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Ed Sanders Tales Of Beatnik Glory

Ed Sanders Tales Of Beatnik Glory image
Parent Issue
Day
31
Month
December
Year
1975
OCR Text

Stone Hill Press

The sixties were so intense and claimed so many victíms from a brilliant generation of politica! and cultural activists thai it comes as a happy and pleasant surprise to find the rare survivor of that heavy decade who ís still functioning at the same high level of perception and passion which characterized so much of the period. Ed Sanders, one of the seminal figures of ihe 60s, is juch a survivor, and his book, an episodic work of semifiction titled Tales of Beatnik Glory, manages lo preserve not only some af the early history of the post-beatnik, pre-hippie "underground," but its incredible. crazily unique as well.

For the record - which in Sanders' case, his been sadly lacking with respect to recognition - Ed left his home in Kansas after high school tor the decadent delights of New York City's bohemian underbelly. Settling wretchedly in the Lower East Side among Ihe poets, painters, musicians, actors. dope fiends. degenerates. ethnics and weirdos who populated the area in disproportionate number, Sanders quickly became involved in the entire spectrum of anti-authoritarian activity which sprang from lower Manhattan at the turn of the decade.

First known for swimming in tne Atlantic Ocean to board a nuclear submarine in an early peace-creep action in 1962, Sanders gained national notoriety in modern poetry circles with his mimeo publication FUCK YOU: a magazine of the arts. FUCK YOU, an irregular journal of poetry and madness which was edited, typed, drawn, printed, assembled, and hustled by Sanders and a crew of amphetamine-driven maniacs on the Lower East Side, literally created the language and legend oí the American underground which was to domínate the remainder of the decade. Translating the elite-oriented message of the highest poetry of the age into everyday street talk and stuffing it with the energy of the rock and roll Midwest, Sanders effected a high-charged fusion of poetry and politics which was aimed at a mass audience rather than the thousand or two souls who had served as support for the work and ideas ol the cultural vanguard of the 50's.

Finding the medium of the poetry magazine inadequate to carry his ecstatic new message, Sanders assembled a raggedy rock and roll band from the illuminated dregs of the neighborhood and called it The Fugs, an aggregation which was to become known as "the underground Rolling Stones." Spewing forth a series of albums lor Broadside, ESP-Disk, and Warner/Reprise, the Fugs also criss-crossed the country on several occasions, bringing the hard-core weirdness of New York City to the cultural wastelands of America and leaving a trail of dope-crazed male and female sex fiends in their wake.

Sanders, the author of several books of poetry (including "Sheep-Fuck Ode." the Fugs' Song Book. and Peace-Eye) by that time, also operated the Peace Eye bookstore in NYC; became an original Yippie organizer in 1968, planning the events for the ill-fated Festival of Life at the Democratic Convention in Chicago later that year; recorded a number of Reprise LPs under his own name; and undertook the research and writing of a book on the Charles Manson gang, The Family, which became a national best-seller.

Now engaged in research foi a work on the RFK assassination, Sanders has put together a well-organized, carefully-written memoir of life on the Lower East Side between 1958 and 1963 which will inform and delight anyone who has any interest in the roots of the weirdness which inspired and infused the sixties as we knew them. Tales of Beatnik Glory draws a picture of an important culturo-historical period, in its own words no less, which has not yet been seen except by those who through it, and Sanders' impeccably hilarious language fills in every detail with the lived original - and irrepressible - energy of the lime and place. What more could one ask for? Bring back the beatniks! 

 - John Sinclair