"Do You Have a Band?"

Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City

Daniel Kane

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544603
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem.

Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.

ONE

The Fugs Are Coming

In his “Complete History of Punk Rock and Its Development on the Lower East Side 1950–1975,” the singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis argues that punk began when a mix of folk music, drugs, film, and poetry were incubated in the Lower East Side. Name-checking Beat Generation figures like Harry Smith, “a beatnik weirdo” who curated the influential Anthology of American Folk Music, Lewis cites the Holy Modal Rounders, who “began to make [folk-revival music] more anarchistic with weird voices and drug jokes.” Lewis celebrates the moment in 1964 when

the Rounders met other beatnik intellectual thugs on East Tenth Street who called themselves the Fugs. They were recorded by Harry Smith playing the punkiest songs yet to exist low-fi noisy shit about poetry sex and drugs … The Fugs were real poets with real topics to speak out and through the underground scene this weird music could leak out beginning the punk idea that anybody could do it without needing much musical ability to it and this new music was soon labeled “Freak Out.”1

What makes “real poets” real in Fugsworld? “We’re taking poetry, some of which is highly charged with sexual connotations,” Ed Sanders, the lead singer for the Fugs, told the TV presenter David Susskind in 1967,

and we’re dropping it into modern music, into pop music, into rock and roll, into chants and religious statements, and social statements. Some of it involves using the Blip words, the four-letter words, the seven-letter words, and the sixteen-letter words that are banned on the airwaves, but which we can say in the context of theater, and we actually say them on albums.2

As Sanders explained, this was not a case of musicians writing elliptical lyrics that were later defined as “poetic.” Rather, the Fugs were “dropping” poems from writers as diverse as Blake, Swinburne, Auden, and Ginsberg into their mix, creating entirely new forms of reception for texts that had traditionally been consigned to the page. Lewis’s iconoclastic history, then, goes some way in correcting the historical record, which, with some exceptions,3 tends to elide the Fugs both as punk precursors and as riotous cultural critics who reconciled nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry with rock ’n’ roll before Lou Reed, Patti Smith, or Richard Hell’s own invocations of bardic authority. The Fugs’ “low fi noisy shit about poetry sex and drugs” reveals them to be the first rock band to show how poetry and rock could work together to promote a visibly confrontational and noisy youth-oriented sensibility.

The Fugs formed in 1964 (just before the Velvet Underground came together in the same neighborhood). The band, initially just Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver, was joined soon after by Holy Modal Rounders members Peter Stampfel and Ken Weaver. The Fugs came together at a time when the Lower East Side’s underground caché had yet to become marketable enough to be used by landlords to rent hovels at inflated prices. And while the Fugs might not have inspired a thousand other people to start their own shaggy, pot-infused poetry-punk groups, they were nevertheless seen by subsequent innovators as heralds of punk rock. As Richard Hell put it in his introduction to an Ed Sanders reading at the Poetry Project, “Ed Sanders, Egyptologist, Investigative Poet, Fug, and immortal auteur of Fuck You/a magazine of the arts. And an inspiration to anyone who ever wondered if ever they could be a rock and roll musician.”4 Pointing ahead to punk rants like the Feederz’ “Jesus Entering from the Rear,” the Fugs delighted in writing scandalous songs such as “Coca Cola Douche” and “Group Grope”; they also published related mimeograph magazines, including Sanders’s Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts and pamphlets such as Fuck God in the Ass.5 Carnivalesque troubadours who sang songs including “CIA Man” and “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs laid the groundwork for punk-politico satires like the Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor.” And like the best punk bands of the 1970s and ’80s, Sanders, Weaver, and Kupferberg, at least initially, barely knew how to play their instruments. “At its best,” wrote one reviewer at the time, “Fugsound always had a doleful, amateur-night quality, and this people liked. It belonged with those loony lyrics. And it was one more way of flipping a big Fug finger at technically slick but shallow mass culture sounds.”6 More than a decade before the slogan “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band” became a guiding principle for punk-infatuated wannabe musicians, the Fugs at least initially made a virtue out of renouncing virtuosity.7

Figure 1.1 Fugs Are Coming flyer, date and provenance unknown.

Source: Samara Kupferberg Collection.

This chapter will consider punk as it was formed in the Fugs’ early recordings and will illustrate and explore the motivations behind the Fugs’ efforts to reimagine poems as shambolic rock ’n’ roll. From the Velvet Underground’s own invocations of tortured poets such as Delmore Schwartz to Patti Smith’s summoning Rimbaud, the Talking Heads’ adapting Hugo Ball’s poem “Gadji Beri Bimba” into their own “I Zimbra,” and Thurston Moore’s improvisatory rap “Oh yes, the flowers / they will grow and they will show us how to blow / in the wind / Like a Dylan Fug, / like a Fuggy Wug,”8 the Fugs’ mixture of poetry and noise anticipated and influenced much of what was to follow.9

When Poetry Was Hipper Than Pop

The Fugs’ performance aesthetic was inspired not so much by the rock ’n’ roll bands of the late 1950s and early 1960s as it was by the vibrant performance poetry scene in downtown New York.10 Kupferberg (who holds a hallowed place in the history of 1950s avant-garde poetry and the political and cultural life of the Lower East Side)11 and Sanders organized and appeared regularly at coffeehouse reading series, including the weekly events at Café Le Metro on Second Avenue in the East Village. “When I read [The Toe-Queen Poems] at Le Metro,” Sanders remembers, “the response, in applause and overwhelming laughter, was the first I had received for anything I’d ever read in public, and I think it was an impetus to form a satiric proto-folk-rock group called The Fugs a few months later.”12 While Sanders always, as he put it, “followed rock-and-roll and country and western tunes as if they were sacred chants,” by 1964 he, like so many of the Beat Generation poets he looked up to, “was more attuned to civil rights songs and jazz.” Things started to change for Sanders when he saw writers of his generation boogying along to the Beatles and the Stones. It got him thinking “about fusing poetry and this new generation of pop tunes. I was getting the urge to form a band.”13

That “urge” was based in large part—at least initially—not so much on the desire to become a serious rock ’n’ roll musician as it was to find a form appropriate to the populist promotion of a particularly dissident, even abject style of poetry:

The three charter members [of the Fugs]—Lower East Side poets all—had long been trying to reach young people with their messages urging the ultimate in personal freedom and condemning violence and war. But they’d found out that printed poetry hardly commands a big audience these days. So why not put it to music, the kind of music the new generation listens to most. Blast out those ballads, satires, and bedtime panegyrics as rock and roll … “This generation is a rock generation.”14

In other words, New York’s punk rock scene got started, in part, because a group of irreverent poets wanted to transmit as much as possible of their love for avant-garde poetry to as wide an audience as possible. Becoming rock ’n’ rollers was simply the fastest and best way forward to “blast out those ballads, satires, and bedtime panegyrics.” That Sanders and his confreres understood and promoted poetry both as text and as edgy, rebellious lifestyle is not necessarily that surprising when we consider that it was poetry, not rock ’n’ roll, that was pushing the boundaries in the late 1950s.

Thanks to the widely publicized 1957 trial in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyosi Murao were accused of obscenity for distributing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” thousands of Americans were aware of a long poem celebrating a cast of characters “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”15 Ginsberg’s friends were to face similar problems at the dawn of the 1960s. Obscenity charges were leveled against Floating Bear’s editors LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima for publishing William Burroughs’s “Roosevelt After Inauguration” and LeRoi Jones’s “The System of Dante’s Hell” in 1961. The initial public response to the publication of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1962

was an almost unanimous interdiction. Interests and authorities as diverse as US Customs, the trustees of the University of Chicago, the US Postal Service, the City of Los Angeles, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a host of journalists and literary critics were all in agreement that what Burroughs had to say should not be said.16

And it wasn’t just poetry and related publications that earned the enmity of the authorities. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, New York’s fire inspectors and representatives from the Department of Licenses regularly invaded poetry readings in West and East Village coffeehouses for breaking fire and zoning laws. In 1959, so-called cabaret laws were used to issue summonses against coffeehouses that held regular poetry readings. Cafés in the West Village, including Café Wha?, the Gaslight, and Café Bizarre, had all been padlocked, cited for various infractions, and threatened with closure for minor offences. In 1963 and 1964, poetry readings in East Village coffee shops like Le Metro faced similar pressure, as did any number of related avant-garde theater and film spaces.

Before 1964, poets and their fellow travelers were in the outré vanguard. Rock ’n’ roll musicians weren’t. What, after all, were people listening to as early as 1957, the year academics and censors were arguing in court about lines in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? The Billboard year-end charts for 1957 reveal that although Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” was number 1 and a number of other artists making frantic sounds, such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent, appear on the list, rock ’n’ roll’s ambitious amalgam of black R&B, white-boy blues, and pornographic grunts and hollers was making room for rather more anodyne sounds. Most ominously, Pat Boone’s unctuous cover version of the tune “Love Letters in the Sand” was at number 2. The unfailingly polite Boone vacuumed out almost any traces of threat latent in earlier rock ’n’ roll. Boone, who continued to achieve tremendous success throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, performed a kind of radical counterattack against the Beat Generation–era narratives of boundless freedom through immersion in jazz, sex, and drugs. Boone “did not embrace or represent the teenage rebellion and bad boy image of the early rock stars; instead he was a ‘goody two-shoes’ who made no secret of his Christian faith.”17 Given Boone’s growing influence in the popular arena, Sanders’s work as a poet and publisher can in this context be seen as a recuperation of the more transgressive elements of 1950s rock ’n’ roll.

The Billboard Top 100 chart for 1958 reveals an ever-increasing banality and escapism that contrasted violently with the radicalism of Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, and other writers. Each passing year found the disconnect between innovative American poetry and American pop music widening—the year 1959 gave us Alfred Leslie’s and Robert Frank’s seminal Beat film Pull My Daisy and the publication of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, but it also put Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” at number 1. If 1960 gave us Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry, which introduced thousands of new readers to poets including Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, and John Wieners, it also gave us Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

While critics have gone to great lengths to explain how and why predominantly white bohemians sought out jazz as their soundtrack,18 a simpler explanation can be found just by tracking the Billboard charts from about 1958 to around 1963—the evidence shows that rock ’n’ roll was steadily losing its power as an alternative and even dangerous challenge to American traditional values. Postwar American jazz, beyond being technically and musically challenging, was also fundamentally transgressive in terms of the stories of the musicians. The drug culture and unconventional lifestyles associated with Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Thelonious Monk all provided a stark counternarrative to the increasingly wholesome image rock ’n’ roll was working hard t...