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Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs & Counterculture in the Lower East Side
Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic, often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend Wm S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the 60s, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, & leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs--formed in 1964 by Sanders & his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg)--as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 4, 2010
20 people are currently reading
427 people want to read
About the author
Ed Sanders
138 books80 followersEd Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.
Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.
In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.
Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.
In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a "Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath."
As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.
In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.
Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.
In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a "Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath."
As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
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June 8, 2012
To disclaim, I admit that The Fugs are one of my Top 5 favorite musical groups and I also enjoy the poetry and prose of Ed Sanders. Both share a feral irreverence combined with transcendental vulgarity, a style close to my heart. Fug You: Etc. is filled with mad pranks, merry jests, Dada engagements with The Man, junkie perils, lowbrow trash art, balling, group gropes, culture-jamming and traveling the country with a subversive hippie-punk band. The Fugs, through their style and association with the Mad Magus Harry Smith (who also appears in Patti Smith's wonderful Just Kids) and their torqued-up, freaked-out acid folk are popularly considered to be a bridge to Punk. And there are sure a lot of proto-punk hijinx here. While Fug You doesn't have the flow of Sander's 1968, it does serve up a juicy slice of heavily documented counter-culture history. Most will know Sanders from his book on the Manson cult, The Family, and the present trip, by necessity, also navigates some heavy currents of those weird times. But there is a Blakean celebration of life growing wild here with Egyptian water poppies & other strange flowers. Read Fug You... to experience a time in wild transition, much as ours or any time. Let it inspire you to freak out a little bit, in a good way.
December 23, 2020
Ed Sanders is, without a doubt, one of my absolute favorite poets ever and someone who I‘ve borrowed from extensively & unashamedly in a lot of my own poetic scribblings and self-published organs of detritus. But the Ed Sanders I love (not the only Ed Sanders mind you) is the demented, licentious, downright fucking freaky Sanders of the 1960s, straddling the shift from beatniks to hippies, when he was running the lower east side’s Peace Eye bookstore and publishing, through his Fuck You Press, a variety of unhinged and perverse poetry, most notably the journal Fuck You/a magazine of the arts. The latter is without question one of the seminal publications in the proliferation of marginal, self-published micropresses that comprise the “mimeograph revolution”.
The DIY freedom mimeo offered these writers on the margins resulted in some of the best poetry published in the 60s and 70s, similar to the surge in obscure, imaginative publications in the zine milieu of the 1980s, made possible by the ubiquity of photocopiers. Some of the other superlative efforts of the mimeo wave include Tuli Kupferberg’s (Sanders’ bandmate in THE FUGS) releases Yeah! & Birth, the inimitable C: a journal of poetry by Ted Berrigan (a frequent contributor to Sanders’ rag), the numerous brilliant pamphlets by Cleveland‘s d.a. levy, and the British publication My Own Mag. But Fuck You/a magazine of the arts is far and away my favorite, mainly bc the complete lack of any pretense or abandon displayed by poets like Sanders, Berrigan, Nelson Barr, Al Fowler, Douglas Blazek, and Szabo in its pages is right up my alley and has indelibly influenced the unapologetically deviant, incoherent, acerbic, and downright hostile approach I often aim for in my own writing. Anyway, you don’t care.
This book documents the good old days when Sanders was writing poems about toe queens, gobble gobble, group grope, and probably shooting amphetamines or something. I have yet to explore Sanders’ post-Fuck You/ material too deeply. He went on to publish Woodstock Journal, which has its moments, and I’m kind of intrigued by his concept of investigative poetry, which he’s applied to figures as disparate as Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, and Chekov. But, at risk of sounding like an ass and putting my foot all the way in my mouth down the line, it seems like most of Ed’s poetry from after the FUP period begins to take itself much more seriously — with predictably dull consequences. To me, it feels like an increasingly “important” (self-?) poet suddenly jettisoning all the goofy filth he wrote with a impish grin in his youth and attempting to write erudite, solemn poetry like “the greats” (for Sanders, it seems his paragons, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound, loom especially large). I’ll always prefer the kind of raw, irreverent filth spewing “from a secret location” that these miscreants were excreting all over the 1960s to pompous, self-consciously “literary” dogshit grasping for profundity.
All cocksmen, cunt slurpers, pill scarfers, and seriously evil stomper types should fuck with this book; then go read some scans of Fuck You Press joints — as unfortunately, along with most of the best mimeo texts of this era, physical copies regularly fetch prices at boutique booksellers so obscene that they would likely make d.a. levy blow his brains out all over again.
The DIY freedom mimeo offered these writers on the margins resulted in some of the best poetry published in the 60s and 70s, similar to the surge in obscure, imaginative publications in the zine milieu of the 1980s, made possible by the ubiquity of photocopiers. Some of the other superlative efforts of the mimeo wave include Tuli Kupferberg’s (Sanders’ bandmate in THE FUGS) releases Yeah! & Birth, the inimitable C: a journal of poetry by Ted Berrigan (a frequent contributor to Sanders’ rag), the numerous brilliant pamphlets by Cleveland‘s d.a. levy, and the British publication My Own Mag. But Fuck You/a magazine of the arts is far and away my favorite, mainly bc the complete lack of any pretense or abandon displayed by poets like Sanders, Berrigan, Nelson Barr, Al Fowler, Douglas Blazek, and Szabo in its pages is right up my alley and has indelibly influenced the unapologetically deviant, incoherent, acerbic, and downright hostile approach I often aim for in my own writing. Anyway, you don’t care.
This book documents the good old days when Sanders was writing poems about toe queens, gobble gobble, group grope, and probably shooting amphetamines or something. I have yet to explore Sanders’ post-Fuck You/ material too deeply. He went on to publish Woodstock Journal, which has its moments, and I’m kind of intrigued by his concept of investigative poetry, which he’s applied to figures as disparate as Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, and Chekov. But, at risk of sounding like an ass and putting my foot all the way in my mouth down the line, it seems like most of Ed’s poetry from after the FUP period begins to take itself much more seriously — with predictably dull consequences. To me, it feels like an increasingly “important” (self-?) poet suddenly jettisoning all the goofy filth he wrote with a impish grin in his youth and attempting to write erudite, solemn poetry like “the greats” (for Sanders, it seems his paragons, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound, loom especially large). I’ll always prefer the kind of raw, irreverent filth spewing “from a secret location” that these miscreants were excreting all over the 1960s to pompous, self-consciously “literary” dogshit grasping for profundity.
All cocksmen, cunt slurpers, pill scarfers, and seriously evil stomper types should fuck with this book; then go read some scans of Fuck You Press joints — as unfortunately, along with most of the best mimeo texts of this era, physical copies regularly fetch prices at boutique booksellers so obscene that they would likely make d.a. levy blow his brains out all over again.
September 12, 2012
In the first pages of Fug You, Ed Sanders recalls the City Lights Books publication of his Poem from Jail, composed on toilet paper during his 1961 incarceration for attempting to swim aboard a nuclear submarine and “conduct a peace vigil atop its missile hatches.”
After this, we will follow him anywhere. (He was not rehabilitated.)
Sanders gamely squires us to the streets, parks, and stages where he and a host of captains courageous, including Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jean Genet, courted clampdown with provocative art and peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War. While Sanders claims not to have been “an integral part of anything” as much as “an experimental participant. . . daring to be part of the history of the era,” one comes away from Fug You with renewed faith in the efficacy of sheer ballsiness. Yes, their heroes were slain (Sanders argues persuasively against “lone nut” assassination theories), pot was not legalized, and the war dragged on, but through court cases, publicity coups, and inspirational boldness, Sanders and Co. made the world safer for artists and other mischief makers.
Sanders’s ticket from his native Kansas City to the Beatnik-breeding Lower East Side was NYU. While conducting “total assault on the culture,” holding down a couple of jobs, and starting a family, he graduated in 1964 with a BA in Greek. Remarkably, significant drug and alcohol use, plus erotomania, coincided with all of the above. But despite the cannabis-and-sex-scented chaos, Sanders documented and saved much (and stayed married to wife Miriam, going on 50 years). At 72, the longtime Woodstock resident is far from burned out; his brisk, economical reportage, free of “memoirist angst” and including many illustrations, conveys fathoms of swept-under-the-rug history (Lenny Bruce’s travails, the rise of the CIA/FBI), spiced with frequent bacchanalia.
Sanders’s hieroglyphic-festooned Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts looms large. This venture featured Sanders’s own rich text and erotic glyphs, plus works by Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and dozens of others. Due to his penchant for what he readily calls smut, it also got him arrested for obscenity—his case was dismissed—and led to cops breaking into his apartment and stealing much of his property, including some amateur porn flicks (never recovered). Not long after FuckYou hit the streets, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, later bugged by the FBI. (Sanders obtained his surveillance records through the Freedom of Information Act.)
Sanders cops to craving “the white stag of fame,” and with the formation of “satiric proto-folk-rock group” The Fugs, he got it. The band toured the world, sharing stages and smoke with Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, and the MC5, and getting in trouble for bawdy lyrics. This celebrity, combined with the escalation of war, the RFK assassination (the book is dedicated to “the presidency of RFK”), and the introduction of heroin into the counterculture, finally tuckered Sanders out, at least temporarily.
Throughout Fug You, Sanders maintains a refreshing conviction that evil exists. In the aftermath of the Manson murders, he stopped writing poetry and headed west to cover the shock and “come up close to (evil’s) clear and present manifestations,” asserting that the experience “helped me to grow up.” His resulting book, The Family, is widely regarded as the best account of the dark side of the hippie dream.
Yet Fug You pulses mostly with triumphant fun and hope, eliciting a sense of gratitude that Ed Sanders still walks among us, well versed in darkness, sustained by light, and still beckoning to The Future.
(this review originally appeared in Chronogram magazine)
After this, we will follow him anywhere. (He was not rehabilitated.)
Sanders gamely squires us to the streets, parks, and stages where he and a host of captains courageous, including Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jean Genet, courted clampdown with provocative art and peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War. While Sanders claims not to have been “an integral part of anything” as much as “an experimental participant. . . daring to be part of the history of the era,” one comes away from Fug You with renewed faith in the efficacy of sheer ballsiness. Yes, their heroes were slain (Sanders argues persuasively against “lone nut” assassination theories), pot was not legalized, and the war dragged on, but through court cases, publicity coups, and inspirational boldness, Sanders and Co. made the world safer for artists and other mischief makers.
Sanders’s ticket from his native Kansas City to the Beatnik-breeding Lower East Side was NYU. While conducting “total assault on the culture,” holding down a couple of jobs, and starting a family, he graduated in 1964 with a BA in Greek. Remarkably, significant drug and alcohol use, plus erotomania, coincided with all of the above. But despite the cannabis-and-sex-scented chaos, Sanders documented and saved much (and stayed married to wife Miriam, going on 50 years). At 72, the longtime Woodstock resident is far from burned out; his brisk, economical reportage, free of “memoirist angst” and including many illustrations, conveys fathoms of swept-under-the-rug history (Lenny Bruce’s travails, the rise of the CIA/FBI), spiced with frequent bacchanalia.
Sanders’s hieroglyphic-festooned Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts looms large. This venture featured Sanders’s own rich text and erotic glyphs, plus works by Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and dozens of others. Due to his penchant for what he readily calls smut, it also got him arrested for obscenity—his case was dismissed—and led to cops breaking into his apartment and stealing much of his property, including some amateur porn flicks (never recovered). Not long after FuckYou hit the streets, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, later bugged by the FBI. (Sanders obtained his surveillance records through the Freedom of Information Act.)
Sanders cops to craving “the white stag of fame,” and with the formation of “satiric proto-folk-rock group” The Fugs, he got it. The band toured the world, sharing stages and smoke with Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, and the MC5, and getting in trouble for bawdy lyrics. This celebrity, combined with the escalation of war, the RFK assassination (the book is dedicated to “the presidency of RFK”), and the introduction of heroin into the counterculture, finally tuckered Sanders out, at least temporarily.
Throughout Fug You, Sanders maintains a refreshing conviction that evil exists. In the aftermath of the Manson murders, he stopped writing poetry and headed west to cover the shock and “come up close to (evil’s) clear and present manifestations,” asserting that the experience “helped me to grow up.” His resulting book, The Family, is widely regarded as the best account of the dark side of the hippie dream.
Yet Fug You pulses mostly with triumphant fun and hope, eliciting a sense of gratitude that Ed Sanders still walks among us, well versed in darkness, sustained by light, and still beckoning to The Future.
(this review originally appeared in Chronogram magazine)
June 29, 2012
I've always liked the Fugs, but kind of more as a concept than actually listening to them a lot - except for the materpieces "Nothing" and "CIA Man" of course. I also haven't read much of Sanders' poetry, but this book is an incredibly well written, passionate look back at the '60s in New York that gives you an informed insider's view of a lot of the major poetry, rock music and radical political activity that went on.
Sanders knew all the great poets of the time and published them in his homegrown mimeographed literary magazine "Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts". He also led the Fugs and kept them together as a band, which as any musician knows is never an easy task, let alone during a wild decade like the '60s with a sudden flood of recreational drugs and politics being fought out on the streets.
On top of those two major cultural ventures, Sanders also kept a bookstore, Peace Eye Books, going for a few years. If you have any doubts that society will lose a huge chunk of its collective soul if book and record stores disappear, pick up this book. Peace Eye was a nucleus for writers, thinkers, wingnuts, drifters and artists who met and talked face to face, which will always have its advantages over exchanging texts through electronic media. I know as a fading bookseller myself that moving to Baltimore initially with a job in one of its bookstores was a fantastic easy entry into what was and still is one of the best undergrounds in the country.
Sanders knew all the great poets of the time and published them in his homegrown mimeographed literary magazine "Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts". He also led the Fugs and kept them together as a band, which as any musician knows is never an easy task, let alone during a wild decade like the '60s with a sudden flood of recreational drugs and politics being fought out on the streets.
On top of those two major cultural ventures, Sanders also kept a bookstore, Peace Eye Books, going for a few years. If you have any doubts that society will lose a huge chunk of its collective soul if book and record stores disappear, pick up this book. Peace Eye was a nucleus for writers, thinkers, wingnuts, drifters and artists who met and talked face to face, which will always have its advantages over exchanging texts through electronic media. I know as a fading bookseller myself that moving to Baltimore initially with a job in one of its bookstores was a fantastic easy entry into what was and still is one of the best undergrounds in the country.
June 25, 2015
В меру хаотичный и бестолковый учебник истории 60-х, который, вместе с тем, неплохо ставит это десятилетие в перспективу и подправляет восприятие. Бестолковость и пунктирность его объяснимы: автору около 70, дело было давно, он явно опирался на свои дневники и вырезки из прессы (коих рьяный собиратель), нарратив не склеился. К тому же, нам хорошо известно, что хорошо помнят шестидесятые лишь те, кто в них не жил. А шутку 60-х и подавно поймут лишь те, кто там жил, но для тех, кто там жил, это не шутка.
А ценность в том, что лучше понимаешь непрерывность процесса — от подлинной творческой революции второй половины 40-х — к ее дальним отголоскам и бледным последствиям в конце 60-х, переход от одной культурной парадигмы к другой: они как-то существуют у нас в головах отдельно по привычке, а на самом деле процесс не прерывался, и такие фигуры как Аллен Гинзбёрг и Эд Сэндерз — тому подтверждение, они суть воплощения этой непрерывности, да и самого процесса. А ярлыки «битники» и «хиппи» сочинили, как известно, журналисты, чтобы немытым массам было проще ориентироваться в том, чего они не понимают и что не приемлют.
А ценность в том, что лучше понимаешь непрерывность процесса — от подлинной творческой революции второй половины 40-х — к ее дальним отголоскам и бледным последствиям в конце 60-х, переход от одной культурной парадигмы к другой: они как-то существуют у нас в головах отдельно по привычке, а на самом деле процесс не прерывался, и такие фигуры как Аллен Гинзбёрг и Эд Сэндерз — тому подтверждение, они суть воплощения этой непрерывности, да и самого процесса. А ярлыки «битники» и «хиппи» сочинили, как известно, журналисты, чтобы немытым массам было проще ориентироваться в том, чего они не понимают и что не приемлют.
July 22, 2012
This is one rollicking good time. The stories race by, each touched upon quickly but with enough detail and flashes of insight that it has the feel of a great introduction to many new people and stories, with Sanders' inimitable wit and city-savvy guiding you through. I read it compulsively, and recommend it highly. I docked a star only because I wanted it to keep going! The book ends right as Sanders is beginning the research on the Manson family that really turned his life upside-down and resulted in the great & crazed book "The Family." I'm hoping for a "FUG YOU 2" ("Electric Boogaloo," of course), that picks up in 1970.
Ed Sanders is an American original who hasn't fully gotten his due. FUG YOU is the book to get you started.
Ed Sanders is an American original who hasn't fully gotten his due. FUG YOU is the book to get you started.
October 31, 2012
I feel like Ed Sanders gets overlooked as one of the great 60s poets, esp. when I go back to his works and see just how much he extended that fantastic Ginsberg discourse found in "Howl." Just who else did that with such fervour and weirdness - "group grope"; "Times Square gobble scene"; "freak over the border." Sanders is the ultimate Beatnik prose master. "Fug You" is a more thorough discussion of events found in his "Tales of Beatnik Glory" and "1968" - so it's familiar territory for students of Sandersiana, but it's still massively enjoyable, and a great entry for newcomers. It's 400-plus pages but you could read it in one sitting. Fun and freaky. Now I'm going to back and re-read his poetry ...
December 10, 2021
It seems like a good idea when you’re a kid but once you get older it just looks silly.
July 13, 2012
Ed Sanders' memoir of the Lower East Side in the Sixties, when the poet published a literary magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, owned the Peace Eye Bookstore, and organized the rock band called The Fugs, as well as founded the Yippies, is an enthralling and even dazzling tour of a madcap period of activity in anarchistic letters -- one in a long line of demonstrations that, as Laura Riding once averred, anarchism is not enough: my link text
"We blew it!" Captain America (Peter Fonda) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper) in Hopper's Easy Rider, and Hopper figures importantly in Sanders' memoir, as the source of Sanders' initial lead into the milieu connecting Charles Manson to Jay Sebring -- the hair-dresser friend of Sharon Tate murdered along with her friends in the Family rumbles of July 1969. The justly honored author of The Family, the best book on the Manson murders, had something to make up for, and it was The Fugs. The Manson assignment was his escape from The Fugs' foundering. By his own account, Sanders rode The Fugs on the countercultural zeitgeist until sometime in 1967 when, having written a song ("Virgin Forest," off the second Fugs record) that he claims shifted the Beatles in their songwriting to moody, suite-like elongations, been signed to Atlantic Records by no less than Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Artegun (a photo of them all, right there in Sanders' book), men who can in some sense be said to have conjured modern recorded popular music, when, having appeared on the cover of LIFE, Sanders was on the cusp of a truly pop crossing, Atlantic listened to that third Fugs record and canceled the contract.
It takes a prickly, show-me kind of entitlement to bear that kind of rejection, but Sanders is part imperious journalistic panache, part undupable literary self-invention. "If he weren't 'groping for peace,' Elizabeth Hardwick nailed him in 1966, in the NYROB, "he would have been in the Twenties an atheist, in the Thirties a Trotskyite. But he is an actor possessing a subversive energy that does not come forth on records or certainly not in his books of verses. . ." An actor, yes, in a conceptual art of his own making, a cultural impresario and a commissar of the sex-positive generation. How you read Sanders' activities as a vanguardist of free love may well predict how comforted you are by Sanders' aversion to the personal, the domestic, the stewardly, as well as his love of gossip, rumor, conspiracy, and lore. In his own mind he broke ground in the representation of sexual pleasure by filming copulating couples on his apartment's hardwood floors in a Secret Location on the Lower East Side sometime in 1963-1964. We'll never know, because the New York City police seem to have raided the apartment and confiscated the film. You may think Sanders at the vanguard of pornography, but by his account Amphetamine Head, the film Vice swiped, was an effort to understand the connection between the titular drug and power trips as they work themselves out in sex, so even if you don't credit his read you can't help but admit that the anthropological pluck made him particularly well-suited to play Pan-in-Reverse to Charles Manson.
The memoir never quite cops to what is obvious, which is that the Fugs is the brain-child of Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg working themselves out in the young Sanders' psyche. Sanders pimped out a Fugs patron to Olson, but to Sanders it's all in the wages of mentorship in the poetry world. When the assignation comes a cropper, Olson doesn't blink to betray the patron's ex-, the poet John Wieners, nor does Sanders feel a moment's remorse for making it all happen -- buy hey, it's a good story and it got into the memoir. Sanders is a little like that. He sees no contradiction between his pride in making the claim about his influence on the Beatles, and re-printing (as though it's significant) a lukewarm review Robert Shelton (Dylan's first biographer) wrote about The Fugs in the Times. But never being able to decide whether The Fugs was worth it was always Sanders' trouble with The Fugs. They were a brilliant band, but the conceptual coup of this reductio ad absurdum of rock's romantic pretensions could never pass muster (as the continually revolving line-up of musicians attests) with those whose stakes in the pretensions were greatest. The Fugs were doing what Patti Smith did ten years before Smith did it (the social connection between the bands was Smith's lover, Holy Modal Rounders drummer Sam Shepard), as it happened, better. Sanders got swept up in the Gram Parsons fever that overtook American music in 1969, but he'd never admit to being part of that. Why not? For all his privilege, there was no concept in Parsons' love of vernacular music. I think in the Sixties Sanders was trying not to be a poet, and wow, he did that spectacularly. He was -- perhaps still is -- a man of letters, his activities on the Lower East Side an opus of politically engaged literary cultural performances. See him act like himself with William F. Buckley, Jack Kerouac and an academic sociologist on a 1968 Firing Line (the transcript poorly edited in reproduction here); I remember seeing that when I was a kid, and it's still a hoot!
"We blew it!" Captain America (Peter Fonda) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper) in Hopper's Easy Rider, and Hopper figures importantly in Sanders' memoir, as the source of Sanders' initial lead into the milieu connecting Charles Manson to Jay Sebring -- the hair-dresser friend of Sharon Tate murdered along with her friends in the Family rumbles of July 1969. The justly honored author of The Family, the best book on the Manson murders, had something to make up for, and it was The Fugs. The Manson assignment was his escape from The Fugs' foundering. By his own account, Sanders rode The Fugs on the countercultural zeitgeist until sometime in 1967 when, having written a song ("Virgin Forest," off the second Fugs record) that he claims shifted the Beatles in their songwriting to moody, suite-like elongations, been signed to Atlantic Records by no less than Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Artegun (a photo of them all, right there in Sanders' book), men who can in some sense be said to have conjured modern recorded popular music, when, having appeared on the cover of LIFE, Sanders was on the cusp of a truly pop crossing, Atlantic listened to that third Fugs record and canceled the contract.
It takes a prickly, show-me kind of entitlement to bear that kind of rejection, but Sanders is part imperious journalistic panache, part undupable literary self-invention. "If he weren't 'groping for peace,' Elizabeth Hardwick nailed him in 1966, in the NYROB, "he would have been in the Twenties an atheist, in the Thirties a Trotskyite. But he is an actor possessing a subversive energy that does not come forth on records or certainly not in his books of verses. . ." An actor, yes, in a conceptual art of his own making, a cultural impresario and a commissar of the sex-positive generation. How you read Sanders' activities as a vanguardist of free love may well predict how comforted you are by Sanders' aversion to the personal, the domestic, the stewardly, as well as his love of gossip, rumor, conspiracy, and lore. In his own mind he broke ground in the representation of sexual pleasure by filming copulating couples on his apartment's hardwood floors in a Secret Location on the Lower East Side sometime in 1963-1964. We'll never know, because the New York City police seem to have raided the apartment and confiscated the film. You may think Sanders at the vanguard of pornography, but by his account Amphetamine Head, the film Vice swiped, was an effort to understand the connection between the titular drug and power trips as they work themselves out in sex, so even if you don't credit his read you can't help but admit that the anthropological pluck made him particularly well-suited to play Pan-in-Reverse to Charles Manson.
The memoir never quite cops to what is obvious, which is that the Fugs is the brain-child of Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg working themselves out in the young Sanders' psyche. Sanders pimped out a Fugs patron to Olson, but to Sanders it's all in the wages of mentorship in the poetry world. When the assignation comes a cropper, Olson doesn't blink to betray the patron's ex-, the poet John Wieners, nor does Sanders feel a moment's remorse for making it all happen -- buy hey, it's a good story and it got into the memoir. Sanders is a little like that. He sees no contradiction between his pride in making the claim about his influence on the Beatles, and re-printing (as though it's significant) a lukewarm review Robert Shelton (Dylan's first biographer) wrote about The Fugs in the Times. But never being able to decide whether The Fugs was worth it was always Sanders' trouble with The Fugs. They were a brilliant band, but the conceptual coup of this reductio ad absurdum of rock's romantic pretensions could never pass muster (as the continually revolving line-up of musicians attests) with those whose stakes in the pretensions were greatest. The Fugs were doing what Patti Smith did ten years before Smith did it (the social connection between the bands was Smith's lover, Holy Modal Rounders drummer Sam Shepard), as it happened, better. Sanders got swept up in the Gram Parsons fever that overtook American music in 1969, but he'd never admit to being part of that. Why not? For all his privilege, there was no concept in Parsons' love of vernacular music. I think in the Sixties Sanders was trying not to be a poet, and wow, he did that spectacularly. He was -- perhaps still is -- a man of letters, his activities on the Lower East Side an opus of politically engaged literary cultural performances. See him act like himself with William F. Buckley, Jack Kerouac and an academic sociologist on a 1968 Firing Line (the transcript poorly edited in reproduction here); I remember seeing that when I was a kid, and it's still a hoot!
May 26, 2013
At first it seems like a rambling, random, disjointed memoir of the years 1962 to 1970, but as you read it, you realize that each little memory blurt is precisely what and where it needs to be, like strokes in an impressionist painting. Once you start this, it sucks you in and pulls you on, until you realize you've read 100 pages in one sitting. A valuable history not just of Ed Sanders, or the Fugs, but of the time period itself.
Recommended.
Recommended.
May 15, 2017
"Fug You' is a great snapshot of New York City Political/Hippie/culture circa the 1960s. The book reads like a journal more than a memoir, but that is perfectly fine. Full of documents, posters, and stuff like that gives the book a great flavor of its time and place. Ed Sanders was right in the middle of the 60s storm, and at the time, it seems anything could be possible. The sense of community is strong in Sanders' world, and it's interesting to note that as we read along the book, and it heads toward the 70s things turn darker, as well as the nature of New York City itself. Sanders is a terrific narrator/witness and lots of insight into the music business as well as the politic business. The Fugs were an important part of the scene, and this book covers that as well as the book business. I particularly enjoy his adventure as a bookstore owner/manager and dealing with the Yippie/Hippie/NYC life at the time. One can't go back in time, but this book in a very witty nature allows that adventure for the reader. The minus part is that it could have been edited better, but at the end of the day, it's a charming yet threatening cloud as darkness (Kennedy/King assassinations, Manson & Nixon) lurks around the scene.
October 14, 2020
If Ed didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to invent him because our imaginative powers wouldn't be equal to the task.
In this book, founding Fug Ed Sanders lays out his role in the sixties in glorious, memorable
detail. From starting one of the first "underground" presses to exorcising the Pentagon, to becoming an international rock star to helping found the Yippies, this man was there. Forget Forrest Gump, this man was actually there, is brilliant and is no fiction.
Fug You is well-written, expansive and chocked with Sanders' wonderful wit, humor and classical / ancient Egyptian / beatnik point of view. This book put me on a Sanders reading binge. Oh, and check out his recordings with the Fugs and as a solo artist. Get to know the sixties, Sanders-style.
In this book, founding Fug Ed Sanders lays out his role in the sixties in glorious, memorable
detail. From starting one of the first "underground" presses to exorcising the Pentagon, to becoming an international rock star to helping found the Yippies, this man was there. Forget Forrest Gump, this man was actually there, is brilliant and is no fiction.
Fug You is well-written, expansive and chocked with Sanders' wonderful wit, humor and classical / ancient Egyptian / beatnik point of view. This book put me on a Sanders reading binge. Oh, and check out his recordings with the Fugs and as a solo artist. Get to know the sixties, Sanders-style.
August 9, 2025
I read this book because I’m a fan of the Fugs and inspired by the profane, irreverent culture of the 1960s East Village, in sharp contrast to the priggish seriousness of the West Coast hippies who evolving at the same time.
The book is basically a chronological diary of Sanders’ work as a writer, poet, rock musician and prankster. What it lacks is a big-picture view of the East Coast counter-culture and its ties to evolving politics and the arts. In this case, a biography would be better than this just-the-facts autobiography.
The book is basically a chronological diary of Sanders’ work as a writer, poet, rock musician and prankster. What it lacks is a big-picture view of the East Coast counter-culture and its ties to evolving politics and the arts. In this case, a biography would be better than this just-the-facts autobiography.
Read
December 7, 2020Ed Sanders is probably one of the coolest beat figures. real renaissance man
August 5, 2013
I just finished reading this amazing retrospective of the 60s by counter-culture icon Ed Sanders, of The Fugs and Peace Eye Bookstore. It's a lovely, signed hardcover edition my wife got me two birthdays ago. I thoroughly enjoyed this arc of history from The Beats to The Family, and now I need to read The Family. I really appreciated learning about Sander's scholarly side: Egyptian hieroglyphics and ancient Greek drama and how this informed his art and antics. In these days of Photoshop it was also fascinating to learn of the obsession, effort, and detail required in his early publication days when the model of print machine he had was as much a hallmark of the era as the music. In New York at least, it was interesting to learn of this intersection of proto-hippie world changers and ardent Catholic activists. The fact that The Fugs shared the stage with The Grateful Dead and The Velvet Underground shows how Sanders, apparently inventor of the term "punk" helped to usher in one era and see the birth of another.
One thing that that leads me to an imagined possibility that is too good to fact-check: Is the lyrics "Transylvanian Transvestite Time Trap" in any way an inspiration to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?
Also, when will the manuscript of the memoir “The Perfect Agent: An Autobiography of the Sixties” by Allen Katzman be published?
One thing that that leads me to an imagined possibility that is too good to fact-check: Is the lyrics "Transylvanian Transvestite Time Trap" in any way an inspiration to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?
Also, when will the manuscript of the memoir “The Perfect Agent: An Autobiography of the Sixties” by Allen Katzman be published?
April 16, 2012
Fug You is great on many levels. Sanders took a concise period of time, packed it to its edges with period details, hilarious and also difficult stories, illustrations & photos... it's a mammoth tome. It took me about a month(!) to read the first hundred pages (acclimating to the micro-sections within each chapter -- a perhaps unnecessary way to break up all the information) but I crushed the last 250+ pages in about 24 hours! One of the most enjoyable sections was a transcript from a televised conversation between Sanders, Kerouac and a couple other jerks. Kerouac was staggeringly drunk, spilling irreverent poetry. So mean. So funny.
May 11, 2016
If you can remember the 60s, you weren't there! this is Ed Sander's rambling memoir of events, recordings, shows, be-ins, love-ins, drugs and counter-culture, all overshadowed by America's war in Vietnam. I remember much of it, though clearly from the wrong side of the Atlantic, and I can't say that Ed has managed to unscramble much that I didn't know although all the asides, gossip and general capturing of the zeitgeist was really good fun. Made me go, get out and play my old Fugs records but I'm probably too old now for a "group-grope".
May 20, 2012
Ed Sanders is an American Treasure. In this memoir, he describes the literary-artistic-musical-political community of the 50's and 60's as only he can since he knew everyone from Joplin to Ginsberg from Rubin to Bobby Seale.
His writing is clear, funny, poignant and his archives of the era - which is illustrated throughout the text - is exhaustive.
A fantastic must read for anyone who wants to understand the culture of mid 20th century America.
His writing is clear, funny, poignant and his archives of the era - which is illustrated throughout the text - is exhaustive.
A fantastic must read for anyone who wants to understand the culture of mid 20th century America.
May 24, 2012
A social history of the Counterculture well worth reading. Sanders is unpretentious and a surprisingly vivid writer. I especially enjoyed the first half of the book. Tighter editing might have improved the book.
October 6, 2015
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
Delightful reminiscences of the craziness that was the art scene in the East village in the sixties. Not for everyone (you hadda been there), but if you're a boho geezer boomer, you'll love it.
We thought they'd never end
Delightful reminiscences of the craziness that was the art scene in the East village in the sixties. Not for everyone (you hadda been there), but if you're a boho geezer boomer, you'll love it.
December 6, 2011
Phenomenal, quirky, funny and engaging.
March 9, 2012
An essential '60s document, and with Sanders as your guide you have reason, gentleness, passion, and abandon and balanced doses. What an epic time; what a resounding tragedy.
April 10, 2013
A real hero from the 60s counterculture.
May 26, 2014
An entertaining and insightful look at the 1960s New York underground countercultural scene in this memoir by one of its iconic leaders.
February 1, 2014
Utterly Fantastic!
June 16, 2014
love Ed Sanders. Love his nutty and unrestricted writing and poetry. This is an essential for any Fug, Beat or Digger.
September 12, 2015
Very informative and funny history of the counterculture in the lower east side NYC in the 1960's
April 30, 2012
Nice to have all the stories in one place.
June 17, 2012
Another great NYC book. Tells of a former age when NYC was not so user friendly
April 1, 2017
Capsule 60s view from poet, hippie, activist, musician, bookstore owner and political dissident... great read.
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