*And now he belongs to the ages, so it'll be really interesting to see how he gets cleaned-up and domesticated in retrospect.
*Assuming, that its, that anyone remembers him at all. Fickle business, history.
http://music-mix.ew.com/2010/07/12/tuli-kupferberg-dies/
Jul 12 2010 06:12 PM ET
The Fugs' Tuli Kupferberg dies at 86
by Simon Vozick-Levinson
Categories: In Memoriam, Music, News
Tuli Kupferberg died today at age 86 in NYC, The New York Times reports.
A cause of death has not been announced; Kupferberg had suffered
multiple strokes last year.
Kupferberg, pictured in 1968, first made his name in the 1950s as a Beat
poet who was friendly with such literary greats as Allen Ginsberg. In
the mid-’60s, he and fellow poet Ed Sanders formed the Fugs, an
off-kilter folk band reportedly named after a euphemism employed
frequently in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. The Fugs’ music
went on to attract great acclaim and no small degree of controversy,
boldly tackling topics like sex and drugs. They were also proudly
outspoken about politics, participating in many protests against the
ever-escalating Vietnam War. At one famous October 1967 event, the Fugs
helped Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and others attempt to symbolically
levitate the Pentagon through music.
*****
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html
Tuli Kupferberg, Bohemian and Fug, Dies at 86
By BEN SISARIO
Published: July 12, 2010
He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year, said
Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.
The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert
Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They
were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group
of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the
graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by
William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated
punk rock.
With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves
as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band
became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played
innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in
1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the
Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the
Dead.”)
The Fugs was formed in 1964 in Mr. Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a
former kosher meat store on East 10th Street in Manhattan. By then Mr.
Kupferberg, already in his 40s, was something of a Beatnik celebrity. He
was an anthologized poet and had published underground literary
magazines with titles like Birth and Yeah.
He had also found notoriety as the inspiration for a character in Allen
Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” As Ginsberg and Mr. Kupferberg acknowledged, he
was the one who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened
and walked away unknown and forgotten,” a reference to a 1945 suicide
attempt (off the Manhattan Bridge, not Brooklyn) that had been
preciptated by what he called a nervous breakdown.
The fame that episode earned him caused Mr. Kupferberg a lifetime of
chagrin and embarrassment. “Throughout the years,” he later said, “I
have been annoyed many times by, ‘Oh, did you really jump off the
Brooklyn Bridge?,’ as if it was a great accomplishment.”
The Fugs’ first album, “The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary
Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction,” was released in
1965. The band became a staple of underground galleries and theaters, as
well as antiwar rallies. In concert Mr. Kupferberg was often the group’s
mascot or harlequin, acting out satirical pantomimes — an American
soldier who turns into a Nazi, for example — or sometimes not singing at
all.
On subsequent albums the band changed its lineup many times and acquired
a more professional sound, though its scatological themes got it kicked
off at least one major record label.
With his bushy beard and wild hair, Mr. Kupferberg embodied the hippie
aesthetic. But the term he preferred was bohemian, which to him
signified a commitment to art as well as a rejection of restrictive
bourgeois values, and as a scholar of the counterculture he traced the
term back to an early use by students at the University of Paris. Among
his books were “1,001 Ways to Live Without Working” — and for decades he
was a frequent sight in Lower Manhattan, selling his cartoons on the
street and serving as a grandfather figure for generations of
nonconformists.
Beneath Mr. Kupferberg’s antics, however, was a keen poetic and musical
intelligence that drew on his Jewish and Eastern European roots. He
specialized in what he called “parasongs,” which adapted and sometimes
satirized old songs with new words. And some of his Fugs songs, like the
gentle “Morning, Morning,” had their origins in Jewish religious melodies.
Naphtali Kupferberg was born in New York on Sept. 28, 1923. He grew up
on the Lower East Side and became a jazz fan and leftist activist while
still a teenager. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944 and got a
job as a medical librarian.
“I had intended to be a doctor at one point, like any good Jewish boy,”
he recalled to Mr. Sanders in an audio interview in 2003. Instead he
began to write topical poems and humor pieces, contributing to The
Village Voice and other publications.
After the Fugs broke up, in 1969, Mr. Kupferberg performed with two
groups, the Revolting Theater and the Fuxxons, and continued writing.
The Fugs reunited periodically, first in 1984. Recently, Mr. Sanders
said, Mr. Kupferberg had completed his parts for a new album, “Be Free:
The Fugs Final CD (Part Two),” and had also been posting ribald
“perverbs” — brief videos punning on well-known aphorisms — on YouTube.
Mr. Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children,
Joseph Sacks, Noah Kupferberg and Samara Kupferberg; and three
grandchildren.
*****
