This coming Friday/Saturday, you have an all-too-rare opportunity to see some veritable living legends when The Fugs take the stage at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Barn.
Known for mixing social issues with a sense of humor, The Fugs are proudly releasing a new album at these shows, Dancing in the Universe. You can expect to hear songs both from their classic catalog and new material as well, proving that the band is as vibrant and relevant as ever.
Ed Sanders, co-founder and leader of The Fugs, moved from Missouri to the East Village in the late 1950s, where he started the band with Tuli Kupferberg.
Relocating to Woodstock in 1974, Sanders has contributed to the community since his arrival, and edited Woodstock Journal for many years. Turning 84 this week and still living in Woodstock, he was nice enough to take time to speak with me not only about The Fugs but related subjects as well. What follows are excerpts from a longer interview.
Adam Snyder: The current members of The Fugs have made up the band since 1984, so the band we’ll see at Byrdcliffe is basically the classic line-up at this point.
Ed Sanders: It’s a good group. Each person has his own career. Scott Petito’s got a very successful recording studio, and he puts out CDs, he’s becoming more and more well known.
Steve Taylor, of course, was Allen Ginsberg’s accompanist for a number of years. He has a PhD in ethnomusicology from Brown University, teaches at City College, and writes music for a dance company in New York City. So he’s very active and has a career.
Coby Batty lives in Richmond, he fronts a band, so he’s got a career. And The Fugs are just one aspect of my creative career, so all of us have other things to do.
That was the problem with the earliest Fugs in the sixties. I was paying weekly salaries to everybody, we had attorneys, managers, agents, all kinds of enterprises always trying to slurp up a percentage of a band.
I was spending all my time just trying to stay ahead of the game. And so I found this version of The Fugs worked out well because we only get together once in a while. We’ve done a bunch of albums since 1984, six or seven, I don’t know, who’s counting when you’re having fun?
AS: You founded The Fugs in 64 with Tuli Kupferberg, I understand that he’ll be there in spirit, because there are some songs on the album you did with him previously.
ES: Before Tuli passed away, he was thriving. He had his own band, and he had a very popular public access television show on the Manhattan Cable.
During his final years, Scott and I went down to Tuli’s loft on Sixth Avenue and recorded a bunch of his songs, you know, with scratch guitar, so we had a bunch of them. We added four of his tunes to Dancing in the Universe, so he’s with us in spirit. We added music and vocal harmonies and stuff to Tuli’s vocals.
AS: What’s it like to put out an album these days?
ES: We did it at Third Man Pressing in Detroit. I wanted a twenty-two page insert booklet that had all the lyrics, and the history of the songs and stuff. So it wound up to be quite pricey but worth doing.
We have a CD, we’re gonna place it, probably on Bandcamp. CD Baby handles some of Fugs’ stuff like the Greatest Hits, but they no longer sell actual CDs or albums. I think you can make a deal with Bandcamp, otherwise I’ll have a garage full of albums.
Some hotshot person connected with the music industry told me that young people want cassette editions now. I wasn’t about to do a cassette edition. That’s the way it is.
AS: As a poet, your Collected Poems won an American Book Award, which is definitely worth mentioning. But for us wannabe beatniks out there, would you mind telling us, as a young poet in 1963 when you came out with Poem From Jail, what was it like to be on City Lights, which was the same publisher as Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti?
ES: Well, I wrote Poem From Jail as a result of sitting in at the launching of a nuclear submarine which had nuclear missiles programmed to attack Russian cities. So I tried to board it, and I went to jail and I wrote this poem. And I read it to my friends, they liked it, they said I should get it published, so I naturally thought of City Lights because it had published Howl, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara and so many others. Howl, you know, changed my life when I read it.
AS: You can see it in your poem. I mean, I feel that I can hear it.
ES: Yeah, so I memorized Howl, and I grew up in a small farm town in Missouri, and there were cows on the field next to my house and I used to stand out in my yard and shout lines of Howl to the cows and bulls, you know, “I saw the best minds of my generation—MOO!”
AS: [Completely cracking up at this point]
ES: So I liked that line, “I saw the best minds of my generation,” which is the opening line of Howl. Those were the marching orders, I felt: to find, get to know, and hang out with the best minds of my generation. I gravitated to New York, to New York University, sought out these people that I was reading.
I never thought that I would really become a peer, but I sent this poem to Ferlinghetti because he had printed Howl, and he liked it, and he printed it, that gave me some status among my neo-beat friends.
I had set two William Blake poems to melody because they were recommended by Allen Ginsberg. So I already had those when Tuli and I formed The Fugs, those songs became my original contribution to the band. Tuli and I realized we had to create a bunch of songs, so each one of us wrote, twenty, twenty-five songs that formed the kernel core of The Fugs.
And we formed it naturally, not as a joke, but not planning a lifelong enterprise or project. We thought it would end quickly but these recordings we did over the years have held up, and they keep getting released. People put them up on YouTube and add images to them, so I don’t know, it’s 59 years later and we’re still a band. They say if you can stay together four years then it’s forever. I’m happy to keep on, you know, we’ll see what happens.
AS: You’re known as a bridge between the beatnik and hippie generations, but through your continued involvement, you’re really a bridge between everything. As a witness, a participant really in history, what do you think are the differences and similarities between the sixties and what are being called the culture wars dividing our country today? Do you have any observations?
ES: It’s a conundrum. The culture wars have always been there. You know, in the 50s there was the big red scare, McCarthy and his lying, anti-communist hysteria campaign. And it’s still happening.
The internet has made bickering much more prevalent, everyone can be a bickerer by opening up a Facebook account, shooting off their mouth, and people who’d never could write a letter to the editor can write reams of text on Facebook. It’s both a pleasure and a pain.
AS: Are you more concerned now, or is it a different type of concern?
ES: Well, if you had ten parallel lives to live, you could start going to issue-oriented meetings and reading websites on issues 24 hours a day, and go to public meetings on every conceivable issue, nuclear power, war and peace, affordable housing, water safety.
Water is under incredible threat now. We’re the last generation that’s gonna have clean water. So there’s water issues, there’s food issues. Then there’s: Where are all the butterflies? This is monarch butterfly season, there are no more monarch butterflies, eating our plants, fluttering around our house. You know, no more swallowtails, no more bumble bees.
AS: We did see a swallow tail yesterday, just one.
ES: That’s great, but you know, I’m right here on the edge of a state forest, you can walk fifty miles out my backyard and never cross a road, but there’s no butterflies on that fifty miles. There’s a plethora and multitude of issues. I have a poem called “Time Tithing” where I urge everybody to tithe their time, take time every day for public good issues.
I’m very active locally in protecting Woodstock’s water. And also land use. You know, keeping rural qualities of the area rural. Keep Woodstock Woodstock. Because it’s a famous town and a lot of people, real estate interests, are trying to make a lot of money off Woodstock by overdeveloping it.
AS: Well that was going to be my final question. You’ve lived here since 1974, and you’ve worked personally to regulate development, you’ve edited Woodstock Journal. What do you think about Woodstock these days?
ES: I think it’s a marvelous town. The gods have made a beautiful place. Hilly and mountainous place with bluestone escarpments. Sixty percent of Woodstock is state forest, trees are protected here. We passed a zoning law a few decades ago that protected Woodstock’s open spaces, and we recently passed a law protecting the glacial aquifer that provides a lot of water for Woodstock.
But there are interests that want to bust it open and build a lot more houses, all in the name of affordable housing, so they’ve proposed a vast new zoning change that I’m opposing, because it’s not really to create affordable housing, it’s just to create more more more more housing, because people with money want to live in a groovy place.
This is a beautiful place but also has a wonderful history, of artists and writers and poets, and creative people and engineers, and all kinds of forces in the United States, and a lot of music, Dylan and The Band and Paul Butterfield, I could just go on and on, you know, people that still live here. And it’s what Hemingway wrote about, is it the Moveable Feast?
AS: Yes.
ES: He wrote about what happens when wealthy people spot a groovy place to live, then move in on it, claim it. Sort of wreck it, in a way. But, you have to allow for wealthy people. That was one of the great things about moving to Woodstock, there could be somebody driving in a rusty old Ford, living next to someone driving a Bentley.
AS: [chuckles]
ES: And there was acceptance of different economic interests. But it’s become so expensive now. Rents especially. Getting rental property is impossible, there’s no rental property, really. I’ve helped some friends try to get a house, and it’s difficult.
What they have to do is pretend like they’re Franklin Delano Roosevelt, use the state to set up economic enterprises owned by the city, that provide affordable housing, but also affordable structures for workers, for people who want to run a print shop, or any kind of business that serves people.
They wanna provide a lot of affordable housing for a lot of people, but what if this person wants to take his or her family out to dinner? There’s no place you can eat in Woodstock for under $150 for a table of four. The economy is skewed toward wealthy people right now, so it has to be rebalanced so that regular working people who work for the town can afford to live here, eat here, buy here, get tennis shoes here. And that’s the kind of economy we want.
It’s not really what The Fugs are about. It’s what I’m about.
The Fugs at Byrdcliffe Barn, 485 Upper Byrdcliffe Road, Friday August 18, Saturday August 19. Tickets $30 for non-members, doors 7:30, shows starts at 8:00. Grab tickets online if you still can at woodstockguild.org. Their new album Dancing in the Universe will be available.
Join the family! 
