork Orange but you couldn’t prove it by me.  But, in 1963 Warhol was not yet that famous or his vacuous movies.  Bailey must have had his nose to the ground with the sensitivity of a bloodhound.  Where Mick got the money for his share of the rights and trip to what is now known as The Big Bagel isn’t clear.

In New York Mick met the Dark, if not Satanist, Andy Warhol with whom he banded as quickly and tightly as he had Bailey.  Because of this the Stones would always be big in the Village.

Interestingly Mick’s girlfriend during this period was Bailey’s top model Jean  Shrimpton’s sister, Chrissie Shrimpton.

Things fell out, Mick gravitated to the adultress, Marianne Faithfull.  The two were arrested at the famous drug bust at Keith’s Redlands in 1967.

Apparently Mick et al. thought they were immune to the laws and mores of the time concerning drugs so that Mick took the arrest and subsequent conviction as a grievous insult.  It confirmed and hardened his devotion to Satan while solidifying his revolutionary aims.  He thought the ‘kids’ would be able to bring down the State.

Thus in 1967 they recorded and released the record album titled Their Satanic Majesties Request.  Smarting horribly- for all practical purposes Marianne’s life was ruined.  In combination with a succession of injurious events that would follow, Marianne’s psyche would never recover.  She had been holding the burning match to see how close to her fingers it got before she was burned, she now knew. 

Still in reaction to the arrest, following Satanic Majesties, Mick decided to make a film.  This became the long lost Rock And Roll Circus.  The movie only has historical significance as it was never released at the time.  Rights were held by Allen Klein so after his death in 2009, under his son Jody’s direction ABKCO released it for the first time.  Psychologically it places where Mick was in 1968.

The American Satanist Kenneth Anger had a huge shoulder to shoulder tattoo of the name L-U-C-I-F-E-R on his chest to show his dedication to the Commander In Chief.  At the end of Rock And Roll Circus as the band plays Sympathy For The Devil we see Mick groveling on the stage as though to the Master.  He wiggles out of his shirt rising to his knees to display a Lucifer tattoo on his bare chest.  Whether real or a transfer isn’t clear.  I hope the latter.

In 1968, at least, Jagger had dedicated himself to Satan.  While Marianne has since repudiated Satanism claiming the fascination was a passing fancy it seems clearly to have been more than that.

That aside, to be borne in mind as we move along.  Mick, who is no dummy, had been quickly learning the ropes of the record business since his introduction in 1963.  As he wasn’t getting enough money to indulge his fantasies, finances became his chief concern.

The Stones were first managed and promoted by the nineteen year old Andrew Loog Oldham.  Oldham was the right man to put the Stones on the road.  Unfortunately for himself Andrew was at the flighty if not to say flaky stage of life so that he found it expedient to sign the Stones to the American desperado or operator, Allen Klein.  Klein was the big talking type so endemic to the industry who promised the moon while actually being able to pry money from the labels not that much ever got back to the artists.  While first being pleased with Klein’s services getting money out of him was a problem so that Jagger quickly became disaffected with him.  In 1968 he began the search for a money man who would work in the Stones’ interests.

This was a critical period for Jagger and the band.  Their first rush of creativity ended about 1966 as the songwriters went dry and the band quit touring.  The transition from the sixties to the seventies actively took place between ’66 and ’67.  In fact that was the Sixties, the rest of the decade was a long slow fade. The artists most identified with the sixties didn’t make the transition to the seventies and beyond.  The Stones before ’68’s Beggar’s Banquet were a quintessential 60s’ band.  Beggar’s Banquet eased them toward the seventies.

So at this transitional period that must have been cause for great anxiety the band had little to show for their sixties output other than a certain notoriety that was however global and second only to the Beatles.

In his search for a money man Jagger asked his friend Chrissie Gibbs for his help.  Gibbs was a central figure in the Groovy Bob Fraser circle.  Fraser’s place was a central gathering place for the crowd including the American Satanist Kenneth Anger and the Warhol crowd.

Fraser himself was an art dealer who associated himself with the upcoming Pop Art Movement.  Thus he was the center of all that was hip and modern.

Gibbs knew of an investment banker by the name of Prince Rupert Loewenstein.  Rupert was an actual hereditary Prince who prefaced his name with that title.  According to Rupert’s memoirs, A Prince Among Stones, Rupert knew Gibbs in only the most casual manner, Gibbs was not exactly a member of the aristocracy as he is presented.

Rupert is a bit of an enigma.  He says, in his memoir, that he had never heard of the Stones when Gibbs mentioned them.  In the context of the times the Stones were rock musicians who are as a class not welcome in polite society and even some not so polite society, yet Rupert said to this very casual acquaintance that he would look into it.  Then, as he tells it, he learned who or what the Rolling Stones were and that all three principals of the group had been arrested on drug charges a year earlier along with Robert Fraser the art dealer and a true member of the aristocracy although now declasse.  Rupert even says that he agreed wholeheartedly with the judge.

Just as a point of reference, when I opened my record shop in 1967 the insurance agents would not even sell me insurance while the AAA agent cancelled my auto insurance.  I could obtain no amenities and only grudgingly services.  So, it is extremely strange that Rupert knowing the actual unsavory history of the Stones jeopardized his standing in respectable circles in the City and society to associate himself with them.  And I mean associate, he actually toured with the band.  If he didn’t know the kind of people he was with he certainly learned then.

Now, no one associated with rock and roll had any social standing especially the Stones as the bad boys of rock.  Then all the creeps and drug dealers who being around the record scene especially attached themselves to the Stones and believe me that crowd was well beyond unsavory.  Robert Greenfield’s book S.T.P. will give you some examples but the flavor of these people doesn’t come through in print.

As I read Rupert’s autobiography, he died a year or so ago, I find a distaste for Stones from beginning to end.  Even the title of his memoir, A Prince Among Stones, is a put down of the Stones.  Rupert obviously disdained the Stones.  So, one asks why he would choose to represent them?  And that’s only the beginning of the mystery.

Having accepted the assignment as they used to say on Mission Impossible he had to familiarize himself with bushels of documents and assorted records.  Before he could even confront Klein he had to spend a year trying to understand the documentation.  Klein was a tough cookie who didn’t play by any rules.  You grappled with him.  I’m not sure that the Stones to this day know what Rupert did for them.

Here’s the point:  The Stones are said to have no money with which to pay him, we are told that they were stone broke.  Didn’t mean that they didn’t have a great stash but, you know, they were broke.  This was a serious time for the band.  Get this:  Rupert worked three years gratis with no guarantee of ever making a dime.  That any of us should have luck of that kind.  Further he learned that there was no way the Stones were going to get any money out of Klein without very expensive litigation.  But, there were exceptions as we shall see.  The Stones entire career from 1963 to the end of the contract in 1971 that Andrew had saddled them with belonged to Klein.  Never fire your manager when he holds your life in his hands.

Any career they would have to make money would begin in 1971.  The intellectual properties Jagger and Richards’ had created would provide them with an income apart from the band although the publishing was sold to Klein by Andrew.  But the full intellectual properties would begin only with Exile On Main Street.    And of course by then the big boom in record sales was underway.  Even at the end of the sixties the record business was small potatoes.  The stadium era was on the horizon.

From Rupert’s point of view the only real potential for money for him would come from the Stones’ touring.  The Stones would do some non-stop touring beginning in 1971.  The ’69 US tour was Rupert’s introductory tour during which he learned how inefficient and criminal touring was..

Until Rupert reorganized touring, the road had not been profitable for the Stones.  No money at all.   So Rupert began his management career on the off chance that the Stones would stay together, actually a fairly long shot, and he could mount some extravaganzas and monitor expense to make the road profitable.  Little he knew that he was catching the really big one.

If you sit and think about this a little it will blow your mind the chances that Rupert was taking especially with a heroin addict of the status as Keith.  I mean we’re talking the Master of Flake with Keith- no offense intended.  The man blew millions that Rupert was setting up in recording contracts when Keith was arrested with a jug of heroin in Toronto.  Keith was not in this alone, there were three other Stones plus Mick as well as Rupert who had bet his life on the Stones.  Can you imagine how crushed Rupert was when he had to call all the bidders and advise them of Keith’s gaffe.  Keith cost Rupert a couple million too.

This is amazing, the pre-’68 money had been so badly managed that the Stones owed more tax money that it appeared that the band could ever pay off; especially when every new dollar would be taxed at ninety percent.  What were the Brits thinking?  As I understand it the Stones have never paid the debt off, or tried.  So Rupert compelled them to leave England for a more tax friendly climate.  As we are repeatedly told they were broke one wonders how they expected to finance their life in France.  Mick and Keith were OK because as Robert Greenfield tells us in his book Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones On The Road To Exile just before the Stones left England Klein sent Mick and Keith each a check for 800 and some odd thousand dollars.  That is nearly a million each.  I don’t know whether BMI paid royalties quarterly or half yearly but Mick and Keith should have gotten a check of comparable size quarterly, semi-annually or annually.  For the next decade or two probably double that.  No sympathy here.

Wyman and Watts both bought handsome residences on the Riviera so one wonders where that money came from while Exile was being recorded.  They settled on the Riviera where they spent a fortune recording Exile On Main Street.  Over half a million dollars.  And while Exile sold well still only over seven hundred and some thousand copies on its first release; not enough copies to surpass recording costs so they received nothing for the LP initially.  Still Rupert hung in there, drug stories or no.

As the only hope for the Stones to make money, apart from intellectual right for Mick and Keith, was touring and thereby justify Rupert’s decision to throw in his lot with them Rupert set about to make touring as profitable as possible.  He was in for some surprises as he had to come into contact with the Underworld, Mafia to you and me.  I don’t see how he or they ever thought that there would be the truly big money of the last tours especially in North America but luck and the times were with him and them.

The Stones, about whom hung an air of vulgarity, were never a top selling recording band, mediocre at best but Jagger was a top performance artist while Keith was and is revered as a guitarist and personality.  The nature of the tour also evolved so that under the guidance of Rupert major companies such as Chrysler sponsored tours contributing up front money while toward the end promoters  ponied up a couple hundred million to manage the tours.  The expense of putting on the show was the Stones but the mechanics of lining up venues and retailing the tickets was off their hands.

If you can stay together the intellectual property or ‘brand’ can become extremely valuable providing a payoff as time goes on.  The Stones may be unique in the size of the payoff but many performers have been on the road for decades and are still out there, viz. Bob Dylan.

Still given all the imponderables, one is astonished that a respectable investment banker would take such a huge risk on his future.  Not only had the principals been arrested and convicted, actually sent to jail, on a drug charge but they were involved with the revolutionary movement, indeed, other revolutionaries considered them one of them.  Jagger wrote revolutionary and agitprop songs.  As the seventies were characterized by revolutionary upheavals throughout the Western world including European outfits like the Baader-Meinhoff Gang and the Italian Red Guards and the infamous Carlos as well as the criminal and destructive American group, The Weathermen it would have been desirable to have some inconspicuous means of communication.  Historically a means has been itinerants who had a reason to travel about such as the entertainers like the Stones and Bob Dylan.  Cultural exchanges in governmental usage.

I think it quite possible, although I have no hard evidence that when Rupert was investigating the Stones at Chrissie Gibbs request he may have contacted the security agencies of England who seeing an opportunity to put an operative above suspicion in the Stones organization recruited Rupert.

As an intelligence agent in the Stones’ organization Rupert could maintain contact through his Europe wide aristocratic friends while dealing through the Stones with the revolutionaries who, at the very least, hung around the Stones.  I suspect that Mick and Keith were more than sympathetic to them.

Eric Burdon of The Animals as a solo artist was arrested by the German police on suspicion of aiding the revolutionaries.  Eric pleads innocence of course but the rock crowd as a group was sympathetic to the revolutionaries while the lyrics themselves were frequently openly revolutionary.  Police suspicion would not have been misplaced.

In Eugene Oregon where I had my record store at the time, revolutionary zanies functioned quite openly, at least as far as I was concerned, infesting the foothills of the Cascades where they had built bunkers to store weapons, ammunition and food against the Day which was thought imminent. As a record store owner they assumed that naturally I too was a revolutionary.  The Black Panthers for instance extorted money from me.  I was caught in the middle as the authorities assumed naturally that I was too.  It was tricky as I was then walking a tightrope between two hostile sides.

Thus Rupert otherwise inexplicably declassed himself while undertaking to represent a bankrupt band that was hopelessly in debt to the Inland Revenue.  A debt he knew could never be paid off and never has been.  In fact his first act regarding the ones was to advise them to leave England for more tax friendly shores.

When Rupert moved the band from England they ceased being a specifically English band becoming a band without a country or a true global band.  As a global band it is probable that Allen Klein even though Jewish was strictly of a US geographic mentality whereas Rupert being Europe based with friends in each country was better able to deal with different tax laws, mores, etc.  As a businessman he was better prepared to set up the business organization that the Stones needed.

It must be borne in mind that when the band left England on the cusp of the big boom of the seventies they became a multi-million dollar corporations with rather intricate financial problems.  Klein had the reputation of a buccaneer; he could squeeze the pips but he couldn’t command respect, Rupert could.

So, the success of the Stones after ’68 depended in a great part on the superb financial management of Rupert, as well as his ability to deal with a lunatic like Keith.  Rupert had no sooner got the band established in France than Keith got them thrown out of the country for, let’s not put a gloss on it, criminal behavior.  Keith was handling large amounts of heroin while providing, as it were a safe haven for the Marseilles criminal drug element.  Finally Keith and Anita turned a young girl, possible with violence, which resulted in the Stones having to flee France.  That made two countries they could no longer perform in, at least for a while, France and England.

I’m sure Rupert smacked his forehead, wrung his hands and asked the universe, what the hell is going on?  Keith and Mick must have been born under good signs as Rupert stayed on.

Having established a basis for prosperity Rupert then set about dealing with the first key problem, Allen Klein. Although broke the Stones initiated an expensive , read multi-million lawsuit against the wily Klein.  Americans operate on the principle that possession is nine tenths of the law so getting anything out of Klein would be a small miracle.  Without numbers to go on any accurate notion of what happened is impossible but as both sides were into the lawsuit for millions over eighteen years it would seem the results when they finally signed off were profitable for each.

So, having serendipitously acquired a supremely competent money man in Prince Rupert Loewenstein the financial future of the Stones was secured.  They would become perhaps the richest band in history.

A Review:

The Rock And Roll Circus Movie

Of The Rolling Stones

by

R.E. Prindle

In December 1968 Mick Jagger decided to make a film, or rather, he shot the film having decided earlier. Perhaps he was inspired by The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of the previous year. These years from 1966 to 1968-69 were a tumultuous time for Jagger and his sidekick Keith Richards. Not least significant was that Mick had taken up with the songstress Marianne Faithfull. Then in 1967 there was perhaps the most famous drug bust in history at Keith’s Redlands house.

The boys had been pushing the drug envelope hard more or less inviting a crackdown and it came in 1967 involving Mick, Keith and Marianne with devastating results for all three characters in the drama.

As the authorities wished to make an example of the baddest boys of rock and roll Mick and Keith received prison sentences of which however they only served two or three days. Nevertheless their psyches had been criminalized, changed their views on their role in society.

While the arrest and jail time were merited in society’s eyes, Mick and Keith who were among the legions marching to Altruria on the wings of pot convinced that their elders had irrevocably messed the world up while they were going to set it right under the influence of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and whatever else was handy, saw the bust and conviction as unjustified interference in their dreams of perfection.

The revolution was on as far as they were concerned hence they began a string of songs along the lines of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy For The Devil, unintended consequences of the bust.

Oh yeah, Mick and Marianne, Keith and his main squeeze Anita Pallenberg had become involved in Satanism which was going around like the flu. Not necessarily dilettantish either like, say, I just read a great book by Satan, but the real kind as fostered by the Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley himself as interpreted by his epigoni Kenneth Anger and Anton LaVey, not to mention the Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Mick and Marianne disavow any serious interest in Satanism but the Rock and Roll Circus contradicts that.

Combined with these irritants in their lives Mick had just starred in a Satanic movie, Performance, and Marianne had had the misfortune of a miscarriage. To say that they weren’t suffering at the time they made their movie would be a understatement.

In this hazy mental state, compounded by too many drugs, Mick cobbled together his Circus.

What is the meaning of the title Circus? Ostensibly it meant literally a circus, after all it had a fire eater and trapeze artists. However it could also be a double entendre. Just as the title of their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, parodied the Queens request on passports so the word Circus also parodied the name the British intelligence agency gave to their gig. The title can be construed as a challenge to the establishment. It would seem clear then that Mick was still seething inside because of Redlands.

His film is negligible as a movie but a good concert film. The symbolism is non stop as the guest audience in dressed in some sort of Munchkin costumes. The cast was bizarre to say the least. While little more than a musical oddity Jethro Tull led by Ian Anderson in his disgusting dirty old man persona opens the show while he was followed by the Who caught in pre-Tommy persona. Never one of my favorite bands, others thought they were a good performance while we are treated to a young Pete Townshend doing a series of his trademark windmills.

The couple circus acts are entertaining enough; the fire eater is pretty spectacular.

John Lennon performing separately from the Beatles was probably the musical highlight of the show for me. While obviously in the throes of a serious depression personally, as a performer once on stage Lennon is charisma spilling out all over the place. The depression does show up in the name he chose for his ad hoc group- The Dirty Mac. The name characterizes the general depression and malaise of the whole show. Lennon’s group brought together some stellar lights of the time. Besides himself he had Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, Eric Clapton on lead guitar and Keith on rhythm. They are joined a by fiddler, I presume Ivry Gitlis, and the irrepressible Yoko Ono.

Yoko was in her Bagism phase. While the movie is loosely shot during Lennon’s gig, if you watch the lower right corner of the film you can see a black object sort of pulsing. That’s the bag Yoko is in. I suppose as she was a performance artist the bag was Yoko’s joke- that’s the bag I’m in, get it?

After a noisy rendition of Yer Blues Yoko wiggles out of the bag bouncing up with her arms outstretched as in Here I am, aren’t I wonderful? Well, she certainly shocked Ivry when she began to squeal. Yoko is very tiny so Ivry kind of looks down at Yoko with raised eyebrows, looks over at John, backs up a couple steps, stops playing momentarily and has this incredulous am I believing what I’m seeing and hearing look on his face. One might say Yoko stole the show. Really, I had to start laughing.

The real show stopper comes next when the camera shifts to Marianne Faithfull. She was decorously posed in a stunning black designer gown. At her most beautiful with a fine folky voice that entrancingly recalled her As Tears Go By but strong and more focused. I missed the words but caught the mood of this enchanting chanteuse. Marianne definitely trumped Yoko as a showstopper.

Taj Mahal was a special case. Believe it or not Taj is still out there challenging the Interminable Tourist Dylan himself. Taj works, or did, about 170 days a year, every year. While he is not well known he began as a duo with Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons then added a string of records on his own. The guitarist is Jesse Ed Davis, a failed guitar god, who had a couple solo Lps of his own. Taj’s first two records are superb blues Lps, two of my favorites of the period. The third LP, a two record set is also quite good but begins his political period that obviated his musical career. He goes rapidly down hill after that.

For some reason he chose a rather lame piece from his repertoire. If he was making an appeal for a girl or girls to join him backstage his salacious version of Hey, Little School Girl might have served him better.

The Stones rounded out the show at the end. While the Who were supposed to have buried the Stones I didn’t find it so. The tension had been well maintained throughout the show with the comic interlude of Yoko and the Stones maintained it through to the end with a climax of sorts.

It was obvious that Mick, Keith and Marianne were in a world of hurt….and Brian Jones. That tragedy would play out over the next year when Brian drowned and Marianne almost drowned in her own tears and Mick spawned a real live Satan at Altamont.

The movie ended in hurt and Satanism- homage to the Devil.

Mick and Marianne had gone to see Jimi Hendrix a few months earlier. After performing Hendrix had sat at Marianne and Mick’s table where he put the make on Marianne telling her to dump the White dude and go with him. Marianne hesitated a moment too long giving Mick offense so that he commemorated the evening in his song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Suddenly I realized the meaning of the line, you and your friend Jimi as Mick shouted it to someone off stage to the right. OK, not my problem.

So Jagger was still wearing his hair as he did in the movie Performance. That soul corrupting film was obviously still influencing him. As Marianne said, it changed his personality.

The show closed with Sympathy For The Devil. There was a little stage extension on which Mick prostrated himself as though doing obeisance as the song played. It looked like he was groveling, then he looked up making a couple goofy grimaces at the camera beginning to pull off his shirt. Not necessary, Mick, not necessary. Then with the shirt off he straightened to a kneeling position to reveal Satanic tattoos a la Kenneth Anger.

Anger had a large LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Here Mick seemed to be imitating him apparently trying to tell us that the Great Satan had arrived. I hope they were transfers. Interesting, especially as the movie Rosemary’s Baby appeared in 1968 in which Rosemary gives birth to the Son of Satan. Even more interestingly in the 1990’s book sequel Son Of Rosemary Satan’s little lad was named Andy. After Andy Warhol, I presume.

I suppose then that Mick conceived the film as a coming out party for himself as The Great Beast. Apparently he took his Satanism very seriously. It make one wonder, was Altamont a projection of the Great Satan?

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.