Fugs left to right, 1965: Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver, Peter Stampfel, Steve Weber
There is a Peter Stampfel interview apropos of the Fugs on the Straight website, which this is a supplement to.If you don't know the Fugs, you might want to start there, or maybe with Jeffrey Lewis' "History of the Development of Punk on the Lower East Side of NYC, 1950-1975," which puts the Fugs in context. The new documentary about the Fugs, Fugs Film!, screens this Friday at the Cinematheque. You can also see a trailer for it here.
But meantime, here are two things: witness testimony on Fugs Film! from ARGH!!, who (unlike me) was able to see the film at its first screening, and after that, the full interview with Peter Stampfel, second from the right on the album cover (the guy holding a painting, which, note, is NOT painted by ths chimpanzee who did the painting on the cover of Fugs 4 Rounders Score: I checked.)
Part One: ARGH!! testimony (ARGH!! has disdain for capitals and follows his own conventions of punctuation*, so we are representing him as we have received this):
fugs movie is good…a gave it 5 stars (loved it) on the ballot after the movie…peter and jeffrey lewis give commentary throughout the movie…jeffrey is like a illegitimate son of the fugs…movie made me happy and sad…happy remembering my sprout yeas...i was 10-11 when the fugs started and i was just starting to see the world beyond family school tv cartoons and comic books…rushing home from school to watch cartoons and soupy sales then walter cronkite reporting assassinations and the vietnam war on the cbs evening news…body bags and bombs and crying vietnamese children running from burning villages…the beatles were making little girls ( and most of my friends) scream with adulation... the fugs were singing kill for peace and liking boobs a lot…i’m sad cuz the revolution the fugs were a soundtrack to fizzled and died and not much has changed in the last 60 years…war and corrupt fascist governments on the news everyday today… i graduated from mad magazine to paul krassner’s realist in my early teens…i stole a copy of abbie hoffman’s revolution for the hell of it and steal this book from the rack at seafair drugs across the road from my jr high school...the first fugs album i owned was the fug’s second album…somebody was an ARGHist before me…i found the album at a garage sale…wow…a band called the fucs…then realized someone fucked with the cover using a felt pen…a friend said it's the fugs not the fucs….
i wish i drew this…and i wish coulda attended this show…oct 22 is my birthday…1965…i turned 11
.jpeg)
thinking now…weird juxtaposition…fugs film vs butthole surfers the hole truth and nothing butt…
fugs…60s revolutionary beat-proto hippies hoping for change…freaks for peace…utopian dreamers…
buttholes…80s hedonistic freaks out to shock…no redeeming values…the hippie dream turned nightmare…
both reflections of their eras…both entertaining…
i think the buttholes exemplify the decline of modern civilization…sad but true…
kinda kennedy vs trump…i’m glad i’m old…and the end is nigh…
baffled since i was young…why do people keep having children…
i remember reading overpopulation is the number one threat to humanity and survival on the planet…
more people…more hate…more war…not enough food or water...
Fugs in Rubble, March 1965, by Dave Gahr, who took the Fugs First Album cover photo. This is, weirdly, how the images appear in the press folder, but I'll be expanding on them presently.
Allan (italics, below): So early on, did the Fugs seem particularly vulgar or edgy to you? Even songs like "I Feel Like Homemade Shit" seem pretty innocent now.
Edgier, more edgy, than anything previously had come close to even. Like, we talked about doing a version of "Get a Job", only (sings) "lick lick lick lick lick yum yum yum yum yum: Rim Job!" Y'know? (laughs). If I had have stayed with the group, I'm sure we would have worked it out. But anyway.
I could see why, actually, Sanders might worry about the word "shit", especially on the album cover, but... what about the line about heifer fuckin', which isn't censored?
How did you end up going to see the Fugs, the first time, at the Peace Eye Bookstore?
Weber said, "Hey, you should see what Sanders and Kupferberg are doing, they've written all these...," y'know, "and they're having a rehearsal", and so I went right over. And they didn't have any instruments instead of Weaver's hand drum, and I instantly volunteered to back them up. I absolutely wanted in on this: this is, like, fantastic! How could I not want in? And it was with really fun. In retrospect, I wish I'd stuck with them, despite, y'know, Weber. But then again, it's somewhat foolish to talk about what one could have done because it would have been neat, y'know? But one didn't, so the neatness never happened.
What do you mean, "despite Weber?"
I quit playing with Weber because one, as soon as the Beatles appeared, Weber realized on some subconscious level that we had some chance of a level of success greater than had been previously anticipated, and he started, basically, refusing to work out new songs. And on the other hand, he'd bitch onstage, "I'm tired of these old songs." I mean, working on a song involves playing it three times, period, and that's all it took to work out a new song. But he would bitch about how there no new songs, and I'd go, "Okay, here, I got new songs" and he would stomp out of the room.
And then he started missing gigs. On the third occasion, the Rounders were playing at Club 47 in Boston in July of 1965, and he decided to hitchhike there instead of taking a bus, and so he didn't show up when the gig actually started. That was the third no-show that he'd done. And also he was taking, like, at that time, prodigious amounts of speed, even for him. Like he went through this one period for several days, he was babbling away, and every sentence he said would have nothing to do with the sentence prior or subsequent. I mean, I wish that it could have been tape recorded for posterity. It would have been a cultural touchstone for the era.
Do you know about Hot Shoppes? They were this diner chain. And we had a gig in Baltimore and it's lunchtime and the place is crammed with people getting their lunch. And he proceeds to give the waitress some hashish: "hey, yeh-ye-yeah, you just smoke it in a pipe." 1965, in a crowded public place, offering drugs...? He was cruising for bigtime trouble. And given all these cumulative factors, missing that gig was the last straw [the two would reunite a couple of years later on Indian War Whoop].
In Ed Sanders' book Fug You, there's mention of a gig for Verve or such that Weber played at that you weren't on.
Weber continued playing with the Fugs. I quit playing with the Fugs because Weber was playing with the Fugs and I wanted nothing to do with Weber. I realize I hadn't made that specific point clear. And when Weber got kicked out, they had a bigger than previous concert opportunity and they were waiting for Weber to get onstage, and Weber was tuning, and tuning. Like...
...one legendary thing that Weber did before I met him was, he'd show up in Washington Square, right, and people had heard about this kid, he would have been 18... he'd show up with a guitar, and he'd tune, and tune, and tune, and at 5 o'clock, the cops would march you away from the fountain with their nightsticks, meaning, like, "Stop playing now", while waving sticks. You couldn't start playing til noon, and at 5 o'clock sharp, dozens of cops were there, to make sure you stopped. So according to [Stampfel's first wife and the writer of "Bird Song"] Antonia, who was there with him at the time, he would tune and tune and tune and finally, like, at one minute to five, he would suddenly play, like, a frantic, amazing one minute, and then the cops would shut him down.
Anyway, then what happened [at the Fugs gig] was, he was tuning and tuning and tuning and then he went backstage to tune, and then he didn't show up, and Sanders went to get him. And he had crawled into a large box and fallen asleep. That was the occasion that caused him to be fired from the Fugs. I don't know if Sanders specifically said when he was kicked out, but it was either late 66, or somewhat early 1967.
He was not the only one using amphetamine, however. You have this song "New Amphetamine Shriek", tell me about that? The song is almost kinda anti-drug, but you were also into it?
Actually, Weber and I did tons of speed when we met, and there were all sorts of... it was a feared drug, like a very bad drug. There was a bunch of early speedfreaks in Chicago who were referred to as "meth monsters"; this would be, like, 1962. And this friend of mine from Chicago was there, and there were all these people hanging around, and he said something about meth monsters, and a guy with a needle full of speed came up to him and shot himself up in the neck: "You want to see a meth monster?" And blood squirts out and gets on the guy (laughs). That's the sort of behaviour that these meth monsters would behave like! And in the folk scene at the time, it was like, groups of methadrine users would get into black magic, and then they would proceed to do black magic against other groups of amphetamine users. I mean, I heard this, but the source of that information was Chester Anderson, who I subsequently found out was a pathological liar. Chester Anderson is a complicated person!
I quit taking speed because it allegedly would kill you if you took it for any amount of time. And in the winter of 63-64, I got really really sick, which I attributed to speed, and I quit taking speed. The first two albums were recorded on amphetamine and weed. And so I quit then, but Weber and Antonia, my old lady, continued.
One line [in the song] about speed was how speed made you not want to have sex. Which was actually the opposite; personally I found that speed made me really, extremely horny, and it was possible to have an orgasm and then have another orgasm and then have another. Also, orgasms lasted longer and felt better, which is the reason that many members of the gay community are into, like, sex on speed. I know Tennessee Williams was. He liked to have his sexual partners shoot him up with speed before sex, that was like a kink of his. So that line, "I don't have a bedtime, I don't need to cum" -- it was a song about speed with some accurate speed information and some inaccurate speed information.
Yes, and there's the line, "If you don't like sleeping and don't want to screw/ You should take lots of amphetamines too." If that wasn't your experience, why did you include that inaccurate information?
Because I felt kind of weird about how super into sex speed would make me. This is kind of like, possibly, tied to Sanders not wanting to say "shit" on a record, despite our extremely transgressive attitude, we were still products of the time. And I would say there was a degree of shame involve, like I'm mildly, uh... embarrassed isn't the word... I haven't been embarrassed in decades. I consider embarrassment like an altered state, another way of being high in a strange way; like when one is embarrassed, one's feelings are more intense.
You're more self-aware. Like a bad trip without the drugs.
We lived in the same neighbourhood, and he would be peddling stuff with his wife on Spring Street, which is two blocks from me. We were about a five minute walk from each other, so we would run into each other all the time.
Peddling stuff like what? Poetry, or...?
Poetry, cartoons. His wife made jewelry and countercultural geegaws.
Further observations to be had in the Straight piece, including Bev Davies' story of seeing the Fugs and Tuli. For more information about Fugs Film! or to buy advance tickets, go here: https://viff.org/whats-on/viff26-fugs-film/
Part One: ARGH!! testimony (ARGH!! has disdain for capitals and follows his own conventions of punctuation*, so we are representing him as we have received this):
fugs movie is good…a gave it 5 stars (loved it) on the ballot after the movie…peter and jeffrey lewis give commentary throughout the movie…jeffrey is like a illegitimate son of the fugs…movie made me happy and sad…happy remembering my sprout yeas...i was 10-11 when the fugs started and i was just starting to see the world beyond family school tv cartoons and comic books…rushing home from school to watch cartoons and soupy sales then walter cronkite reporting assassinations and the vietnam war on the cbs evening news…body bags and bombs and crying vietnamese children running from burning villages…the beatles were making little girls ( and most of my friends) scream with adulation... the fugs were singing kill for peace and liking boobs a lot…i’m sad cuz the revolution the fugs were a soundtrack to fizzled and died and not much has changed in the last 60 years…war and corrupt fascist governments on the news everyday today… i graduated from mad magazine to paul krassner’s realist in my early teens…i stole a copy of abbie hoffman’s revolution for the hell of it and steal this book from the rack at seafair drugs across the road from my jr high school...the first fugs album i owned was the fug’s second album…somebody was an ARGHist before me…i found the album at a garage sale…wow…a band called the fucs…then realized someone fucked with the cover using a felt pen…a friend said it's the fugs not the fucs….
i wish i drew this…and i wish coulda attended this show…oct 22 is my birthday…1965…i turned 11
.jpeg)
thinking now…weird juxtaposition…fugs film vs butthole surfers the hole truth and nothing butt…
fugs…60s revolutionary beat-proto hippies hoping for change…freaks for peace…utopian dreamers…
buttholes…80s hedonistic freaks out to shock…no redeeming values…the hippie dream turned nightmare…
both reflections of their eras…both entertaining…
i think the buttholes exemplify the decline of modern civilization…sad but true…
kinda kennedy vs trump…i’m glad i’m old…and the end is nigh…
baffled since i was young…why do people keep having children…
i remember reading overpopulation is the number one threat to humanity and survival on the planet…
more people…more hate…more war…not enough food or water...
Part Two: Peter Stampfel
Fugs in Rubble, March 1965, by Dave Gahr, who took the Fugs First Album cover photo. This is, weirdly, how the images appear in the press folder, but I'll be expanding on them presently.
Allan (italics, below): So early on, did the Fugs seem particularly vulgar or edgy to you? Even songs like "I Feel Like Homemade Shit" seem pretty innocent now.
Peter: Well, one of the first points of attraction I had towards the Fugs was the fact that they had these two songs, "Coca Cola Douche" and especially "Bull Tongue Clit." I thought, like, 'Now man, that's in your face!" Y'know? And also you've gotta remember that when they do, "I Feel Like Homemade Shit", it was like, "I feel like homemade yodelodel-odel-odel-ay-ee," because of a reluctance to say "shit" on the record. It was certaintly extremely transgressive, which was one of the things that I thought was so great about it, but on the other side, there was the fact that Sanders was reluctant to say "shit" because it was going to be on a record, it is sort of mirroring a specfic era. That would be early 1965. I don't think there's anything that, y'know, vulgar or over the top on the first album, certainly not by current standards, but by contemporary standards, I could see how it could give some yahoos conniptions.
So you felt like it was edgy at the time.
So you felt like it was edgy at the time.
Edgier, more edgy, than anything previously had come close to even. Like, we talked about doing a version of "Get a Job", only (sings) "lick lick lick lick lick yum yum yum yum yum: Rim Job!" Y'know? (laughs). If I had have stayed with the group, I'm sure we would have worked it out. But anyway.
I could see why, actually, Sanders might worry about the word "shit", especially on the album cover, but... what about the line about heifer fuckin', which isn't censored?
That's curious (laughs)!
So tell me about "Bull Tongue Clit." It never made it onto a record? Was it an Ed or Tuli piece?
So tell me about "Bull Tongue Clit." It never made it onto a record? Was it an Ed or Tuli piece?
It was Ed. I don't think it ever did make it onto a record. It was not a great song! All I remember of it was, "She's got a bull tongue clit, she's got a bull tongue clit" (laughs). But it certainly was one of the most memorable titles ever. [It can be heard at about the 18:40 mark of this 1968 concert].
L-to-R Stampfel, Kupferberg, Sanders, Weaver, Weber, image by Dave Gahr
How did you end up going to see the Fugs, the first time, at the Peace Eye Bookstore?
Weber said, "Hey, you should see what Sanders and Kupferberg are doing, they've written all these...," y'know, "and they're having a rehearsal", and so I went right over. And they didn't have any instruments instead of Weaver's hand drum, and I instantly volunteered to back them up. I absolutely wanted in on this: this is, like, fantastic! How could I not want in? And it was with really fun. In retrospect, I wish I'd stuck with them, despite, y'know, Weber. But then again, it's somewhat foolish to talk about what one could have done because it would have been neat, y'know? But one didn't, so the neatness never happened.
What do you mean, "despite Weber?"
I quit playing with Weber because one, as soon as the Beatles appeared, Weber realized on some subconscious level that we had some chance of a level of success greater than had been previously anticipated, and he started, basically, refusing to work out new songs. And on the other hand, he'd bitch onstage, "I'm tired of these old songs." I mean, working on a song involves playing it three times, period, and that's all it took to work out a new song. But he would bitch about how there no new songs, and I'd go, "Okay, here, I got new songs" and he would stomp out of the room.
And then he started missing gigs. On the third occasion, the Rounders were playing at Club 47 in Boston in July of 1965, and he decided to hitchhike there instead of taking a bus, and so he didn't show up when the gig actually started. That was the third no-show that he'd done. And also he was taking, like, at that time, prodigious amounts of speed, even for him. Like he went through this one period for several days, he was babbling away, and every sentence he said would have nothing to do with the sentence prior or subsequent. I mean, I wish that it could have been tape recorded for posterity. It would have been a cultural touchstone for the era.
Do you know about Hot Shoppes? They were this diner chain. And we had a gig in Baltimore and it's lunchtime and the place is crammed with people getting their lunch. And he proceeds to give the waitress some hashish: "hey, yeh-ye-yeah, you just smoke it in a pipe." 1965, in a crowded public place, offering drugs...? He was cruising for bigtime trouble. And given all these cumulative factors, missing that gig was the last straw [the two would reunite a couple of years later on Indian War Whoop].
In Ed Sanders' book Fug You, there's mention of a gig for Verve or such that Weber played at that you weren't on.
Weber continued playing with the Fugs. I quit playing with the Fugs because Weber was playing with the Fugs and I wanted nothing to do with Weber. I realize I hadn't made that specific point clear. And when Weber got kicked out, they had a bigger than previous concert opportunity and they were waiting for Weber to get onstage, and Weber was tuning, and tuning. Like...
...one legendary thing that Weber did before I met him was, he'd show up in Washington Square, right, and people had heard about this kid, he would have been 18... he'd show up with a guitar, and he'd tune, and tune, and tune, and at 5 o'clock, the cops would march you away from the fountain with their nightsticks, meaning, like, "Stop playing now", while waving sticks. You couldn't start playing til noon, and at 5 o'clock sharp, dozens of cops were there, to make sure you stopped. So according to [Stampfel's first wife and the writer of "Bird Song"] Antonia, who was there with him at the time, he would tune and tune and tune and finally, like, at one minute to five, he would suddenly play, like, a frantic, amazing one minute, and then the cops would shut him down.
Anyway, then what happened [at the Fugs gig] was, he was tuning and tuning and tuning and then he went backstage to tune, and then he didn't show up, and Sanders went to get him. And he had crawled into a large box and fallen asleep. That was the occasion that caused him to be fired from the Fugs. I don't know if Sanders specifically said when he was kicked out, but it was either late 66, or somewhat early 1967.
He was not the only one using amphetamine, however. You have this song "New Amphetamine Shriek", tell me about that? The song is almost kinda anti-drug, but you were also into it?
Actually, Weber and I did tons of speed when we met, and there were all sorts of... it was a feared drug, like a very bad drug. There was a bunch of early speedfreaks in Chicago who were referred to as "meth monsters"; this would be, like, 1962. And this friend of mine from Chicago was there, and there were all these people hanging around, and he said something about meth monsters, and a guy with a needle full of speed came up to him and shot himself up in the neck: "You want to see a meth monster?" And blood squirts out and gets on the guy (laughs). That's the sort of behaviour that these meth monsters would behave like! And in the folk scene at the time, it was like, groups of methadrine users would get into black magic, and then they would proceed to do black magic against other groups of amphetamine users. I mean, I heard this, but the source of that information was Chester Anderson, who I subsequently found out was a pathological liar. Chester Anderson is a complicated person!
I quit taking speed because it allegedly would kill you if you took it for any amount of time. And in the winter of 63-64, I got really really sick, which I attributed to speed, and I quit taking speed. The first two albums were recorded on amphetamine and weed. And so I quit then, but Weber and Antonia, my old lady, continued.
One line [in the song] about speed was how speed made you not want to have sex. Which was actually the opposite; personally I found that speed made me really, extremely horny, and it was possible to have an orgasm and then have another orgasm and then have another. Also, orgasms lasted longer and felt better, which is the reason that many members of the gay community are into, like, sex on speed. I know Tennessee Williams was. He liked to have his sexual partners shoot him up with speed before sex, that was like a kink of his. So that line, "I don't have a bedtime, I don't need to cum" -- it was a song about speed with some accurate speed information and some inaccurate speed information.
Yes, and there's the line, "If you don't like sleeping and don't want to screw/ You should take lots of amphetamines too." If that wasn't your experience, why did you include that inaccurate information?
Because I felt kind of weird about how super into sex speed would make me. This is kind of like, possibly, tied to Sanders not wanting to say "shit" on a record, despite our extremely transgressive attitude, we were still products of the time. And I would say there was a degree of shame involve, like I'm mildly, uh... embarrassed isn't the word... I haven't been embarrassed in decades. I consider embarrassment like an altered state, another way of being high in a strange way; like when one is embarrassed, one's feelings are more intense.
You're more self-aware. Like a bad trip without the drugs.
Yeah, yeah.
So have you seen the film?
I've seen the film maybe three times, I think. It's excellent! I think they did a really terrific job, and also, most of the material in it, the majority was stuff I didn't know. Like, the Ken Weaver backstory is, "Holy shit!" The film is fucking great. Like, I don't see how a much better job could have been done. There were a couple of screenings in which I was a participant in a panel afterwards, so I had to see it a couple of times, and I even enjoyed seeing it multiple times. I'm not much of a multiple watcher of films. I would absolutely give it the highest rating.
Terrific, let me clear up two quick things. After you left the Fugs in 1965, you did not play with them again, correct?
Terrific, let me clear up two quick things. After you left the Fugs in 1965, you did not play with them again, correct?
They invited me to do one show with them two years ago, period, that was it. It was a Fugs show where I joined them for a couple of songs. And Ed was willing to be interviewed for the Rounders documentary, Bound to Lose, and I would run into him occasionally, and we would talk, but I don't think there was a further occasion on which I played with them again.
And we should also mention the Jeffrey Lewis album of Tuli Kupferberg songs.
Oh yeah, yeah!
That's a marvelous album. How did it feel, revisiting those songs with a different band?
That's a marvelous album. How did it feel, revisiting those songs with a different band?
Well, for one thing, I hadn't heard most of those songs! I wasn't aware of the fact that Tuli wrote so many songs, and so many songs that were really, like, terrific. Jeffrey befriended Tuli in the 1990s or 80s, and that's when he learned a lot of these songs, and after Tuli died, Jeffrey would do a memorial on his birthday. And at a point, he asked me to join, you know? And he was playing, also, with Steve Espinola, who I hadn't met previously, who subsequently joined my band [he actually seems to be in both the Atomic Meta-Pagans and the Ether Frolic Mob with Peter, and perhaps others]. But what happened was, for Tuli's birthday, we'd get together and do Tuli songs, and we'd often do new ones, to be non-repetitive. And we kept saying, "We should record these," which we finally did, which I'm very, very delighted about. I highly recommend the album of us doing Tuli songs.
Did you stay in touch with Tuli?
Did you stay in touch with Tuli?
We lived in the same neighbourhood, and he would be peddling stuff with his wife on Spring Street, which is two blocks from me. We were about a five minute walk from each other, so we would run into each other all the time.
Peddling stuff like what? Poetry, or...?
Poetry, cartoons. His wife made jewelry and countercultural geegaws.
Further observations to be had in the Straight piece, including Bev Davies' story of seeing the Fugs and Tuli. For more information about Fugs Film! or to buy advance tickets, go here: https://viff.org/whats-on/viff26-fugs-film/
*Addendum from ARGH!!
tanx for sharing my views on the fugs and the state of humanity today...uncivilization...i don't have a disdain for capitals and punctuation...lazy one finger typer...usually a coffee or cocktail in the other hand...also i dig ee cummings...letter writing and comic captions i print all capitals...everyone shouts in my comics...my cursive handwriting is a scribble no one can read...
No comments:
Post a Comment