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.

 
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.

“Tuli Kupferberg was a mentor to all of us who grew up in the ?

 
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