Kupferberg, Tuli and The Fugs

KUPFERBERG, TULI (1923-2011). AND THE FUGS. A leading figure in the counter culture, Beat poet, and publisher, Tuli Kupferberg led the agitational, humorous group that had a great impact on “protest music” of the 1960s and later.

Tuli Kupferberg was born Naphtali Kupferberg on Cannon Street in the deepest Lower East Side of New York. His parents, Galician immigrants with Hasidic family backgrounds, met in the United States. As a child, Kupferberg liked the music he heard at his parents’ social club, including klezmer, and enjoyed Yiddish-language radio on Sundays, with humorous Yiddish-English commercials like ‘Marshak’s Malted Milk, it’s good for kleine kinder.”

He acquired a sense of humor mostly from his mother, a Russian-Ukrainian immigrant. His father owned a sequence of luggage shops in New York City, all of them failures. During the Great Depression, he became a clothing machine operator, making pockets for menswear the rest of his life. He labored under Jewish sweatshop owners, became a loyal union member, and was arrested and beaten up occasionally during strikes.

Kupferberg transferred from Townsend Harris High School (for the gifted) in Manhattan, where he had joined the left-led American Student Union, to New Utrecht High in Brooklyn, where he wrote his first poems and published his first short stories in the high school magazine. He was attracted to anarchism, but also fascinated with the life and writings of Karl Marx. He entered Brooklyn College, continued his writing, and drew closest to the anti-war, anti-imperialist stance of the Trotskyists. In 1943, for a few months, he became a stevedore and joined the IWW. He also helped run an anarchist-oriented bicycle delivery service, and for a time pushed a Good Humor cart. Called to Selective Service but ruled 4F, he graduated from Brooklyn college cum laude in 1944. He then moved to Broome Street and became fascinated with the radical legacies of the Lower East Side, including the last of the anarchist bookstores. After a brief and unsuccessful marriage, he met Sylvia Topp, his lifetime partner.

By the later 1950s and early 1960s, Kupferberg had become a leading Beat poet and underground publisher, with short-lived periodicals such as Birth, which published LeRoi Jones, Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPrima; Swing; and nine issues of Yeah, from 1961 to 1964. His other books in this period and after included 1001 Ways to Live Without Working (1961); The Christine Keeler Coloring Book (1963);1001 Ways to Beat the Draft ,with Robert Bashlow, (1966); and Fuck Nam: a Morality Play (1967). 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, overwhelmingly his most successful, was re-published by Grove Press in 1967; and 1001 Ways to Make Love (1969) also by Grove. He also contributed to Ed Sanders’s Fuck You—a Magazine of the Arts. Kupferberg attended the 1964 trial of Lenny Bruce in New York and used his notes from the trial to create one of his first songs for the Fugs.

The Fugs grew out of the circles of friends singing peace and civil rights songs together, spontaneously, often after demonstrations. Visiting a club where poets Robert Creeley and LeRoi Jones read aloud, Tuli and his friend Ed Sanders resolved to form a band. They drew inspiration from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the “Theory of the Spectacle” in Aristotle’s Poetics, through Alfred Jarry, the Dadaists, the Beats and Charlie Parker and the Happenings. The basic concept was simple: the full freedom guaranteed by the Constitution was not yet being fully used. Kupferberg himself proposed “The Fugs,” borrowing from Norman Mailer’s euphemism for “fuck” in The Naked and the Dead.

The creation of a regular group inspired Kupferberg to write songs. Mostly without accompaniment, he recorded hundreds of them on tapes. The group held its premiere at Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore in February 1965, adorned with cloth wall banners by Andy Warhol and in attendance William Burroughs, George Plimpton and James Michener among others. Kupferberg himself was a great visual performer, sporting a wide variety of hats, unique shirts, and props. The Fugs polished their art at a series of theaters in New York City from 1965 through 1967. They began attracting larger audiences, and started in 1965 to record albums, first for Folkways Records—by the famed Moe Asch—then for ESP Disk, and finally for Warner Reprise, home of recording artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell. Tenderness Junction and It Crawled into my Hand, Honest, both released in 1968, were followed in 1969 by a final album, The Belle of Avenue A.

The Fugs performed at many benefits: for the New York Workshop in Nonviolence; for the underground newspaper the East Village Other; for the Free Store in the Lower East Side; many against the war in Vietnam; and a number of free summer concerts in Tompkins Square Park. Popularity also brought early attention of the FBI. A few weeks after the Fugs's second album was released in 1966, an FBI investigation began. In the early summer of 1966, an FBI memorandum noted that a postal inspector had completed an investigation: "The Fugs is a group of musicians who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers, i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. .... it is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene."

Someone came up with the idea of holding an Exorcism of the Pentagon, this mystic pentagonal citadel of napalm and incineration, as a project for the antiwar demonstration in Washington in October, 1967. Ed Sanders scripted and choreographed the Exorcism. The Fugs and Diggers led the chanting of “Out, Demons, Out!” A few months later, Kupferberg and Sanders took part in the demonstrations in Chicago, chanting "The Whole World is Watching,” while the police used their clubs on undeserving heads. A few months earlier, the Fugs had staged a performance and led a demonstration in Joe McCarthy’s home town of Appleton, Wisconsin.

The Fugs broke up in early 1969 did not perform together again for fifteen years. Kupferberg performed minus the Fugs beginning in the early 1970s with his new group, Revolting Theater, and also did many solo song/poem recitals. He also became known for his witty, insightful political cartoons, published in the Village Voice and other places. One of his memorable books is Listen to the Mockingbird (1973), satiric poem-songs to known tunes.The Fugs and Kupferberg began reunion performances in the symbolic year of 1984 in concert halls across Europe.

Kupferberg began broadcasting a weekly Public Access television show in New York City beginning in the late 1980s, called Theater of the Real. For a number of years, he sang and commented on the times, with his long time friend Lanny Ken-field as co-host. His close friend Thelma Blitz began filming the shows in 2003.

For the last decades of his life, Kupfeberg lived with Sylvia, their son Noah (until he left for Harvard) and daughter Samara in a loft on the western edge of Soho. “The place was just filled with books,” commented friend Clayton Patterson. “It was like a library. There was very little living space because there were so many books.” The Fugs did a number of recording sessions at the loft in 2005, amidst many tall and packed bookshelves.

In April of 2009, Kupferberg suffered a stroke that left him nearly blind. Virtually sightless, he struggled to continue his You Tube videos, and began a series of videos called “Perverbs,” filmed by Thelma Blitz, which he created every week or so, almost to the month of his passing. In early May, 2009, he suffered a second stroke. He returned to his loft, and had begun to read text using a magnifier, when in early September 2009, he had yet another stroke. The last stroke occurred after a short lecture he had given on Marx and Engels. A concert to raise money for his care was a great success, with the Fugs, Lou Reed, John Zorn and Laurie Anderson among the performers. A memorial at the St. Mark’s Church on Second Avenue marked his death and celebrated his life. Thelma Blitz continued his tulifuli channel on You Tube, with more than 600 programs available.

Tuli Kupferberg and Sylvia Topp Papers. Fales Library and Special Collections, Bobst Library, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/mss_385/

The Fugs. Website. http://www.thefugs.com

Fugs Discography

The Village Fugs (The Fugs First Album) Broadside/Folkways
1965
& then it was released by ESP-Disk 1966
The Fugs (2nd album) ESP-Disk 1966
Virgin Fugs (bootleg) ESP-Disk 1967
Tenderness Junction Reprise 1968
It Crawled into My Hand, Honest Reprise 1968
Belle of Avenue A Reprise 1969
Golden Filth (Live at the Fillmore East) Reprise 1970
Refuse to Be Burnt Out (Live reunion) Olufsen &
New Rose 1984
No More Slavery (Studio album)
Olufsen & New Rose 1985
Star Peace (two disk set, an opera)
Olufsen & New Rose 1986
Fugs Live in Woodstock 1989
Songs from a Portable Forest
(best of 1980s reunions) Gazelle 1992
The Real Woodstock Festival
2-CD set Ace Records 1995
The Fugs Final CD, Part One Artemis Records 2003
Be Free Fugs Records 2006