Yesterday I mentioned the Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg as the co-author of 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, a genuine relic of the era. Which reminds me…
Visiting New York with my father in 1967 or so, I persuaded him to take me to see the Fugs in one of their now legendary nightly performances at Greenwich Village’s Players Theater. It was a memorable show with something close to the founding group of the Fugs — Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and two or three others. I was relieved that my dad fell asleep before the Fugs hit their scatological stride.
Sanders is an interesting guy. He majored in classics at NYU and has a literary bent with a twist. He co-founded the Fugs in the name of the creative alternative Norman Mailer had seized on to portray the speech of soldiers in The Naked and the Dead. Sanders went on to write The Family (1971), his scarifying account of the Manson murders that has made it into a third edition.
By the way, you can hear him recite the opening lines of The Iliad in the original Greek with a mock country twang on the song of that title on his (disappointing) Sanders’ Truckstop album (1969). The closing track on the album is “Pindars Revenge.”
Looking around online for some information about Sanders, I happened onto the 1968 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. The episode features a drunken Jack Kerouac, a sober Ed Sanders, and Professor Lewis Yablonsky, sociologist and author of The Hippie Trip, an academic exploration of the subject. Buckley called it Yablonsky’s “magnum opus.” Kerouac required no introduction, though he did need some coffee and a cold shower. Buckley accurately introduced Sanders as a musician, a poet, and a polemicist, adding in classic deadpan style: “He is one of the Fugs, a widely patronized combo.” Priceless.
Buckley begins with Sanders, posing a rich Buckleyesque question as a follow-up to his opening inquiry: “Do I understand from this that we are supposed to make the inference that the hippies don’t have a highly developed political [agenda]?”
I’m filing this under Laughter is the Best Medicine. Let it supplement “Personal & confidential: WFB, Jr.”
