Fug Everything, Let's Dance

"There's a great New York tradition of 'doing it yourself' in the arts. Just bypass the buildings and go straight to the streets." --Richard Hell[i]

In this article, I will attempt to situate the Fugs in the larger context of the re-emergent avant-garde of the 1960s. So there are two levels to this, the particular history of the band, and the larger cultural movement in which the band played a small but influential part.

I: The New and the Now

Present trends in the indy arts are descended from a major movement in DIY practice across all the arts that developed in the post-world-war US, and that movement was based in earlier trends in Europe that came out of the Romantic movement and in reaction to it, and emerged as a result of changing conditions in the industralized nations in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.

There is a method that historians have used used for centuries for telling a big story by telling a small one in relation to its larger context. They used to call it "the great man method." It's an anachronistic label for a technique that doesn't have to be about "the great" or be gender exclusive.

So, to briefly introduce the small-scale focus before pulling back for the larger landscape, let's say that if you are a socially-conscious musician or poet operating in the US today, and you are not due for senior citizenship anytime soon, then the Fugs are your daddy whether you know it or not. This is too sweeping of course, but it's useful for perspective.

The Fugs, formed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1964, have been recognized as primary ancestors of alternative rock, championing socially-conscious music with a DIY aesthetic more than a decade before punk exploded on the international scene. According to critic John Rockwell, the Fugs were, "the prototypical New York, beatnik, art-rock group, the precursors of the Velvet Underground and, through them, the entire New York and international new wave rock culture of the mid-1970s onward."

The Fugs emerged during the cultural shift that we now often refer to simply as "the sixties," and that came about at a confluence of new historical trends, a small sampling of which follows.

--The shift in global economic and political power from Europe to the US that occurred when the European nations emerged from WW2 with massive debt, with the US as their major creditor.

--The geographical shift in the world genius pool that happened when thousands of the best minds in the European arts and sciences fled to the US to escape oppression and genocide.

--The leap in higher education and class mobility that resulted from the US's postwar prosperity and the GI bill that sent to college thousands of Americans whose grandparents never dreamt of a college education, increasing their standard of living and their expectations for their children.

--The subsequent massive reaction of a new, young, baby-boom, better-educated middle class (who had been trained to feel entitled to "freedom," "the pursuit of happiness," "the American Dream," etc.) against the hyper-conformist red scare crack-down contradictions of a government largely run by untravelled, small-town men from farm states who had been born in the previous century. (I'm talking about Congressional demographics here. What percentage of currently-serving US legislators have ever been outside the US? I saw the number once, it was less than half, but I couldn't believe it. Does anybody have reliable numbers on this one?)

--The Civil Rights movement which, in the 1950s and 60s, like the Anti-Slavery movement of the 1850s and 60s, fostered a wave of new radicalism across the spectrum of social causes. (For example, Abolitionism taught middle-class women to get up and speak in public, thus seeding the women's movement.)

--The rapidly increasing cross-over between black and white cultures in the form of a desegregation of music that prophesied desegregation in the larger material realms.

--The wartime economic upswing that boosted the advertizing industry to a new and unanticipated level of penetration. War taxes were high, but you could get a tax write-off for business expenses, so companies invested unprecedented levels of cash in PR. By the end of the war, radio and print advertizing had made an anthem of equating consumption of manufactured goods with victory and freedom. The mantric monosyllables for the practice were new and now.

--Rent control! In 1942, FDR signed the Emergency Price Control Act, a law designed to prevent inflation in the booming, fully employed wartime economy. In 1950, New York adapted the federal regulations (which had expired in 1947), applying controls to 2 million rental units in the city. Rent regulation has always faced strong opposition, and by 1961, New York City was the only major city in the country that still had rent controls.

So -- It's the early 1960s and if you want to be a painter, poet, dancer, actor, filmmaker, novelist, designer, and/or beatnik entrepreneur there's only one place to get a pad for 50 bucks a month and be surrounded by thousands of like-minded young people. You've got to be there. Hey presto, it's a counterculture.

The present and various alternative music, art, poetry, dance, theater, perf scenes (as well as today's reemergent sense of activism) come out of that time and those conditions. (The spirit is still there, thought the low rent isn't.)

II: Freedom

The alternative music scene in which the Fugs were major instigators can be situated in relation to the oral poetry renaissance of the 1950s and ‘60s, as well as to the larger underground and re-emergent avant-garde of which the new poetry was a part, and which included independent cinema, experimental theater, new trends in dance, "happenings," aleatory music, and free jazz.

The New York avant-garde of the 1950s-60s was descended from the European avant-garde which, beginning about 1880, drew inspiration from post-Revolutionary French literature, particularly the Symbolist poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud. A key figure in the French avant-garde of the early 1900s was the modernist experimentalist Guillaume Apollinaire, whose poetry influenced the Beats and the New York School of the 1950s-onward. He was the art critic who introduced "Cubism" to the world, and he coined the term "Surrealism" in 1917, before it became the tag of the new writers and painters of the 1920s influenced by Freud's theory of the unconscious (which had first hit the presses in 1900). Many of the artists active on the downtown scene of the early 1960s shared an interest in this body of literature.

In his column in the Village Voice of May 2 1963, Jonas Mekas announced a new development in American independent cinema inspired by post-Revolutionary French literature, a "new freedom" that he saw in the films of Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, and Jack Smith.

"These movies are illuminating and opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts; a content which Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, and Rimbaud gave to world literature a century ago and which Burroughs gave to American literature three years ago. It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty. . . . I know that the larger public will misinterpret and misunderstand these films."[ii]

Free jazz emerged at the same time as the "new freedom" in film, but it carried a political message of a whole other magnitude. There is a long-standing connection between African American musics and the struggle for liberation. More than a century ago, slaves' songs carried encoded messages to "steal away" and "follow the drinking gourd" to freedom, and beginning in the 1950s, African American song explicitly demanded that American society make "liberty and justice for all" something more than a grade-school cliché. But the black, working-class musicians who launched the free jazz movement of the 1960s did not hint at freedom, or even demand freedom, they declared it, setting an example for other activist musicians who drove the massive countercultural upsurge of the mid-1960s.

As Ted Gioia notes in his History of Jazz, "freedom stood out as a politically charged word in American public discourse during the late 1950s and early 1960s."[iii]

Freedom riders, the "Freedom Vote" mock election of 1963, the "Freedom Summer" voter registration drive of 1964, the "Freedom Singers" chorus that toured the country, the drive to establish "Freedom Schools" and a "Freedom Democratic Party," and the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King kept the concept prominent in the public discourse and popular consciousness of the period. Free jazz musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, did not divide art and politics into separate realms. To liberate oneself from the strictures of harmony and musical form, and to defy the music business taste-makers, was to demonstrate freedom from restrictive social order and corporate control.

The generation of American artists who came of age circa 1960 rode a confluence of trends -- economic upswing, civil rights progress, new US dominance in and support for the arts, a democratic blending of low and high cultures, the existentialist imperative of the engaged artist, and the emergence of a massive youth market -- that resulted in a new bohemian blend of politics and play, and a sense that one's art does not merely reflect society, but shapes it.

Many 70s punks and their progeny situated themselves as anti-hippie, pointing to ‘60s idealism as inconsistent with the assassinations, escalating narcotics trade, and police-state crackdown that attended the Vietnam debacle, and blaming the hippies' "sell out" of the counterculture for the neoliberal nightmare of the ‘70s-2000s. Still, punk's antagonistic stance, subject matter, gender-bending, and imperative to self-invention, as well as its impulse to speak out, to boldly make one's individual statement and to see speech, music, and art as a means of rebellion in which everyone can participate, is a legacy of the 1960s counterculture and the avant-garde that underlay it.

III: Do it

In the early 1960s, when poets Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, and Tuli Kupferberg took to singing, it was at once a challenge to prevailing musical values and a return to an ancient aesthetic order -- to the text, the voice, and the body at the expense of polished musical affects. By mid-decade the use of ordinary language in poetry and ordinary movement in dance, the troubling of high/low professional/amateur artist/audience distinctions, the lessening or dissolution of directorial authority, the rise of collaboration and collectives, the growth of independent film, the folk music and blues revival's championing of "authentic" untrained voices, and the latest freedom shout from the jazz prophets conspired to license young artists to "do it yourself."

Allen Ginberg: "First of all there's the development of an open oral poetry in San Francisco. Then, in '58 '59, for the first time there were poetry readings in coffee houses beginning on MacDougal Street which put the word thing into another context beside the academic or lecture hall or university or more dignified surroundings. And that was considered quite a novel thing. And that was on the front page of the Daily News, it was so unusual to have poetry in a coffee shop. There was a front-page photo, with José García and Peter [Orlovsky]."[iv]

In 1960, Mickey Ruskin opened The Tenth Street Coffeehouse, hosting open readings on Monday nights and readings by invited poets on Wednesdays. In 1961, Ruskin opened Les Deux Magots on East Seventh Street, and the readings moved to the new, larger location. In 1962 the Judson Church on Washington Square began presenting poets' plays, a reading series, happenings, and new music concerts. At the same time, the Judson Dance Theater group offered performances and workshops in a new style based in ordinary bodily movements. Also in 1962, Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones, Alan Marlowe, and Fred Herko opened the New York Poets Theater, presenting dance, music, film, and poetry readings, as well as plays by Jones, di Prima, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, and Michael McClure. At the end of that year, Ruskin sold Le Deux Magots and the readings moved through a series of local bars, then to the headquarters of the anarchist collective The Living Theatre before settling, in the winter of 1963, at Le Café Metro on Second Avenue just south of St. Mark's Church.

Allen Ginsberg: "From the coffee shop poetry readings came poetry at the Café Metro and that lasted from '63 to ‘65-66, and the participants there were Jackson MacLow, and Ed Sanders, and Peter Orlovsky and myself and Anne Waldman, and all the poets around New York including the Umbra poets, the black poets, Quincy Troupe and David Henderson."

By mid-year the bar had become a focal point of the downtown art scene. One typical Sunday program, in December 1963, offered showings of experimental films, the playing of Harry Smith's Kiowa peyote ritual recordings, and a presentation by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. The shows attracted large crowds, neighbors complained, and Le Metro was issued a summons for having unlicensed entertainment.[v] The final crisis came in a confrontation between the Café management and the poets. Allen Ginsberg: "The poetry at the Metro ran into trouble with the owner who insulted some of the blacks. We decided to move the readings to Saint Mark's Church."

St. Mark's Church has a long and distinguished history as a center for avant-garde performance and progressive politics. Harry Houdini, Isadora Duncan, and Frank Lloyd Wright had appeared there, and W.H. Auden had been a member of the congregation. In 1966, when the Poetry Project was founded, the presiding cleric, the Reverend Michael Allen, had recently returned from riding freedom buses in the south, and was preparing to go to Vietnam with Joan Baez.[vi]

The Poetry Project began after sociologist Harry Silverstein applied, through the New School for Social Research, for a federal Office of Economic Opportunity grant to pilot programs for "alienated youth."[vii] The two-year grant funded the St. Mark's Arts Project: the Poetry Project, Theater Genesis (now the Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and the cinema collective, Film Millennium. The church also housed the Black Panther's breakfast program, the Motherfucker's dinner program, and a child care service.

Allen Ginsberg: "The [Vietnam] war was central to everybody's preoccupations in the sixties. Many of the poems of the time expressed outrage or sympathy or violence or fright or grief. . . . So there was a community, a forum where people could articulate their relationship to the big national problem of the Vietnam War. . . . Sixties mouths could meet people who had been pacifists in World War I, people who knew Catholic worker saint Dorothy Day. You got a taste of prior eras, prior movements, prior communities and their moments of glory; publications, parties, social activities, and love affairs, decades old."[viii]

Also present were neighborhood veterans of the old bohemia of the 1920s, remnants of the Old Left, and long-time members of the War Resisters' League. Over the next few years, musician poets Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell were added to the mix.

IV: Yeah yeah yeah, we could do better than that

"Knowing nothing about rock & roll whatsoever they proceeded to write sixty songs. . . . Exactly like punk ten years later. . . . [They] did it all on pure balls."[xxi]

The Fugs, "arguably the first self-consciously underground rock band,"[ix] were named after a euphemism Norman Mailer featured prominently in his 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead (fug this, fug that, etc.). At the time of the book's publication, the censorship-busting acquittal on obscenity charges of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books in San Francisco, was nine years in the future.

About the time of Ferlinghetti's trial, Edward Sanders, then a high-school senior in Missouri, went on a fraternity-visit weekend where he entertained his drinking buddies by chanting Ginsberg's Howl.[x] In the spring of 1958 he left the University of Missouri at Columbia and headed for New York University to study physics, intending to pursue a career in rocket science. He later switched his major to classics. Sanders became an activist, walking from Ohio to New York in May 1961, and from Nashville to Washington, D.C. from April to June 1962, with the Committee for Nonviolent Action's Walks for Peace. In May of 1961 he was jailed for swimming out into the Thames River near New London, Connecticut to board a submarine in protest of nuclear missiles. He graduated from college in 1964 and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (February 1965) on Tenth Street between Avenues B and C.

Ed Sanders: "The Peace Eye for a while was a very famous hang-out place, like there'd be Nico [of the Velvet Underground], or Donovan. . . . Visiting poets would come by, Jerry Rothenberg, whoever was in town. And Allen [Ginsberg] lived just down the street at 408 East 10th. It was half a block away. And there were all these bars on Avenue B. Mazur's, Stanleys, and then there was the Charles Theater which had all the avant-garde films-Jonas Mekas, Ron Rice, the Taylor Mead movies. So there was a four-block area of culture."[xi]

Sanders met Tuli Kupferberg, an older poet and leftist intellectual who had unwittingly escaped the Second-World-War draft by explaining his theories about the political and economic causes of the war to an army psychiatrist.[xii] Ed said of Tuli: "Most child-prodigies play the violin or piano, Tuli was a prodigy as an anarchist."[xiii] Kupferberg performed in the downtown readings, and his work had appeared in anthologies and small magazines including two magazines he and Sylvia Topp produced, beginning in 1958 with three issues of Birth, followed by ten issues of Yeah.

Tuli: "I was selling my stuff. I would sell my stuff in front of a theater on avenue B [and 11th Street, the Charles Theater], an old movie theater that was on its way out. Once a week Jonas Mekas would have independent films showing. It was very important in the history of independent film. And I would go there and I would sell my publications in front of the theater. I met Ed there and Ed somehow knew or liked my work."

ST: "So you met Ed outside the theater."

Tuli: "Yeah. I met him there but mostly I got to know him at the Metro readings. "

In 1964 the Beatles came to the US, sparking a sea change in popular culture.

Allen Ginsberg: "The first time I ever started really dancing would be around '63 at the Dom. They had a dance downstairs and everybody was dancing and it was 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' Beatles music. It was just so ecstatic and joyful. Remember my little poem about the Beatles in Portland Oregon, 'The body moves again, the body dances again'? The reclamation of the body actually is what it was, like the head cut off from the body originally and then reclaiming the body as part of our heritage after years of prohibition, the end of the censorship and also the triumph of African American muladhara sphincter yoga, making the white people move their ass. You know, the opening of the muladhara chakra by the African Americans. . . . It was the revenge of Africa, so to speak, on the West which had featured a different chakra, you know, the head chakra, featured hyperintellectuality. And in order to return back to the body-in that poem Who Be Kind To -- 'A psalm is heard from Nigeria and re-echoes in Nottingham in Prague and a Chinese psalm will be heard if we all keep the red transistors in our breast,' or something, '‘cause the body moves again, the body dances again.'"[xiv]

Sanders and Kupferberg heard the Beatles too. Both poets had more than a listener's interest in music. Kupferberg had a substantial library of records and old songbooks which he scoured to find melodies for his satyrical lyrics.

Sanders had grown up with Protestant hymnody, having attended the Church of the Disciples of Christ as a child in Missouri, and had listened to radio jazz, rhythm and blues, and early rock as a teen. As a scholar of ancient Greek lyric verse, he took a natural interest in sung poetry, and he embraced Charles Olson's notion of the poet as historian. The musical inspiration that melded his historiographic and poetic impulses came out of his activism. Sanders knew that many of the rallying songs of the trade union and civil rights movements had been rewritten from the hymns he'd learned as a child. He realized he could tap his own musical background to produce what he calls "socially-conscious" American lyrics on the model of the Greek poet-historians and moral philosophers. The final impetus came when everybody started dancing to the Beatles. Sanders and Kupferberg figured if four guys from Liverpool could do it, so could they. They were poets, they'd have great songs. In the winter of 1964 they conceived the Fugs.

Tuli: "We used to read at Le Metro and then around the corner was the Dom, Polish for house, it's Latin, right? And in the basement there was a bar, a Polish bar originally."

ST: "Stanlin Tolkin's bar."

Tuli: "Right. It was the time when the sixties was beginning to happen, and he saw the commercial potential of that and he turned it into a tourist trap, basically. And he charged admission to go in. Of course there were a lot of poor kids around that wanted to go to places, hang out. He issued cards to a select group of freaks and they could get in all the time free. There was a juke box there that played the Stones, the early Beatles.

"The early Beatle songs were very wonderful musically but they really showed no promise of what they would later do in their lyrics. So Ed said, or we both sort of, Ed said, "We could do better than that. How would you like to form a band?" And we started from there."

Ed: "The Fugs grew out of the labor union songs of the ‘30s and ‘We Shall Overcome' of Pete Seeger and out of the three-chord Protestant hymns that were transformed into civil rights songs. And out of jazz poetry and out of Bird and bebop and early rock and roll. [In] 1964 when we were formed, that was ‘Mustang Sally,' Roy Orbison's ‘Pretty Woman,' and the Beatles' ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.' Those were the things that were happening-early Beach Boys, Dylan hadn't gone folk-rock yet. That's how we came out. We came out of the concept of a happening. You'd go to these galleries and there'd be people jumping up and down in barrels full of grapes and then somebody naked covering their head with pieces of ticker tape. And you could call that art. Easy rules-all you had to do was bring youthful genius and will. For all the flaws of early Fugs we had pretty good timing, and a lot of energy, and we were confident in ourselves. And we were all poets, so we could whip out these songs that, well, we're not talking Schumann here, or Schubert. Because of recording equipment we were able to capture these things. These things we did one take only, as wild young men looking at each other. We didn't know that you were supposed to face the microphone."[xv]

Ed and Tuli began writing songs, setting texts by Swinburne and Blake, and drawing on Platonic musical ethos.[xvi] They recruited Ken Weaver to play drums, and Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders joined the group for a time.

Tuli: "The first show was in the Peace Eye Bookstore on 10th Street, where I lived at 381, it was the next building. And I got the store. I told Ed that was the place for his book store. The first gig was actually in that store. You think we were crude on the album, but we were cruder there. I think Ken Weaver might have had a fruit box as a drum."

Ed: "Andy Warhol had done cloth wall banners of his flower image, and literati as diverse as William Burroughs, George Plimpton, and James Michener were on hand for the premier croonings of "Swinburne Stomp" and other Fugs ditties."[xvii]

The Fugs developed their act playing downtown venues like the Bridge Theater on Eighth Street, Izzie Young's Folklore Center, Diane Di Prima's Poets Theater, and the Players Theater on MacDougall Street. Harry Smith recommended the band to Moses Asch at Folkways, and the first album (The Village Fugs: Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction) was recorded in April and July of 1965, "Production supervised by Harry Smith." The album contains two settings of William Blake poems, the Swinburne chant, and songs such as "I Feel Like Homemade Shit," and "Slum Goddess."

In the fall of '65 The Fugs toured cross-country. In San Francisco they played shows with Allen Ginsberg, the Mothers of Invention, and Country Joe and the Fish.[xviii]

In 1966 the Fugs signed with ESP records. Part of the deal was a steady theatre booking where the band could develop their set. From late January until mid-May they played weekly at the Astor Play House on Lafayette Street, sharing the stage with other ESP artists such as Sun Ra and Albert Ayler.

Tuli: "There was the Astor Place theater. That was ESP, we signed up there. And Albert Ayler played there and Pharoah Sanders. There was an ESP program. He [Bernard Stollman, ESP] would showcase his artists there. Ayler really liked the Fugs, he was a Fugs fan. I loved his music. It's sad that he's gone."

The Fugs Second Album was released by ESP in March 1966 and made the Billboard Top 100 album chart in spite of garnering little radio play due to the sustained tendency to scatological and sexual references and probably also due to Kupferberg's anti-war anthem "Kill for Peace."

In the summer of 1966 the Fugs began a run of more than 700 shows at the Players Theater where they attracted a broad audience.

Shortly after the album's release, "a concerned citizen" wrote to the FBI: "Certainly, the great majority of decent Americans will applaud any effort to make record racks and newsstands refrain from peddling such filth." J. Edgar Hoover forwarded the album to the attorney general for a decision on whether to prosecute and replied to the letter-writer:

"I, too, share your concerns regarding this type of recording which is being distributed throughout the country and certainly appreciate your bringing it to my attention. It is repulsive to right-thinking people and can have serious effects on our young people."[xix]

In the early summer, in a memo to the FBI, a Postal Inspector recommended that the investigation be closed since the album was not considered obscene.[xx]

In the fall of 1966 The Fugs signed with Atlantic, and the recording was completed in the new year, but the label refused to release the record and dropped the band. The Fugs then signed with Reprise, producing four albums on that label. The Fugs played their last show in the spring of '69 at the Hershey Arena in Pennsylvania. (Sanders and Kupferberg reformed the band with new instrumentalists in 1984.)

On the back cover of The Fugs First Album (ESP 1966 issue of Folkways 1965 recording) there are advertisements for albums by Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, the New York Art Quartet featuring LeRoi Jones and his poem "Black Dada Nihilismus," and other, lesser known "new music" artists playing what came to be called "free jazz." This pairing on a record jacket of the jazz avant garde and the early rock underground provides an apt metaphor for the status of black musicians vis a vis white rock. They are the underground beneath the underground.

The Fugs' notion of do-it-yourself, activist art clearly feeds into punk and what came after. The "happenings" of the ‘60s may have been conceived in the 1950s by artists coming out of the classical arts tradition, such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, but the happening was "ready-made" (to borrow a term from another important predecessor, surrealist Marcel Duchamp) for poets who wanted to rock, and set the stage for the new breed of non-institutionalized DIY experimentalists across the arts.

The Fugs prefigured today's alternative rock and other independent arts trends in a number of ways. They championed amateurism, a disregard for mainstream decorum, and a radical politics. Most significantly, they crossed lines between artistic disciplines. Like the key New York art rock performers Richard Hell and Patti Smith of the subsequent generation, they were poets before they were musicians. Ten years after the Fugs issued their settings of Blake and Swinburne, Richard Hell innovated the punk style on an aesthetic derived from the Symbolists and Surrealists and the Beats, and Patti Smith matched her Rimbaud-inspired verse to a rock guitar.

[i] Richard Hell in Anne Waldman's Out of This World anthology (New York: Crown, 1991), p. 646.

[ii] Jonas Mekas, "Movie Journal" column in the Village Voice, May 2, 1963, quoted in Sitney: Visionary Film.

[iii] Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) pp. 337-38.

[iv] Allen Ginsberg interview, 2/23/93.

[v] See Alan Deloach, ed., The East Side Scene: An anthology of a time and a place (Buffalo: New York University Press, 1968), pp. vii-xii.

[vi] Anne waldman in Out of This World, p. 4.

[vii] This account is taken from Allen Ginsberg's foreword to Out of This World, pp. xxiv-xxx; and my interview with Anne Waldman of 17 May 2002.

[viii] In Waldman, Out of This World, p. xxvii.

[ix] Jonathan Buckley and Mark Ellington, eds., The Rough Guide to Rock (London: The Rough Guides, 1996), s.v. Fugs.

[x] Ed Sanders, personal communication.

[xi] Lisa Jarnot interview with Ed Sanders in The Poetry

Project Newsletter Number 166, October/November 1997, p. 28.

[xii] Tuli Kupferberg, personal communication.

[xiii] Ed Sanders, personal communication.

[xiv] Allen Ginsberg interview, February 1993.

[xv] Sanders in Jarnot interview, p. 28.

[xvi] On their album It Crawled into My Hand Honest The Fugs took on Plato's famous edict concerning the relationship between musical mode and the State in the song "When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake."

[xvii] Ed Sanders: TheFugs.com.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] J. Edgar Hoover quoted in John Orman, The Politics of Rock Music (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), p. 148.

[xx] Ed Sanders: TheFugs.com.

[xxi] Pete Stampfel quoted in Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids, p. 21.