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‘Try to Be Joyful’: Jeffrey Lewis’ wonderful tribute to the Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg
03.28.2018
10:16 am
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Call it “Freak Folk,” call it ”New Weird America,” or call it nothing since one-size-fits all genre taxonomy is rarely adequate to contain most art forms anyway, but there’s an identifiable strain of American independent singer-songwriter music that can draw a very direct lineage to some of the strangest expressions of the Mid-Century folk music revival that was sparked by the Smithsonian Folkways release of the utterly essential Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. While late ‘50s traditionalists like Dave Van Ronk and the New Lost City Ramblers took very reverent cues from the Smith anthology, the early ‘60s produced the likes of Dylan and Baez, and after them, just straight-up Greenwich Village weirdos like the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders emerged to define a form of folk befitting the burgeoning psychedelic era. Those two bands had overlapping memberships and were also united by a gonzo approach. The Rounders tended to be more traditionally musical, while the Fugs were just utterly bereft of a single care for ANY convention—their heavily satirical lyrics could be unabashedly vulgar, their music could be fearlessly, purposefully tuneless and noisy (in 1964, mind you) and from a certain vantage point they can plainly be seen as a very early proto-punk band.

While those bands still have devotees over fifty years later, few artists are flying their flag quite like New York’s Jeffrey Lewis. We’ve told you about him before here on Dangerous Minds, in both of his guises as a folk singer and a comix artist. He’s been releasing music, mostly for the storied Rough Trade label, since 2001, and he’s been fortunate enough to have connected personally and creatively with HMR’s violinist Peter Stampfel and the Fugs’ larger-than-life lyricist/singer/co-figurehead Tuli Kupferberg, one of the Village’s most outrageous figures despite being pretty much twice everyone’s age—the Fugs were his first band, and he started it in his forties, after he’d already had a long career as a poet, activist, and provocateur. Actively creative even after a stroke in 2009, Kupferberg died at age 86 in 2010. Lewis has since been organizing annual concerts in his memory, and those concerts have led directly to his forthcoming album Works by Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)—a fun, boisterous and anarchic tribute that captures Kupferberg’s ethos well. We got Lewis talking about his relationship with early gonzo folk, with Kupferberg himself, and the new album.

Jeffrey Lewis: I have a deep love of ’60 weird stuff, since I was a teenager and I first discovered music. My first love was classic rock, the Rolling Stones, stuff like that, then I developed more and more of an interest in the weirder, more psychedelic side of ‘60s rock. As it generally happens when you’re a record nerd, you fall deeper and deeper into these different rabbit holes, and new doors start to open. But specifically talking about things like the Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders, that stuff has a different appeal, a purely regional element, in that it was the music of the neighborhood where I grew up, which is once again the neighborhood where I’m currently living after many years in other places. It’s the countercultural music of the ’60s Lower East side, and the Fugs especially were THE Lower East Side neighborhood band. And the Holy Modal Rounders to some degree, but the Fugs were more extreme, and more specific in talking about the neighborhood as well. There aren’t that many ‘60s bands that were that specific about their extremely local cultural neighborhood experience, and it just happened that one of the bands that was, was from my own neighborhood, so that combination—it was weird music, it was ‘60s music, and it was actually talking about the streets and the people that were, like my parents, my parents’ generation, the beatnik and hippie people of the Lower East Side. That was irresistible to me.

DM: Tuli Kupferberg in particular was such a fascinating figure, too, given his age at the time he started making music and the history he had before that. I understand you got to meet him and work with him before he passed?

JM: Yeah! I was a fan from afar for a number of years. He was often out and about—and here’s a great thing about New York City, as opposed to Los Angeles or other places where lots of famous people might live: New York City is a great equalizer because you’re not in your car all the time, isolated, you’re walking the sidewalks, you’re in the subway. So when you live here you see Patti Smith, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Richard Hell… they’re just there when you’re going to the supermarket, looking in an art gallery. That is part of why I got to connect personally with Tuli was that I would just see him at events, and he was such a recognizable figure, such a weird looking guy in his way, so striking, that he was just instantly recognizable to me. So first as a fan it was like “Oh my God, there’s Tuli Kupferberg across the room, should I talk to him?” Just being a groupie, essentially. The same way every time when I’d see Lou Reed or whatever, like should I bother him? But when it comes to people like Tuli or Peter Stampfel, they’re idols of mine, but they’re not mainstream celebrities at the level of like David Byrne, who obviously, to the average person, is much more famous.

So I could talk to them about what sort of stuff they were into, and they were approachable. Also I think it was easy to see that what I was doing, the music I was doing, was in a tradition of stuff they would have been into, our aesthetics were a match, so I wasn’t just some random fan giving them a CD. So one thing would just lead to another, so by 2005 I was getting Tuli and Peter to participate in recordings I was making, like having Peter come by and play some fiddle, or I would try to get Tuli to speak about something, just get his voice on a recording, and they were so open and welcoming, and you find connection. You see the books on each other’s shelves and you see things you’ve read too, stuff like that, it’s everybody’s dream, isn’t it? To morph from a fan into a friend? Like I think a lot of Michael Jackson fans or Harrison Ford fans would love to be those people’s friends. In my case, I was fortunate to be able to collaborate with some of my idols.

DM: You really do have an enviable track record of getting to work with your heroes.

JM: It helps to have accessible heroes—if I idolized Steven Spielberg it probably wouldn’t have happened!

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.28.2018
10:16 am
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‘1001 Ways to Live Without Working,’ Tuli Kupferberg’s prescient pre-hippie book of mindfuckery
10.04.2016
02:40 pm
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Several years before the Fugs formed, Tuli Kupferberg was running around Greenwich Village as a poet and pamphleteer. His most successful effort was a 1961 book published by “Birth Press” called 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, a scurrilous F-U to establishment culture that showed an uncanny ability to anticipate what young people would be thinking about five years later.

On the front cover, to announce the book’s intentions, was a striking image of a man’s face with the words “A STANDARD OF LAZINESS” written across his forehead. The back cover featured “Visualized Prayer for the American God #6,” a typographical poem by the Cleveland poet d.a. levy, which is a swastika made out of dollar signs.

True to its name, 1001 Ways to Live Without Working really is a list of a thousand items, and as such, draws material from as many rhetorical registers as it can. The book is a mixture of a long numbered list and photos of odd archival material, many of them classified ads or pertinent news reports, to add spice. Scant thought was given to layout, which lends the book a refreshing carefree style.

Here are the first 10 entries:
 

Die
Someone else die
Find a million dollar in a toilet bowl you the only one dares to fish it out
Beg & quit after $1.00 a day
Steal
Go into business
Marry a rich homosexual
Marry a rich sexuall
Marry a rich asexual
Marry rich

 
What the book reminds me of more than anything is a kind of spindly foretaste of John Hodgman’s 2005 book Areas of My Expertise, the difference being, of course, that whereas Hodgman’s book is a kind of hipster’s celebration of trivia and esoterica, Kupferberg’s work is something akin to a political weapon.

In 1967 Grove Press, sensing the currents in the air, reprinted the book, the same year that Kupferberg published the follow-up 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft.

Here are a few pages from the book.
 
 
 
More after the jump…...
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.04.2016
02:40 pm
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Richard Pryor’s ‘Dynamite Chicken’ is a raunchy, NSFW time capsule of the hippie era


 
Sorting out who is and who isn’t in the 1971 “comedy” movie Dynamite Chicken, written and directed by Ernest Pintoff, is no easy matter. The montage-heavy movie relies so much on found footage that it’s accurate to say that John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Humphrey Bogart, and Richard Nixon “appear” in the movie even if they were scarcely aware of it or, in some cases, were long since deceased at the time. Not to put too fine a point on it, the makers of the movie were verging pretty close to fraud here.

Richard Pryor they definitely had, as well as a lot of countercultural figures like Paul Krassner, Tuli Kupferberg, Joan Baez, Sha-Na-Na, Peter Max, and a comedy troupe called Ace Trucking Co. that featured a young Fred Willard. The movie’s a bit like Kentucky Fried Movie, only far more political in intent; it’s chock-a-block with skits, snippets of musical performance, political debate, a strip-tease or two, and whatever else popped into the noggins of the filmmakers at the time. There’s tons of quick-cutting montage of newspaper clippings and just a ton of random footage.
 

 
The full title,  “Dynamite Chicken: A Contemporary Probe and Commentary of the Mores and Maladies of Our Age … with Schtick, Bits, Pieces, Girls, Some Hamburger, a Little Hair, a Lady, Some Fellas, Some Religious Stuff, and a Lot of Other Things,” is an accurate reflection of what the movie is like. The emphasis here is squarely on free expression; the movie starts with a scroll explaining, in a way we today associate more with Lenny Bruce, that Richard Pryor had been witnessed “in the late ‘60’s” by a policewoman saying the words “bullshit, shit, motherfucker, penis, asshole” during a public performance. The distance between “free expression” and “annoying the audience for the sake of it” is pretty small, and in addition to some salubrious footage of women in various states of disrobe, we also get a pointless and somewhat sickening exegesis of a comic book about slicing women in two with a buzzsaw. Early on, I had been thinking that Chicken Dynamite is an almost perfect cinematic equivalent of SCREW Magazine, when who should materialize on the screen but Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley themselves.

Andy Warhol was one of the few luminaries who apparently did consent to be filmed, for a short sequence in which Ondine reads aloud from Warhol’s book a: A Novel while Warhol looks on. John and Yoko weren’t involved; their bit is just a statement about peace from the Montreal Bed-In a couple years earlier. The link to National Lampoon, mostly a spiritual one, is made explicit with a clip of Michael O’Donoghue, then one of the chief writers at the magazine, in a spoof of a cigarette commercial. There’s a bit towards the end in which Ron Carey (known to me primarily as a bit player on Barney Miller) dresses up as a priest and does some soft-shoe in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave., scored to Lionel Goldbart’s “God Loves Rock and Roll” that is pretty delightful.

The footage with Pryor was shot outdoors in a single day; Pryor riffs on a bunch of raunchy material while messing with a basketball somewhere in the projects. At this point in Pryor’s career, the similarities with Dave Chappelle were (in hindsight) particularly strong. After Pryor became a big movie star in the early 1980s, he apparently became annoyed with his association with Chicken Dynamite, as he successfully sued to bar “the distributors of the film ... from emphasizing his role in the film,” according to an issue of Jet from December 1982.
 

 
In the end, Chicken Dynamite was probably a little bit dated even when it came out. It’s a movie made by people who are waaaaay too “serious” to be funny, for the most part. It’s the kind of movie that even if you are “enjoying” it, you might choose to turn it off before reach the end of its 75-minute running time, just because it wears you out. Still, some parts are pretty entertaining, and it’s worth a look for those who missed the era and those who didn’t.
 

 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.04.2015
02:33 pm
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Tuli Kupferberg, Slum God Of The Lower East Side
07.14.2011
04:15 pm
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Tuli Kupferberg - born September 28, 1923, died July 12, 2010
 
“You can have the men who make the laws/ Give me the music makers.” The Fugs.

I once bought a pair of sunglasses from Tuli Kupferberg, not because I needed them, but because I wanted to own something that belonged to a man who had changed my life.

When I was 15 (1966) I purchased The Fugs debut album at a People’s Drug Store in Fairfax, Virgina. I took it home, listened to it, and soon thereafter made my first pilgrimage to New York City’s Lower East Side. I wanted to be a part of the grime, squalor and divine decadence that the Fugs so poetically, mystically and hysterically evoked in their music. I wanted to walk among slum goddesses, dirty old men, Johnny Piss Off and the Belle of Avenue A. I wanted to join in on the ultimate group grope, to fill my brain with light and find my corner of bliss in a city that only a Fug could love. All because of a record album, all because of a band, all because of Tuli.

Tuli embodied the tattered and beautiful soul of NYC. He was the patron saint of the dark alleys and garbage strewn streets that lead to coldwater flats of wisdom and pleasure. In a town of cracked minds and bruised souls, Tuli was the wandering minstrel, the sage of the sewers, the calm presence in the maelstrom of sirens and sobs. He sang away the demons at the door and let his prose settle around us like a sweet cloak of tongue nectar.

In 1967, I marched with The Fugs and 70,000 people in Washington D.C to protest the Vietnam War. Tuli and Ginsberg led us in a mantric chant (Om Mani Padme Hum) in an effort to levitate The Pentagon, a building that my father, a military man, was inside of. What gave me this courage, if not the music and poetry of my heroes? Ginsberg, Leary, Kerouac, The Fugs, The Beatles.

Tuli was a peace activist, a holy warrior, who believed that when pamphlets and protests stop working, it’s time to invoke the Gods and Goddesses of loving kindness. If you can’t beat the death merchants with bullhorns and speeches, bring out the heavy artillery, call upon the armies of the astral plane to lay some Blakean magic on the motherfuckers.

Regarding Tuli’s contribution to the music scene over the past 5 decades, his influence on rock provocateurs, from Country Joe’s Fish Cheer to punks like the Meatmen, The Frogs and The Circle Jerks, I’ll leave that to those among us who care more about the specifics than I do. Yes, The Fugs inspired me to start a band called The Pits Of Passion and to write songs about getting my first blow job. I’m sure that without Tuli and The Fugs, I’d probably have never written my best known tune, “88 Lines About 44 Women.” There is no question The Fugs opened the field for all of us to spew our darkest deepest and filthiest thoughts, knowing that we weren’t alone in the flesh frenzy and fuck fest of absolute reality. The Fugs were arguably the first punk band. All good.

But, what I most want to remember about Tuli Kupferberg is the sweetness of the man, his humility and kindness and that, yes, it is possible to change the world with a guitar, a good hook, a few dozen dirty words and a whole lot of soul.

Ted Berrigan writing about Tuli:

I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, “Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?” 

“Yeah,” he said, “I really did.”  “How come?” I said.

“I thought that I had lost the ability to love,” Tuli said. “So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tuli said, “but nothing happened. I landed in the water & I wasn’t dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed.”

 
Originally posted on 07/12/10.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.14.2011
04:15 pm
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Fug on Film: Tuli Kupferberg is a beatnik God
11.10.2010
03:41 pm
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The recently deceased Tuli Kupferberg plays God in the wild 1972 underground film, Voulez-vous coucher avec God? made by Canadians Michael Hirsh and Jack Christie. A rare screening of Voulez-vous coucher avec God? will take place on November 14 at the Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. in Manhattan during a special celebration of celluloid Tuli called “Fug on Film.” Presented by Arthur.

J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice:

As strenuously druggy, anarchic, and blasphemous as it is, this 1972 feature might have been one of the many post–El Topo movies auditioned as a midnight attraction by the old Elgin Theater and might even have caught on. Instead, it’s having its belated local premiere this Sunday as part of Anthology’s tribute to Kupferberg, beat poet, Fugs founder, and Voice contributor (mainly in the form of letters to the editor).

Here, he plays Middle America’s worst nightmare: His God is an unkempt, hairy schmoozer, consorting with his female subjects in a vaguely Baghdadian crash pad identified as Hashish Seventh Heaven, while holding forth in a braying New York accent: “Give ‘em some of that blackface crap—we’ve got enough sexism,” he advises the filmmakers in between chants of “Oy, oy, let’s bomb Hanoi!” As cheerfully offensive as it is, the movie’s greatest outrage comes when God anoints a toothless derelict to run for U.S. president. (The same actor, identified only as “George,” doubles as the angel Gabriel—in which role he’s punished for dereliction of duty with a hot-oil enema.)

Slapdash, but not badly made, this exercise in Yippie vaudeville employs Claymation and television, as well as a bevy of naked houris, to hold one’s attention—although it does fall apart midway. End title delivered as a moon notwithstanding, the climactic gross-out is the mouse omelet prepared for George—a repast that only serves to burnish the genius of John Waters, whose Pink Flamingos (the movie in which Divine eats dog shit) was the Elgin’s midnight attraction for 48 weeks, from late winter 1973 to January 1974.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.10.2010
03:41 pm
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Larry ?
01.20.2010
07:17 pm
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Tuli Kupferberg was a mentor to all of us who grew up in the ?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.20.2010
07:17 pm
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Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kupferberg
01.20.2010
06:09 pm
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Dangerous Minds pal Michael Simmons sends word of a concert in New York this weekend to benefit Tuli Kupferberg, patron saint of bohemian New York and one of The Fugs, history’s first punk band. In his way Mr. K has challenged the world, but Michael tells it much better than I can:

The Fugs were founded by poets Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, and Ken Weaver in 1965 as a logical marriage of the three Bs—Beat (poetry), (the) Beatles, and (Lenny) Bruce. Born in 1923, Tuli billed himself as “the world’s oldest rock star” at the advanced age of 42. He’d already published Beat zines Birth and Yeah, was noted by Mailer and Allen Ginsberg for outsider behavior including the levitation of the Pentagon, and beloved by we younger hippies for his unshakeable bohemianism as captured in his rooftop striptease. (It’s interesting how repressed America was back then while now everyone gets naked on the Internet. There was a time when disrobing publicly was a political act.) Tuli wrote many of the Fugs’ biggest non-hits: “I Feel Like Homemade Shit,” “Nothing” (“Monday nothing/Tuesday nothing/Wednesday Thursday nothing”), the aching ballad “Morning Morning” (beautifully covered by Richie Havens), “CIA Man” (recently heard in the Coen Brothers Burn After Reading), and “Kill For Peace,” the greatest anti-war song of all time. The latter captured Tuli’s outrageous wit in the service of his dead serious anarcho-pacifistic loathing of war and violence.

Thr Fugs broke up in 1969 and reformed in Orwell and Reagan’s 1984. They’ve continued to record and perform live, rail against the ruthless and selfish, and sing to the heavens in support of peace, fun, sharing, and love. If none of the latter four attributes have been abundant for the last 30 years, one cannot blame the Fugs. O how they’ve tried. For those who trot out the tired clich?ɬ

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.20.2010
06:09 pm
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