On June 21 and 22, 1969, John Brower and Kenny Walkeron had produced the Toronto Pop Festival in the Varsity Stadium at the University of Toronto. Its success encouraged them to do a larger festival in September, but like many musical enterprises, problems ensued.
Kim Fowley to the rescue
Because of poor ticket sales, Brower and Walkeron almost had to cancel the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival when their main backer pulled out.
Musician, producer, and general bon vivant Kim Fowley was going to be the MC of the show. He suggested to Brower to call Apple Records and invite John Lennon and Yoko Ono to be MCs as well. Fowley’s reasoning was Lennon’s love for roots rock and that Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent were among those in the festival.
Plastic Ono to the rescue
Lennon not only accepted the suggestion, he offered to play at the festival as well. Accompanying Lennon and Ono were Klaus Voormann, Alan White, and Eric Clapton. At first no one believed Brower, but once the recorded conversation of Brower ordering tickets for Lennon et al, tickets sold out.
Line up
As mentioned above and as the event’s name implies, this festival (though just one day) had a basic rock line up:
Whiskey Howl
Bo Diddley
Chicago
Junior Walker and the All Stars
Tony Joe White
Alice Cooper
Chuck Berry
Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys
Jerry Lee Lewis
Gene Vincent
Little Richard
Doug Kershaw
The Doors
John Lennon and Plastic Ono Band
80 members of the Vagabonds motorcycle club rode escort, 40 in front and 40 in back, for John and Yoko’s limousine from the Toronto airport to the university stadium.
1969 Toronto Rock Roll Revival
D.A. Pennebaker
Luckily for history and us today the organizers filmed the event. D.A. Pennebaker, maker of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back and Monterey Pop again did a great job. There are many pieces of the film, Sweet Toronto on YouTube. The more you watch the better an already great concert gets. Great great rock and roll!
1969 Toronto Rock Roll Revival
Lights on…
It is a sad commentary that the show’s great stars needed the light of John Lennon to bring a sold out mostly young white audience to listen, but that’s what happened. Ironically, the story is that John Lennon, performing for the first time without Paul McCartney since their 1950s meeting, needed encouragement.
The hitherto imaginary band consisted of Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and session musician Alan White on drums. [see Beatles Bible article]
Before introducing the Plastic Ono Band, Kim Fowley had everyone get their matches ready to greet Lennon , Ono, and friends. Whether this was the first time an audience used matches to greet a performer is unknown. It is likely one of the first times.
The band’s set list mostly reflected the festival’s revival theme:
The American Beatlemania that began in 1964 affected American businesses in many ways. The British Invasion, though initially referring to the dozens of British performers and bands that followed on the heels of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, spread commercially into clothing and other media, too.
1966 Monkees Premiere
1966
By 1966, Bob Dylan had gone electric. The Beatles had gone herbal. Brian Wilson was petting sounds. And NBC decided that a faux Beatle TV show was a good idea.
It was.
1966 Monkees Premiere
1965
The idea to “create” a band was not new. Al Grossman created the Peter, Paul, and Mary trio, but the idea to create a band based more on acting than musical ability was new.
The first person to become a Monkee was 20-year-old Davy Jones. Jones had been a child actor and actually had an odd Beatle connection. He had played the Artful Dodger in the 1962 Broadway show Oliver!. He performed a scene from that play on The Ed Sullivan Show the same night as the Beatles’ first appearance on that show, February 9, 1964.
An ad for the other three spots attracted 437 applicants. Chosen were Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork.
Nesmith had actually worked as a musician. Micky Dolenz was an actor who had starred in the TV series Circus Boy as a child.
The network selected Peter Tork last. Stephen Stills had tried out but did not get the gig. Stills was the one who had told Peter Tork about the call.
1966 Monkees Premiere
Monkees Premiere
Like any TV project, many people were involved. Don Kirshner was head of music and he selected Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart to write music for the show and album. The Monkees themselves had limited roles musically, particularly at first. All these contradictions upset many in the band, particularly Michael Nesmith.
Eventually the four had much more control.
But…
As an opening salvo, Colgems released the The Monkees’ first single, “Last Train to Clarksville” on August 16, 1966, The first broadcast of the television show was on September 12, 1966 on NBC.
Colgems released the album, The Monkees, on October 1. It reached Billboard’s #1 album on November 12 and was there for 13 weeks; it charted for 78 weeks.
1966 Monkees Premiere
Duchess of Harmonica
In the first episode, “The Royal Flush,” the Monkees foil a plot to assassinate princess Bettina, the Duchess of Harmonica. The show had two seasons with a total of 58 episodes.
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.
Fugs Kill For Peace
For Peace,
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
