It was a magnificent fall day in late summer. It is less than 8 miles from the school to the World Trade Center. We can see the Towers from the roof.
I was in the main hallway when I met Jackie, a social studies teacher. She said the news had reported a plane flew into one of the Towers. My first thought was remembering that a plane had once hit the Empire State Building, but I needed to continue my day as everyone was doing.
When the second plane hit the other Tower, our day stopped. TVs on in every classroom. Then Jackie told me that a Tower had collapsed.
“You mean the part above where the plane had hit.” How could a building like that actually collapse. Completely collapse.
Parents started to call. Parents came in. Parents brought their children home. The safety of home?
Nine Eleven Sleep Alone Why
Why?
I saw a mother picking up her daughter. Both crying. A clear day had become a mental fog. Not knowing what to say, but knowing I should say something, I cliché’d: “It’ll be OK.”
It wasn’t. The son, the brother, was in one of the Towers. His body never found. Why?
Nine Eleven Sleep Alone Why
Job interview
Our son was in the city that day for a job interview.
Downtown.
He later told us that when he entered the building he could see the Towers. When he left the building, the Towers were gone. He finally got across the river and met us in a shopping mall’s completely empy parking lot. Stores closed. He was with one other person, a young woman in similar straits.
Our days became an occasional waft of burning smell and an eerie silence until fighter jets suddenly and alarmingly screeched overhead.
Nine Eleven Sleep Alone Why
Sleep Alone Why
as the sun was set and the pieces of light touch your hair perfect love come softly with the dawn, the dawn city once full of people desolate, is desolate we look back in to the ruins where we played
at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky skytouch your hand you touch the back of my hand so many empty nights just waiting for this, for this standing there all heading downstream unsteady island we hear nothing, nothing at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky skyat least we were together holding hands flying through the sky at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky at least we were together holding hands flying through the sky sky
Published in 1948, Rinehart and Company published novelist Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead in 1948. The company convinced novelist Mailer to substitute the word “fug” for “fuck” in the novel.
In the far more open society of 1964, naming one’s group The Fucks was still beyond the pale even if the group emanated from Greenwich Village.
Fugs Kill For Peace
Strictly Kosher
Ed Sanders had rented a former Kosher meat store on East 10th Street in late-1964 and called it the Peace Eye Bookstore. Sanders left up the “Strictly Kosher” sign in the window.
Tuli Kupferberg lived next door. Kupferberg published magazines that he sold on the Village streets. Sanders published some of Kupferberg’s poetry in Sanders’ journal, Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts.
In late 1964 Sanders and Kupferberg decided to form a rock group. Kupferberg suggested the name Fugs.
According to Sanders, the band used the “… concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used.”
According to Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, the Fugs became “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.”
Fugs Kill For Peace
February 1965 debut
Friend and drummer Ken Weaver joined the Fugs. Then Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders joined.
The Fugs debuted in February 1965 at the Peace Eye Bookstore. Andy Warhol had done banners. William Burroughs, George Plimton, James Micherner, and others attended.
Fugs Kill For Peace
Peace tour
The band began recording songs in hopes of releasing an album. In the fall of 1965 the Fugs toured as part of an anti-Vietnam War protest. The band consisted of Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Steve Weber, and Ken Weaver.
The band returned to NYC at the end of to tour to find that Folkways Records had released their first album: The Village Fugs– Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction.
Fugs Kill For Peace
ESP Records
The Fugs left Folkway and signed with a new company, ESP Disk. In early 1966 they recorded a second album. The personnel for the second album the musicians consisted of Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver, plus keyboardist Lee Crabtree, Vinny Leary (guitar), Pete Kearney (guitar), and Jon Anderson (bass).
Fugs Kill For Peace
Kill For Peace
ESP-Disk released the Fugs’ second album, The Fugs, in March 1966. Allen Ginsberg wrote the liner notes. It was on this album that the Kupferberg compostion, “Kill for Peace” appeared. The album, to the surprise of many including the band itself, did well and charted. On July 9, 1966 The Fugs! was at 89, just above Martha and the Vandellas Greatest Hits!
Fugs Kill For Peace
FBI Investigation
According to their site, Popularity also brought us the attention of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. A few weeks after the Fugs Second Album was released, there was an FBI investigation of the Fugs, which I learned about years later when I obtained part of my files under the Freedom of Information Act.
Someone at a radio or television station wrote an indignant letter to the FBI complaining about The Fugs. Of course, in those years the FBI was known to write letters to itself, or set up such letters, in order to justify investigations of American activists.
In the early summer a FBI memorandum stated that a Postal Inspector had finished an investigation: “He advised The Fugs is a group of musicians who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers, i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. …. it is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene.”
If we’d only known about this, we could have put a disclaimer on the record, “Ruled NOT obscene by the FBI!”
Fugs Kill For Peace
Life magazine
LIFE cover 02-17-1967 New York counter culture leader Ed Sanders.
Ed Sanders fame helped put him on the cover of Life magazine in February 1967. It also encouraged right wing nuts to send a fake bomb and make threatening phone calls.
Fugs Kill For Peace
1969, End of part 1
1969 was the Fugs final year (at least for a fugging fifteen years). They played with the Dead and Velvet Underground on February 7 at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh.
On February 21-22, 1969, the Fugs had their final concerts of the 1960s at the Vulcan Gas Works in Austin, Texas.
Again from their site: It had not been an easy time. We were very, very controversial. We were always on the verge of getting arrested. We had bomb threats. We were picketed by right wingers. Someone sent me a fake bomb in the mail. Someone called once and said he was going to bomb, first me, then Frank Zappa. We were investigated by the FBI, by the Post Office, by the New York District Attorney. We were often encouraged not to try to perform again at the same venue. We were tossed off a major label. It took bites out of our spirit. I was getting weary– four years had seemed like forty, and I felt as if I’d awakened inside a Samuel Beckett novel.
There was no invitation to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, but…
Fugs Kill For Peace
1985, beginning of part 2
The band reformed in 1985 and began recording again. In 1994 the Woodstock anniversary concert was planned for Saugerties, NY. Sanders, a resident of Woodstock, NY, thought the reunion far too commercial and profit-driven to be a part of. He organized a personal Real Woodstock Festival in Woodstock itself in the Byrdcliffe Barn. They held it on August 13 and 14. Thanks to modern media, we can listen to their music from the live album that came from their sets: The Real Woodstock Festival.
Country Joe came over from the Saugerties site to join the Real Woodstock Festival.
Fugs Kill For Peace
Still going…
Co-founder Tuli Kupferberg died on July 7, 2010, but the band continues to sporadically reform and play.
As Ed Sanders writes at the end of the band’s history, Dum spiro, spero, the Latin adage goes– while we breathe, we hope.
Cynthia Powell was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, on September 10, 1939. She met John Lennon in 1957 while both were students at the Liverpool College of Art. She was engaged. He had a girlfriend. She broke off the former and he the latter.
Much later she said, ““If I’d known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to I would have turned ’round right then and walked away.”
We never know what one meeting can do, though.
Cynthia Powell Lennon
John and Cythia marry
John and Cynthia married on August 23, 1962 shortly after she discovered her pregnancy. John insisted they marry.
Brian Epstein was the best man. George Harrison and Paul McCartney also attended, but John’s aunt Mimi, who disapproved of the marriage, did not. Powell’s half brother Tony and his wife were there.
Epstein paid for the reception afterwards at Reece’s restaurant in Clayton Square.
That night, the Beatles played at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester, a situation that increasingly repeated itself as their popularity grew and their touring expanded.
Epstein allowed John and Cynthia to live at his flat without rent. They remained there until Julian Lennon was born on April 8, 1963 after which they moved in with John’s disapproving aunt Mimi in Liverpool.
Cynthia Powell Lennon
Married life on the road, before…
To say “they” lived there is an exaggeration, since John was in London most of the time with the band.
To add to the marriage’s difficulties, Brian Epstein, urged the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. The image Epstein wanted (as much as those many teenage girl Beatle-maniacs) was of four eligible bachelors, not three + one married with a child.
As with any relationship that has a mother primarily raising the young child because the father is away and when home usually coming home from a long night out, challenges occurred.
In a 1985 Fresh Air interview Cynthia said of John: “He used to sleep an awful lot. And he would wake up when we were ready to go to bed, if you know what I mean. With a small child, you have to be up early in the morning, and then you’re pretty exhausted at night, whereas John’s hours changed. You know, he’d be up at night and in bed during the day. So the whole fabric of our life changed because of the work that he was doing, and because of the pressures from outside.
About the Beatles rapid and phenomenal success she said, “So all of a sudden, you find yourself with a chauffeur and a housekeeper and a cook and an interior designer and all the things in life that you’ve never experienced before and you weren’t brought up to, I was left to cope with and handle, which was hard work. It was a full-time job, actually.”
Cynthia Powell Lennon
Married life on the rocks…
John met Yoko Ono in 1966. The artistic attraction turned into an emotional and physical one that Cynthia discovered in 1968 when she found them together after returning from a Greek holiday Lennon had encouraged her to take.
At first, Lennon sued for divorce accusing Cynthia of adultery. She counter-sued on August 22, 1968 and on November 8, 1968, was granted a divorce.
She stated, “I had to survive this for Julian. I couldn’t afford to crumble: I had to be strong, do what was best for him. I could fight the divorce, but that would get horribly messy and in the circumstances as clean a break as possible seemed best.”
Survive she did. Cynthia Lennon married three more times after the 1968 split, most last being widowed to Noel Charles who died in 2013.
When asked what led to the famed split, Cynthia said, “I think we both changed. It was natural that we both change. But I did not want to go down the road John was going … I had nothing to escape. I wasn’t looking for anything else. I wasn’t searching in my mind for new experiences on a mental state.”
Cynthia Powell Lennon
In Loving Memory
Cynthia Powell Lennon died at her home in Spain on April 1, 2015. She was 75. After her death, son Julian posted the following touching video:
You gave your life for me
You gave your life for love
The feeling still remains
Though you’re on a different plane
Your world is full of angels
You’ve become one
With God above you’re freeYou were so Beautiful You are so Beautiful The love you left behind will carry on You gave your heart and soul to everyoneYou never lived a lie You showed me how to cry The life that you embraced Always let you down But you’re the only one that stood your ground No matter what they sayYou were so Beautiful You are so Beautiful The love you left behind will carry on You gave your heart and soul to everyoneYou were so Beautiful You are so Beautiful The love you left behind will carry on You gave your heart and soul to everyone You were so Beautiful You are so Beautiful The love you left behind will carry on You gave your heart and soul to everyoneYou gave your life for love I know you’re safe above
Cynthia Powell Lennon
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
