The Fugs! Fug It!
by Mike Marino

Can a outlandish band of outlaw flag burning musicians led by a publisher-poet actually levitate the Pentagon? Probably not, and indeed not, but the Fugs gave it their best effort. The Fugs were not merely a weirdy band as viewed by those who stood on the "other side" of the line of demarcation that divided the counter culture of the Sixties from society's straights. They were bards who were banned, and under constant scrutiny by the drag queen minions of Herbert (I am woman hear me roar!) Hoover's FBI. The Feral Bureau of Inquisition. They were in the advance guard of the avant guard when it came to mixing politics and protest with art and activism in the swirling whirling voracious vortex of the hipster Sixties. Ed Sanders, head hipster, poet and Fugs founder managed to somehow cross the gulf and mend the social fabric between the Beats and the emerging sub-culture of the Hippies with a raucous brand of fun loving message laden Crazy Glue in the form of music and activism. They were one of the early purveyors of profound protest with musical offerings that had a devious wink of the eye audible in the vinyl grooves of their albums. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius and while the tie-dyed denizens of Haight Ashbury said, turn on, tune in, and drop out Sanders said Fug It and went playfully full tilt boogie for the throat of the Establishment.

Ed Sanders emerged from the tomb of the womb intact in Kansas City, Missouri in the fuggin' year of 1939, one month before Hitler invaded Poland. There has been not one shred of evidence that one event had anything to do with other. As "Leave it to Beaver" was racing up the ratings charts on television, Ed hit the Midwestern road thumb extended to Greenwich Village in NYC to attend New York University. The Village in the Fifties and Sixties were to ground zero for Beats and Hippies as much as Middle Earth is to a damned Hobbit. At the time, little did Ed know that a whole Bohemian world was about to open it's doors wide with an explosive passion that would ignite his artistic sensibilities and lifelong commitment to activism that would lead to among other things...the attempt to Levitate of the Pentagon as the counter culture tried like hell to toss a brick into the cog of the war machine's devastation in Vietnam. That old Military-Industrial Complex Blues.

First and foremost, Ed was a poet and prior to the launching of the Fugs, Ed wrote his first poem from jail called simply enough, "A Poem from Jail" while he was incarcerated in a cell after protesting the launching of nuclear submarines. Now I'm certain that had these been Yellow Submarines he would not have protested, in fact would have signed on as a crew member. In writing the poem there were a few hurdles to overcome, as his jailers didn't have the courtesy to provide Ed the Terrible with notebook paper to pen his poem to, so being the inveterate inventive type, Ed improvised and wrote it on the roll of jailhouse toilet paper. You can't silence the revolution if you squeeze the Charmin, and remember...if you have a roll of toilet paper upon which to write your manifesto...shit happens!

Once released and his revulsion to repression was as fully awake as a speed freak on a three day binge, he started publishing the underground journal "Fuck You - A Magazine of the Arts" followed by opening of the eye opening Peace Eye Bookstore which became a compost pile of the flotsom and jetsom of the avant gard Bohemian community of artists, activists, poets, writers and radicals. Like all left leaning enterprises of the fail safe Sixties, the cops raided the place and charged Ed with obscenity. It was the same NYC prosecutor who previously had busted dear old ribald Lenny Bruce! Riding to the rescue, the ACLU rushed to his defense and beat the system at it's own game...Not Guilty! Not only was Ed free to go, but his notoriety was now in full orbit and he made the cover of Life Mag with an article proclaiming him as a leader of the new counter culture in NYC. He was not just in orbit in NYC's radical universe, but was it's center of gravity. The time was right and ripe to say "Fug It" and hence the Fugs were born in 1963. Music and protest would never be the same again. The Fugs were about unleash a comedic assault on all the mistaken precepts of "normalcy" and decorum. The Fugs had arrived...and like the cavalry, just in the nick of time...

Formed originally as a three piece band that included Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, they also drafted Ken Weaver to keep the hypnotic beat a drummer. As they experimented more and more they made a recon raid and captured Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the group, Holy Modal Rounders, but it was Kupferberg who came up with the name "Fugs" named in honor of the euphemism for "fuck" in Norman Mailers grit and guts novel, "The Naked and the Dead" and no, it was not about sexy necrophiliacs. Mailer was a no holds barred, bare knuckle writer who always went for the macho knockout punch in literature and conversation, not to mention being a street brawling activist for justice and human rights.

Other musicians drifted in and out of the band over the years. A high tide of talent that would come and go in and out of the Fug Orbit race for vinyl space and one of the few experimental bands to make use of a clarinetist. Ok, so it was not exactly a full symphonic rainbow of Moody Blues starture or Leonard Bernstein at the Philharmonic but it was Fug Harmony that began fertilizing the garden of protest with a nod of admiration to the Marx Brothers. With the Fugs, everyday was a Day at the Circus.

They inked a deal with ESP-Disk records in 1965 and according to Sanders at a royalty rate of 3%! So stop your bitchin' Indie artists, it could be worse. The label not only offered a royalty rate that was below sea level but the label owner had a habit of fuggin' over his artists by not paying them anything at all! Gotta love the music biz! A job with a bomb squad offers more economic security.

The war in Vietnam was taking center stage in the purple hazed and dazed Sixties and protesting the war was a dangerous occupation on the Left Wing of the good ship American Lollipop, but the Fugs jumped out of the proverbial foxhole and charged full steam ahead, musical guns blazing, locked and loaded and going for the Establishment head shots. They were featured performing as almost a traveling medicine roadshow at various End the War protests singing about Fuggin' Peace, Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. One song, "Boobs A Lot" turned out to be not too popular with the Gloria Steinem crowd of Female Libbers but lets face it...bra burning itself heralds the promise of a lot of boobs!

Soon J. Edgar Hoover's FBI who deemed that eleven songs of theirs are "vulgar and repulsive" as if that were a crime. This coming from a Jabba the Hut Hermann Goering look a like transvestite with enough belly fat to feed Ethiopia for a year. The FBI was keeping a close watch on the Fugs, and many others of course for exercising their rights of free speech and right to protest, land of the free as long as the free don't exercise that freedom. Democracy as Hypocrisy. In 1967, activists from across the nation not only marched on Washington, but marched to the Pentagon, the military wing of the Military-Insustrial Complex, and The Fugs now attempted during this National Mobilization to End the War to help others levitate the Pentagon, and once again, enter Norman Mailer who was also there and wrote about this episode of protest history in his book, "Armies of the Night"

The Fugs were now in the Who's Who of political protest and while Dylan and Ochs were the bards, the Fugs were the court jesters, bringing a touch of raw nerve humor to a landscape of red, white and blue body bags and My Lai massacred villages where women and children were butchered and murdered in a mass entanglement of criminal American psychosis driven murder.

The Sixties waxed and waned and the Fugs splintered to pursue solo careers and projects but did reunite in the 80's for performances in the US and Europe. The war in Vietnam had ended in a Vietnamese victory and even the Berlin Wall came down with a crash along side communism. There are a few communist countries left...Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Berkeley, California, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Madison, Wisconsin. Today, Sanders lives in Woodstock, NY and is publisher along with his wife, of the Woodstock Journal. He writes, he paints and he invents musical instruments including one apparatus of light activated switches called the Lisa Lyre.

One final note, while promoters were trying to rape and rip-off the nostalgia hangover of the '69 Woodstock with a bad clone version in '94, Ed and the remaining Fugs organized the Real Woodstock Festival the same year in competition. It included performances by the Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish and the Howling Bard, Allen Ginsberg keeping the "beat" alive. Final Fugs albums were recorded in 2003 and 2004 which included a reading of "Howl" by Ginsberg, and the Fugs finally said Fug It vanished into an acid flash of nostalgia, but not before one last concert performance for the Queen of England no less at a Meltdown Concert produced by non other than Ray Davies of the Kinks. Kinks and Fugs? What more can a Kinky Mother Fugger ask for!