The Old Fug John Strausbaugh
Tuli Kupferberg and I go to the same doctor. I ran into him there this summer. I was complaining about heartburn. Tuli's advice: "Drink a lot of water." I've been hydrating like crazy since. Tuli Kupferberg was a middle-aged man when the world was young. I figure he knows a thing or two about survival. As he approaches 77, he may look like hell-spotted and baggy-eyed as an old hound, with a limp mop of gray hair and snaggletoothed grin-but he's still as raffish and playful as ever.
Tuli was 42 when he and Ed Sanders cofounded my favorite "revolutionary rock band" of the 60s-even though they weren't quite a band, and parodied rock more than they played it, and probably weren't any more effective as motivators of social change than any of the others. The Fugs were more committed to their antiwar, pro-drugs, pro-sex ideals than Jefferson Airplane ever were to theirs, and smarter than the MC5. Interviewed in the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever in 1997, Tuli put it simply and straightforwardly: "Our goal was to make the revolution. That would have been a complete revolution, not just an economic or political one. We had utopian ideals and those are the best ideals." He must be one of the most gentle and good-humored "revolutionaries" of all time.
Autonomedia has just put out a new collection of Tuli's doodles and collages, with maybe the best book title of the year: Teach Yourself Fucking (192 pages, $15). It's his first book in some time (previous titles include 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, Listen to the Mockingbird: Satiric Songs to Tunes You Know and Less Newspoems). He says he recently tried to sell Verso on a roman a clef called The Fucks, but they preferred he simply write a straight memoir of the Fugs. "But this is much better," he argues, with classic Kupferbergian logic. "This is a memoir that I made up."
The DIY-looking cover of Teach Yourself Fucking features four snapshots taken by his friend Thelma Blitz in 1992, showing Tuli sitting in a chair, with no pants on, looking...pleased with himself. As for the title, it started with a self-help book he saw in London, with the title Teach Yourself Banking, which struck the Marxist in him as preposterous. "I thought teaching yourself fucking would really be just as marvelous as if you were able to teach yourself banking," he explains.
You've seen many of the cartoons in the book; some are classics. Like Karl Marx's wife telling him to get a job, a cigar-chomper asking the Beatles "What else do you do?" and the longhaired panhandler wearing the sign "WILL BE LAZY FOR FOOD." And of course the one of Reagan with his pants down and his dick out, saying to the USA, "Was it good for you, too?"
Tuli says the oldest of these go back more than 10 years. "I think I started doing this seriously in the late 80s," he explains, "but the last thing in there is probably not more than six months old. I made some substitutions at the last moment. In '59 I published something called Selected Fruits and Nuts, and that was drawings." He pauses. "I think I might've drawn better then."
The book's also got a full array of his "Great Moments in the History of" collages, in which he reproduces news clippings or advertisements, often requiring very little commentary to get his point across. For example, a news item in which an AIDS specialist observes that "If the cure for AIDS was one clean glass of water, most people in the world today would not have access to treatment" is a great moment in the history of capitalism. A funny wire photo of a dog sticking his snout into Queen Elizabeth II's crotch is a great moment in the history of the monarchy, with Tuli's added quip, "Wake up & smell the Corgi!"
When I spoke to Tuli last week he was going to join the Unbearables for their annual Brooklyn Bridge poetry event. He was hoping to tape it-"if my sound guy shows up"-for his public access show Revolting News, which runs 10 p.m. alternate Wednesdays on Manhattan channel 34.
Not bad for a guy who was already a well-known New York figure and publisher of the poetry magazine Yeah when the Fugs got started. Though they rejected the term, the Fugs started out really as a jug band, closer to a slovenly version of the folkies' protest music than to anything resembling rock. And more than either folk or rock, they were like performance art or a Happening, an anarchic beatnik joke. Even later, when they became more proficient as singers and had real rock musicians behind them-at one point, even hired-gun Atlantic Records session musicians-they were largely joking around with the form. For every 2:30 pseudo-folk-rock ditty like "Frenzy" or "Doin' All Right," their albums were carefully landmined with quasi-country protest jokes like "Wide, Wide River" (AKA "River of Shit"), or the 11-minute opus "Virgin Forest," a radio playlet in form, offering a vulgar thumbnail sketch of human evolution. It's something like what the Mothers of Invention were doing at the time (except that Zappa was basically a conservative and the Mothers' music had no real politics), or a filthy-minded Firesign Theater sketch. My three favorite Fugs songs are all Kupferberg's-"Nothing," "Defeated" and the jingle "The Ten Commandments." They're among the purest, bleakest-and yet funniest-expressions of the spirit of nihilism and anarchism in the annals of pre-punk music. (As a solo artist, Tuli also did the self-explanatory "Go Fuck Yourself (With Your Atom Bomb)" and "Nobody For President," and wrote the funniest put-down ever of the Fillmore East's Bill Graham, "MOTHER," as in "-fucker.")
The Fugs became a success so fast they surprised even themselves. They started out playing small gigs for audiences of 50 or 60 East Village hipsters. Soon they were a regular act at the Players Theater on MacDougal St., playing more than 700 concerts in a year-plus residency. The avantish label ESP put out The Fugs First Album and The Fugs Second Album, containing what is to this day some of the most silly and scandalous material that ever made it into the Top 100. They would later move to Atlantic (which, prefiguring the Sex Pistols, dropped them without releasing a single record by them) and Reprise. They toured extensively (Fleetwood Mac opened for them in Europe). Sanders was on the cover of Life.
It is perhaps their own fault that to the general public they were those "obscene" fellows behind joke songs like "My Baby Done Left Me (I Feel Like Homemade Shit)," "Slum Goddess," "Frenzy," "Group Grope" and the ineffable "Boobs a Lot." As a revolutionary force they were taken, shall we say, less than seriously. Then again, "Doin' All Right," with lyrics by their friend, the poet and antiwar leader Ted Berrigan, uses a salacious image to tremendous effect in quite possibly the finest antiwar couplet ever written: "I'm not ever gonna go to Vietnam/I prefer to stay right here and screw your mom." Other songs like "Kill for Peace," "War Kills Babies" (a wordless sound-collage of horror) and the wonderful "CIA Man" speak for themselves. The band was actively involved in helping to organize and play protest rallies and similar events all over the country. "We were sort of the USO for the left," Kupferberg tells me. "We played more benefits than any band I know." They were in effect the house band for the 1967 "exorcism" of the Pentagon, personally paying for the sound system, and recording the chant "Out Demons Out" (it appeared on their LP Tenderness Junction). In another of their most famous moments, while performing their piece "Spaghetti Death" one night, Ed Sanders threw spaghetti sauce on Andy Warhol's white suit. "It was during Vietnam. I guess it was symbolic," Kupferberg says to me, with a sly grin.
It was Sanders, disillusioned with the grim turn political and social events were taking in 1968 and '69, who broke up the band just as the 60s became the 70s. Kupferberg has said he thought it was exactly the wrong time for the Fugs to disband. "We ended at a time when I think we were most needed," he tells me. The "USO of the left" really could have helped morale "when things started going down."
It's a forgotten tidbit of local history that the Fugs actually put out their first album, The Village Fugs, as a Broadside LP, distributed through Moses Asch's Folkways Records. They recorded the whole thing in two two-hour sessions in 1965. Their producer was the legendary Harry Smith. "And he was very good in the studio," Tuli recalls wryly. At one point "he didn't like what the engineer was doing, and he threw a glass of whiskey against the wall. What a guy, right?"
It was this album that ESP rereleased as The Fugs First Album. Another early Broadside recording, "Kill for Peace," appears in the new five-CD box set from Smithsonian Folkways, The Best of Broadside 1962-1988. Sixties survivors will remember Broadside, a stapled, mimeographed (remember mimeographs?) newsletter and songsheet of folkie and protest music published by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, her late husband Gordon Friesen and their two daughters out of a cramped, rent-controlled apartment on W. 104th St. Many of the Broadside recordings were also done there, under close and primitive conditions that probably suited the beatnik sensibilities of singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs, Janis Ian, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Eric Andersen, Happy Traum and of course Bob Dylan, who was first published in and recorded for Broadside as Blind Boy Grunt. "Talking John Birch," Dylan's first published song, was printed in the inaugural issue, and "Blowin' in the Wind" was also debuted there.
All of this is included in The Best of Broadside. Although there's a lot of that terribly sincere, squeaky clean, Kumbaya-singing white folks' protest music spread across the 89 tracks on the five CDs-about half of it's stuff I just could never stomach, beginning with Seeger himself-I'm still surprised at how many strong, striking folk songs and protest anthems are left when all the cringe-making nuns-at-the-folk-mass stuff is avoided. There are a handful of great Vietnam-era songs I don't remember ever hearing before, like Thom Parrott's "Pinkville Helicopter" and "Hole in the Ground," and one of the best antiwar songs I never heard, a great r&b number called "Hell No, I Ain't Gonna Go," by the black duo Matt Jones and Elaine Laron. An early version of Janis Ian's "Society's Child," here called "Baby I've Been Thinking," reminded me what a sadly lovely tune it really is. For novelty, there's an early version of "Plastic Jesus," and Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" (the song that lodged a superior attitude toward "ticky-tacky suburbs" in my young mind) and something called "Song for Patty," as in Patty Hearst. And the several Phil Ochs songs collected here are among his best.
It all comes packaged with a fat, informative booklet as well. Working my way through all these old songs and stories last week, I remembered something Tuli said to me last spring: "We live in pessimistic times," he said, with a Kupferbergian gesture that somehow combined a fatalistic shrug and a wry grin, "but with optimism for the future."
My heartburn's been much better. Drink a lot of water.