'60s survivor
The last of the radicals brings his private revolution to Prague
By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 12th, 2007
“Like I told Jimi Hendrix once: Any country that can invent the wah-wah
pedal can’t be thoroughly evil.”
Ed Sanders is not short on anecdotes. The poet, musician, Charles Manson
target and political gadfly has been called the bridge between the
beatniks and the hippies, chumming around with friends Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg in the North Beach of the early ’60s,
then hanging out backstage with the likes of Hendrix and Jim Morrison in
the latter part of that packed decade.
Sanders was in Prague last week as an early teaser to next summer’s
Prague Writers’ Festival, an event that will be wholly focused on that
annus terribilis, 1968 -- a year Sanders remembers very well.“It was a
strange, schizophrenic time,” Sanders told an audience that gathered for
his slide lecture at the American Center. “There was all this
revolutionary fervor, and then there was all the rest.”That “rest” was
considerable: Vietnam, massacres in My Lai and Mexico City, Biafra, the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, the
bloody riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, not to mention
epic riots in Paris and London. In New York City, writer Valerie Solonas
gunned down Andy Warhol, while in Baghdad a coup d’ιtat propelled a
young, unknown man named Saddam Hussein into power.
For Czechs, 1968 can never be forgotten, of course, as that was the year
the armies of the Warsaw Pact parked tanks on Wenceslas Square to crush
the Prague Spring. “Terrible times and things,” Sanders reminded the
crowd, “and yet in the middle of the madness the Beatles could release
their great White Album.”
Meeting with Sanders is like meeting up with the past itself,
particularly the part that lived in the trenches and on the barricades
where history is made.
Yet nearing his 70th year, Sanders still possesses a surprising
youthfulness, energetically producing new books, CDs and his own line of
microtonal musical instruments. “I was looking forward to going to the
Golden Bards’ Old Folks Home,” he quips, “but things are such that you
have to keep working to keep from winding up on the streets.”
The other culture
After hitchhiking out of the plain Great Plains for the cosmopolitan
stew of Greenwich Village, Sanders wrote his first poem on prison toilet
paper after being arrested for protesting nuclear proliferation in 1961.
His passion for poetry and political activism were born as fraternal
twins. “A wise person once told me to dare to be a part of the history
of your era,” he says. “I took it seriously.”
In Greenwich Village, he launched the avant-garde journal Fuck You: A
Journal of the Arts (a platform for late Modernists and fellow beats)
and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, which the NYPD promptly raided on
grounds of obscenity, leading Sanders back to jail and onto the cover of
Life magazine, which dubbed him a “leader of New York’s other culture.”
By then, Sanders was best-known as the singer/songwriter for the
influential band The Fugs, which formed in 1965. “It was a time for
music,” Sanders recalls, “and music still defines those times.”
“I’m an American patriot of the Walt Whitman wing of the Democratic
Party,” Sanders declared to his American Center audience, and like any
true patriot he’s been gravely disappointed. A good portion of his
lecture dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, an event that
moved him profoundly. Even in conversation with the poet later, he
appeared to be checking his emotions when talking about Kennedy.
“It’s the moment I discovered that I was a true American patriot,”
Sanders recalls. “I wept all day.”
Yet the schizophrenia that he had earlier referred to in his
presentation surfaced in an uncomfortable memory of the day following
the assassination. “I got a call from Jerry Rubin,” Sanders says of the
famous ’60s radical, “and he said, ‘Did you hear the good news?
Kennedy’s dead. Now we can raise some hell in Chicago.’ I couldn’t
believe it.” And Rubin had his wish more than fulfilled, as history reports.
“I’m going to write a book on Kennedy next,” Sanders tells me. “I’ve
discovered some additional information about that day in Los Angeles.”
One thing he found strangely dovetails back into an earlier book of his.
“Did you know,” he asks, “that the day Kennedy was killed, he had a meal
with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate?”
Sanders’ The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack
Battalion was the first book to deal with the Tate-LaBianca murder spree
by the Spahn Ranch beasts. Sanders gained access to Manson’s clan by
posing, as he once wrote, as a “Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped
psychopath.”
“I went out to California with this idea that Manson was innocent,”
Sanders says. “You know, the establishment taking their frustrations out
on nomad hippies. Then I discovered that he wasn’t just guilty, but very
guilty.”
His book made a sworn enemy out of Manson, who has sent his share of
death threats and demonic drawings to Sanders, one of which Sanders used
for a 9/11 design. “It was the most evil thing I had to express evil,”
he says. The Family itself is due for a reprinting, with additional
information that Sanders has dug up.
History denied
Along with those book projects, there’s also his recently completed
five-volume set of the history of America in verse. “It’s a great
country with a great history,” he states. “But there’s a sense of dread
in the country at the moment.”
To Sanders, there are far too many moments of “better history denied,”
particularly with Kennedy’s death. “And then there was Gore,” he
complains of the 2000 election. “He was just too much the Southern
gentleman to go down to Florida and take on the Elmer Gantrys that were
stealing the election.”
Bush and his “Custerism,” as Sanders labels the man’s proud ignorance,
have certainly proven to be grist for the old activist. In a concert
last Monday night at Divadlo Minor, Sanders performed a new poem about
the world becoming a harmonious whole at the jailing of Bush. As with
almost all of Sanders’ work, he manages to be totally, radically engaged
with history while maintaining an almost Epicurean joyfulness.
He was joined in the concert by the Plastic People of the Universe, and
so the audience was again confronted with the legacy of 1968. “My band,
The Fugs, was playing in Essen, Germany, when the Soviets attacked
Czechoslovakia,” Sanders had told his audience earlier at the American
Center. “We decided to go to Prague, and we were going to lie down in
front of the tanks. It was a statement, but it also would have made a
great album cover. Well, we got close to the border, but a German
soldier with a machine gun stopped us.”
For a man who has lived history, Sanders seems starved for more, and is
even wistful for what he missed. “If I could go back to a previous
moment, I’d like to join Walt Whitman on his journey to New Orleans in
1860,” Sanders tells me. “I would go with him to see the dreadful slave
auction in Congo Square, and I would say, ‘Walt, let’s make some
placards that say STOP SLAVERY NOW.’”
Sanders laughs, then says, “We’d be thrown in jail, sure. But think of
the poetry we could write there!”
Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com
By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 12th, 2007
“Like I told Jimi Hendrix once: Any country that can invent the wah-wah
pedal can’t be thoroughly evil.”
Ed Sanders is not short on anecdotes. The poet, musician, Charles Manson
target and political gadfly has been called the bridge between the
beatniks and the hippies, chumming around with friends Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg in the North Beach of the early ’60s,
then hanging out backstage with the likes of Hendrix and Jim Morrison in
the latter part of that packed decade.
Sanders was in Prague last week as an early teaser to next summer’s
Prague Writers’ Festival, an event that will be wholly focused on that
annus terribilis, 1968 -- a year Sanders remembers very well.“It was a
strange, schizophrenic time,” Sanders told an audience that gathered for
his slide lecture at the American Center. “There was all this
revolutionary fervor, and then there was all the rest.”That “rest” was
considerable: Vietnam, massacres in My Lai and Mexico City, Biafra, the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, the
bloody riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, not to mention
epic riots in Paris and London. In New York City, writer Valerie Solonas
gunned down Andy Warhol, while in Baghdad a coup d’ιtat propelled a
young, unknown man named Saddam Hussein into power.
For Czechs, 1968 can never be forgotten, of course, as that was the year
the armies of the Warsaw Pact parked tanks on Wenceslas Square to crush
the Prague Spring. “Terrible times and things,” Sanders reminded the
crowd, “and yet in the middle of the madness the Beatles could release
their great White Album.”
Meeting with Sanders is like meeting up with the past itself,
particularly the part that lived in the trenches and on the barricades
where history is made.
Yet nearing his 70th year, Sanders still possesses a surprising
youthfulness, energetically producing new books, CDs and his own line of
microtonal musical instruments. “I was looking forward to going to the
Golden Bards’ Old Folks Home,” he quips, “but things are such that you
have to keep working to keep from winding up on the streets.”
The other culture
After hitchhiking out of the plain Great Plains for the cosmopolitan
stew of Greenwich Village, Sanders wrote his first poem on prison toilet
paper after being arrested for protesting nuclear proliferation in 1961.
His passion for poetry and political activism were born as fraternal
twins. “A wise person once told me to dare to be a part of the history
of your era,” he says. “I took it seriously.”
In Greenwich Village, he launched the avant-garde journal Fuck You: A
Journal of the Arts (a platform for late Modernists and fellow beats)
and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, which the NYPD promptly raided on
grounds of obscenity, leading Sanders back to jail and onto the cover of
Life magazine, which dubbed him a “leader of New York’s other culture.”
By then, Sanders was best-known as the singer/songwriter for the
influential band The Fugs, which formed in 1965. “It was a time for
music,” Sanders recalls, “and music still defines those times.”
“I’m an American patriot of the Walt Whitman wing of the Democratic
Party,” Sanders declared to his American Center audience, and like any
true patriot he’s been gravely disappointed. A good portion of his
lecture dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, an event that
moved him profoundly. Even in conversation with the poet later, he
appeared to be checking his emotions when talking about Kennedy.
“It’s the moment I discovered that I was a true American patriot,”
Sanders recalls. “I wept all day.”
Yet the schizophrenia that he had earlier referred to in his
presentation surfaced in an uncomfortable memory of the day following
the assassination. “I got a call from Jerry Rubin,” Sanders says of the
famous ’60s radical, “and he said, ‘Did you hear the good news?
Kennedy’s dead. Now we can raise some hell in Chicago.’ I couldn’t
believe it.” And Rubin had his wish more than fulfilled, as history reports.
“I’m going to write a book on Kennedy next,” Sanders tells me. “I’ve
discovered some additional information about that day in Los Angeles.”
One thing he found strangely dovetails back into an earlier book of his.
“Did you know,” he asks, “that the day Kennedy was killed, he had a meal
with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate?”
Sanders’ The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack
Battalion was the first book to deal with the Tate-LaBianca murder spree
by the Spahn Ranch beasts. Sanders gained access to Manson’s clan by
posing, as he once wrote, as a “Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped
psychopath.”
“I went out to California with this idea that Manson was innocent,”
Sanders says. “You know, the establishment taking their frustrations out
on nomad hippies. Then I discovered that he wasn’t just guilty, but very
guilty.”
His book made a sworn enemy out of Manson, who has sent his share of
death threats and demonic drawings to Sanders, one of which Sanders used
for a 9/11 design. “It was the most evil thing I had to express evil,”
he says. The Family itself is due for a reprinting, with additional
information that Sanders has dug up.
History denied
Along with those book projects, there’s also his recently completed
five-volume set of the history of America in verse. “It’s a great
country with a great history,” he states. “But there’s a sense of dread
in the country at the moment.”
To Sanders, there are far too many moments of “better history denied,”
particularly with Kennedy’s death. “And then there was Gore,” he
complains of the 2000 election. “He was just too much the Southern
gentleman to go down to Florida and take on the Elmer Gantrys that were
stealing the election.”
Bush and his “Custerism,” as Sanders labels the man’s proud ignorance,
have certainly proven to be grist for the old activist. In a concert
last Monday night at Divadlo Minor, Sanders performed a new poem about
the world becoming a harmonious whole at the jailing of Bush. As with
almost all of Sanders’ work, he manages to be totally, radically engaged
with history while maintaining an almost Epicurean joyfulness.
He was joined in the concert by the Plastic People of the Universe, and
so the audience was again confronted with the legacy of 1968. “My band,
The Fugs, was playing in Essen, Germany, when the Soviets attacked
Czechoslovakia,” Sanders had told his audience earlier at the American
Center. “We decided to go to Prague, and we were going to lie down in
front of the tanks. It was a statement, but it also would have made a
great album cover. Well, we got close to the border, but a German
soldier with a machine gun stopped us.”
For a man who has lived history, Sanders seems starved for more, and is
even wistful for what he missed. “If I could go back to a previous
moment, I’d like to join Walt Whitman on his journey to New Orleans in
1860,” Sanders tells me. “I would go with him to see the dreadful slave
auction in Congo Square, and I would say, ‘Walt, let’s make some
placards that say STOP SLAVERY NOW.’”
Sanders laughs, then says, “We’d be thrown in jail, sure. But think of
the poetry we could write there!”
Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com
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