Ed Saunders says Fug You

Now this article isn't about NZ really at all, but hopefully it will still amuse. If you haven't heard of Ed Sanders, you are just about to hear of a very interesting gentleman indeed. You can learn more in his new memoir, Fug You, which comes out in early January 2012.

Back before punk, there was The Fugs, and Ed Sanders was one of the key personnel in the group. The Fugs were formed in late 1964 in New York City by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg was a beatnik who appears in Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl and was a publisher and author before joining his friends in The Fugs.

Younger than Kupferberg by 16 years, Sanders was a Mid-Westerner who ended up in the 60s Greenwich Village scene after studying Greek at New York University. This was all way before the internet, blogs, Party Poker and Amazon, and Sanders ran a radical bookshop called Peace Eye Bookstore where he could peddle his anti-War, radical message. They then decided a band would spread the message even further. The Fugs were named after the euphemism for 'fuck' in Norman Mailer's Second World War novel The Naked and the Dead. The band, who had been born of the Beats and early-Sixties radicalism, combined their strong political message with a great sense of fun.

More recently, the band has been picked up as an influence by Jeffrey Lewis (a Fugs song appears in his song 'A History of Punk on the Lower East Side of NYC 1950 -1975'and Tuli Kupferberg pops up in the video for 'Will Oldham Williamsburg Horror'). Sanders' new book, Fug You is a collection of his writings over the years and includes some great anecdotes about running the Peace Eye Bookstore, meeting the movers and shakers of the Sixties, as well as trying to elevate the Pentagon!