Features

The Fugs: American Peace-Creeps

In the late summer, recovering his eyesight from an April 2009 stroke, Kupferberg experienced a second one. “He had just given an hour-long lecture on Marx and Engels to one of his nurses,” notes Sanders. With Hal Willner, Sanders is organizing a benefit for Kupferberg’s medical expenses, but acknowledges the grim probability of the new disc’s title, Be Free! (The Fugs’ Final CD, part II), to be released in February.

The disc, Sanders says, espouses “our longtime anarcho-socialist/center-left/libertarian/Kropotkinian worldview.” Like their 1965 debut, it contains a setting of a William Blake poem to music. Not to mention a few of Sanders’ home-built instruments, including the Microlyre.

Perhaps Sanders’ most important work of recent years, though, is his epic nine-volume America: A History in Verse. With the first three volumes published in elegant print editions by Black Sparrow Press, and an omnibus CD from Blake Route Press containing the first five (1900-2000), the milestone composition attempts to “trace with grace / what the Fates & Human Mammals have wrought / in the Time-Track of the USA.”

Though Sanders notes that he can “use the phrase ‘right-wing nut’ on every page if I want,” he doesn’t. Usually they’re “military-industrial-surrealists.” America is built and fact-checked from hundreds of clippings-filled bankers’ boxes and shelves of history books overtaking Sanders’ writing studio. He can only write in the house now.

“I always was a pack rat and a collector and kept a lot of files,” he says. “I learned that from Allen Ginsberg. He was also a Jack the Clipper. He started cutting out clips in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and then during the rise of Hitler, on Kristallnacht, and the Fifth Column. He told me to clip, clip, clip, and I always did.” He points out another stash of filing cabinets in the garage. Each box is labeled in Sanders’ spiraling spider-crawl, hinting at the hieroglyphics he taught himself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while studying Greek and Latin at NYU.

It is a method Sanders refined while researching his classic best-selling exposé on Charles Manson, The Family, first published in 1971, a process which also involved him posing as “a New York pornography dealer with Andy Warhol out-takes” and a “dope-tranced psychopath” in order to get information. He became a “data addict.”

“I encourage people to use America as a data resource from my left-liberal perspective,” he says. “I point out new things each year and look for art and poetry and try to cover, naturally, the struggle of peace forces—there are always peace forces—against the forces of war. It’s a classic battle in the United States, going back to the War of 1812, or the battles against the Native Americans.”

They are forces Sanders himself has marshalled, both as a Fug (say, exorcising Joseph McCarthy’s grave with Ginsberg in 1968) and beyond (as in his 1975 manifesto, Investigative Poetry, to “bring down into the vale of Ha Ha Hee/ the North American CIA Police State”).

“I am a poet, songwriter, leader of a rock and roll band, publisher, editor, recording artist, peace-creep,” Sanders testified in the 1969 Chicago Seven trial.

The prosecution interrupted. “What was the last one please?”

“Will you spell it for the reporter?” the Judge asked.

“P-E-A-C-E,” Sanders said. “Hyphen, C-R-E-E-P. And a yodeler,” he added.

The court would not let him demonstrate. “I’m still very upset with [the judge],” he says. “I’m the only Beatnik who can yodel, and he thwarted my chance to exercise my skill.”

Photo Ted Barron