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.
Just as Woodstock had inspired other young entrepreneurs to try their hand at organizing their own festivals, the Isle of Wight’s festivals, particularly 1970’s, inspired Helmut Ferdinand, Christian Berthold, and Tim Sievers to do the same.
And just as the Isle of Wight was an island concert (duh), these three young men chose the Isle of Fehmarn, between West Germany and Denmark. The idea was a sensible one: book the artists appearing at the Isle of Wight after that event on August 28, 29, and 30. Such Woodstock names as Melanie, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, John Sebastian, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, and most importantly of all, Jimi Hendrix.
Interesting financing
Like any young men with an idea, they needed money to back it. Beate Uhse put up 200,000 German Marks in advance and offered the use of her 20 German sex shops as additional ticket sale offices. She was a stunt pilot and opened the first sex shop in the world. [Beate died in 2001. Her company, Beate Uhse AG is listed on the Frankfort Stock Exchange.]
Jimi Hendrix Swan Song
German Max Yasgur
Ferdinand, Berthold, and Sievers selected an area called Flueggerstrand and rented a field belonging to a farmed named Störtenbecker. They converted a nearby school into a temporary hospital.
With unpleasant echos of Woodstock in the air, they…
had to ask local breweries and dairies to provide beverages as the company they hoped to contract refused.
asked the German Red Cross to provide a mobile kitchen for the warm meals.
built two fences around the festival area
installed a few telephone boxes.
rented a gigantic sound system from England
Joan Baez and John Mayall cancelled because they feared non-payment after learning of poor ticket sales.
Jimi Hendrix Swan Song
Bad Weather Bonus
As if the pre-festival similarities to Woodstock weren’t enough, the day the festival started, so did the rain. Unlike Woodstock, a German biker group called the “Bloody Devils” arrived and supplanted the planned security.
Jimi Hendrix Swan Song
The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Hendrix, Billy Cox on bass, and Mitch Mitchell on drums) were on Saturday’s schedule. Rain cancelled that appearance, but Hendrix, already paid, played the next day. Bootleg copies of that performance existed for year, but on December 13, 2005 Dagger Records released the best-sounding recording.
It was his last concert. Hendrix died in London on September 18. The monument pictured below now commemorates that performance on the Isle of Fehmarn.
It was a difficult month for rock fans, particularly those who had attended Woodstock. On September 3 Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson died. Hendrix on the 18th. And Janis Joplin on October 4.
