R.I.P. Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs (1923-2010)
http://blog.limewire.com/posts/45802-r-i-p-tuli-kupferberg-of-the-fugs-1923-2010/
July 12th, 2010
When Tuli Kupferberg passed away today, July 12th, New York City lost
a local hero, but the world lost a multifarious artistic pioneer. One
of the original East Village bohemians, native New Yorker Kupferberg
was a vital part of the Beat-era scene in the '50s as a poet and a
publisher of literary 'zines. In fact, he was one of the inspirations
for the most famous Beat poem of all, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." But
when he started The Fugs in 1964 with the much younger Ed Sanders,
his innovations multiplied. The Fugs were folk-rock before The Byrds
or The Lovin' Spoonful, they were provocative, sometimes profane
practitioners of sociopolitical rock & roll satire before Frank Zappa
& The Mothers, they brought poetry to rock when The Doors were still
in high school, they sang of New York's seedy underbelly before The
Velvet Underground, and they engaged in activism before it was hip.
Singing and writing for The Fugs, Tuli was like no other '60s rocker.
He was in his 40s when the band started, didn't have a particularly
impressive voice, and had an idiosyncratic sensibility that was equal
parts political dissident, gritty New York street character,
classically influenced poet, foul-mouthed provocateur, and oversexed
hippie. In short, he was one of the most unforgettable figures of the
entire '60s rock scene, which is saying something. The Fugs broke up
when the '60s ended, but they reunited in 1985 and had been active
ever since. In between, Tuli always kept busy with poetry, prose, and
performing, all the way up until the end of his life. After a stroke
in 2009, he was severely debilitated, and had been in poor health
ever since, but even in his last months he remained active, creating
a series of "perverbs" on YouTube for his admirers. A grandfatherly
figure for the New York underground art scene, he was the mayor of a
Bohemia he helped to create.
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Tuli Kupferberg: Model Village Citizen, 1923-2010
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/07/tuli_kupferberg.php
By Tom Robbins
Jul. 13 2010
Most afternoons in the 1970s, you could find Tuli Kupferberg, the
poet and folksinger who died yesterday at 86, peddling his penny
poems along Sixth Avenue. He would hang out at the corner of West 8th
Street outside of the old Nathan's. The poems were always little gems
of anarchist menace, along the lines of his epic, "Kill, Kill, Kill
for Peace," put to music by his great beatnik rock group, The Fugs,
with Ed Sanders and Ken Weaver.
The poems were often accompanied by his simple line drawings, melding
the joyfully obscene with the political.
The drawings and poems would occasionally pop up in the mail at the
Voice in a plain brown envelope, no note attached. The message was
simply to use them as the paper saw fit. He was part of the Voice's
extended family, which means, of course, that he was often estranged
from it. His wife, Sylvia Topp, was a Voice editor for years. Son
Noah was an intern.
In lots of ways, he was the Voice poster child for its model bohemian
citizen: A militant pacifist, he lived for years off of Tompkins
Square Park in a tenement where his friend, Allen Ginsberg, also
resided. Ginsberg included a stanza about him in his most famous
poem, "Howl," although he didn't attach Tuli's name to it:
"who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and
walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer"
It was a true story, one that Tuli didn't discuss except to correct
the record. It was the Manhattan Bridge, not the Brooklyn, a poetic
license to which Ginsberg was freely entitled.
The Times' obit tells us that his given name was Naphtali, though I
don't remember hearing anyone use it. Ailing in his last years, he
was duly celebrated this spring by his many admirers, at the Bowery
Poetry Project, and at a concert at St. Anne's.
He had the mournful face of a rabbi, matched by a Borscht belt sense
of humor that skewered all things of pretension -- money, power,
generals, Nixon -- always accompanied by bawdy jokes, and an
impossibly gentle manner. The perfect, and last great, flower child.
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Tuli Kupferberg dies at 86; founding member of the underground band the Fugs
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-tuli-kupferberg-20100713,0,2767548.story
Kupferberg was a poet, political cartoonist and lifelong peace
activist. He wrote two books that became counterculture classics:
'1001 Ways to Beat the Draft' and '1001 Ways to Live Without Working.'
By Randy Lewis
July 13, 2010
Tuli Kupferberg, a founding member of the underground left-wing 1960s
band the Fugs as well as a poet, political cartoonist and lifelong
peace activist, died Monday in New York. He was 86.
Kupferberg's health had been declining since he suffered two strokes
last year that left him blind, according to Ed Sanders, with whom he
formed the Fugs in New York's Lower East Side in 1964.
Earlier this year, producer Hal Willner coordinated a benefit concert
in New York featuring dozens of musicians who cited the Fugs as an
influence, including Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Sonic Youth,
Philip Glass and Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith Group.
"It's hard to imagine a world without Tuli Kupferberg, and New York
will never be the same," Willner told The Times on Monday by e-mail.
"More than anything, Tuli was someone who you never heard a negative
thing about and everyone was always happy to see him … a rare quality.
"With his poems, songs and parodies, he always cut to the chase and
got right to the point of what it was he was getting at always
incredibly insightful, biting yet done with hysterical yet simplistic
humor that one could not argue with his point of view," Willner noted.
Kupferberg had been too ill to attend the benefit show but sent a
short video that concluded with him telling the audience, "Now go out
there and have some fun. It may be later than you think."
Kupferberg wrote the lyrics for one of the Fugs' signature songs,
"Kill for Peace," which the band played at its concerts as the
Vietnam War was escalating in the mid-'60s.
He also wrote "Nothing, Nothing," a nihilistic song set to the melody
an old Yiddish song, which helped set the stage for the art rock
outfits such as the Velvet Underground in the late '60s and much of
the attitude of '70s punk music.
"The Fugs were right on the barricades of what was possible," veteran
music industry executive Danny Goldberg told National Public Radio in
April. "There was a fearlessness, an intensity, an unwillingness to
pander to any commercial norms that was very exciting."
In addition to making music for years with Sanders, Kupferberg
continued to publish his poetry, sometimes selling his works on
street corners in and around his longtime home in Greenwich Village.
He also was the author of books that became minor counterculture
classics, including "1001 Ways to Beat the Draft" and "1001 Ways to
Live Without Working."
Naphtali Kupferberg was born Sept. 28, 1923, in New York City. He
attended the Brooklyn College of Arts, studying, among other topics,
sexual freedom in the institution's New School of Social Research. He
published poetry magazines including Birth, which attracted the
attention Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets.
When he and Sanders started the Fugs in 1964, Kupferberg was 41, a
generation older than Sanders and young rock stars like the Beatles.
After the group reunited in 1985 to embark on making another string
of albums, Sanders wouldn't reveal Kupferberg's age, telling The
Times only that his band mate was "ready for Medicare."
Although he stopped performing with the Fugs several years ago,
Kupferberg continued writing, selling political cartoons on the
street and posting homemade videos on YouTube, including a recent
one, "I Am an Artist For Art's Sake," that crystallized much of his
approach through life:
"I am an artist for art's sake," he sang. "It was God who gave me my
big break. I was born for a higher reason, and all his angels I am
pleasing. I'm an artist for God's sake."
Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp, and three children.
--
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Tuli Kupferberg, Bohemian and Fug, Dies at 86
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html
By BEN SISARIO
Published: July 12, 2010
Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and singer who went from being a noted Beat
to becoming, in his words, "the world's oldest rock star" when he
helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious rock
group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan.
He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year,
said Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.
The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic
Robert Christgau, "the Lower East Side's first true underground
band." They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most
literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker
room as well as the graduate seminar ("Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,"
based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle
glee that anticipated punk rock.
With songs like "Kill for Peace," the Fugs also established
themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist
theater. The band became "the U.S.O. of the left," Mr. Kupferberg
once said, and it played innumerable peace rallies, including the
"exorcism" of the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in
his book "The Armies of the Night." (The band took its name from a
usage in Mailer's "Naked and the Dead.")
The Fugs was formed in 1964 in Mr. Sanders's Peace Eye Bookstore, a
former kosher meat store on East 10th Street in Manhattan. By then
Mr. Kupferberg, already in his 40s, was something of a Beatnik
celebrity. He was an anthologized poet and had published underground
literary magazines with titles like Birth and Yeah.
He had also found notoriety as the inspiration for a character in
Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." As Ginsberg and Mr. Kupferberg
acknowledged, he was the one who "jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this
actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten," a reference
to a 1945 suicide attempt (off the Manhattan Bridge, not Brooklyn)
that had been preciptated by what he called a nervous breakdown.
The fame that episode earned him caused Mr. Kupferberg a lifetime of
chagrin and embarrassment. "Throughout the years," he later said, "I
have been annoyed many times by, 'Oh, did you really jump off the
Brooklyn Bridge?,' as if it was a great accomplishment."
The Fugs' first album, "The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary
Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction," was released in
1965. The band became a staple of underground galleries and theaters,
as well as antiwar rallies. In concert Mr. Kupferberg was often the
group's mascot or harlequin, acting out satirical pantomimes an
American soldier who turns into a Nazi, for example or sometimes
not singing at all.
On subsequent albums the band changed its lineup many times and
acquired a more professional sound, though its scatological themes
got it kicked off at least one major record label.
With his bushy beard and wild hair, Mr. Kupferberg embodied the
hippie aesthetic. But the term he preferred was bohemian, which to
him signified a commitment to art as well as a rejection of
restrictive bourgeois values, and as a scholar of the counterculture
he traced the term back to an early use by students at the University
of Paris. Among his books were "1,001 Ways to Live Without Working"
and for decades he was a frequent sight in Lower Manhattan, selling
his cartoons on the street and serving as a grandfather figure for
generations of nonconformists.
Beneath Mr. Kupferberg's antics, however, was a keen poetic and
musical intelligence that drew on his Jewish and Eastern European
roots. He specialized in what he called "parasongs," which adapted
and sometimes satirized old songs with new words. And some of his
Fugs songs, like the gentle "Morning, Morning," had their origins in
Jewish religious melodies.
Naphtali Kupferberg was born in New York on Sept. 28, 1923. He grew
up on the Lower East Side and became a jazz fan and leftist activist
while still a teenager. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944
and got a job as a medical librarian.
"I had intended to be a doctor at one point, like any good Jewish
boy," he recalled to Mr. Sanders in an audio interview in 2003.
Instead he began to write topical poems and humor pieces,
contributing to The Village Voice and other publications.
After the Fugs broke up, in 1969, Mr. Kupferberg performed with two
groups, the Revolting Theater and the Fuxxons, and continued writing.
The Fugs reunited periodically, first in 1984. Recently, Mr. Sanders
said, Mr. Kupferberg had completed his parts for a new album, "Be
Free: The Fugs Final CD (Part Two)," and had also been posting ribald
"perverbs" brief videos punning on well-known aphorisms on YouTube.
Mr. Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children,
Joseph Sacks, Noah Kupferberg and Samara Kupferberg; and three grandchildren.
--------
'60s anti-war rocker Tuli Kupferberg dies in NYC
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g0V_r_IVXaserCmTuwKdKhhsJdSwD9GU9MU00
By FRANK ELTMAN
7/13/10
Tuli Kupferberg, a founding member of the Fugs, one of the first
underground rock groups and a staple on the anti-war protest scene in
the 1960s, has died.
Kupferberg, who had suffered strokes in the past year, died Monday in
a Manhattan hospital, said his friend and bandmate Ed Sanders. He was 86.
"I think he will be remembered as a unique American songwriter,"
Sanders told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his
home in Woodstock, N.Y. "Tuli had an uncanny ability to shape nuanced lyrics."
Sanders, who is writing a new memoir about the Fugs, said he visited
his friend in the hospital on Thursday. Although Kupferberg was
clearly ailing, he leaned into his ear and sang him the lyrics to a
Fugs classic, "Morning, Morning," Sanders said.
"And then I said, `goodbye,'" he said.
Kupferberg's contributions were recognized in January when Lou Reed,
Sonic Youth and others appeared at a benefit concert in Brooklyn to
help pay for some of his medical expenses. He was too ill by then to
attend the show, but recorded a 10-second video message, according to
the New York Times, thanking the audience.
"Now go out there and have some fun," he said. "It may be later than
you think."
The Fugs were formed by Sanders and Kupferberg, who were neighbors on
Manhattan's Lower East Side in early 1965, according to the band's
website. Their name, a substitute for a common expletive, was
inspired by Norman Mailer, who used it in his classic, "Naked and the Dead."
The band ran in the same circles as Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa and the
Mothers of Invention, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other icons of
the 1960s. It often performed at peace protests.
Kupferberg once referred to the band as "the U.S.O. of the left,"
according to the Times.
The group disbanded in 1969, but reformed several times since. It
performed for a time on the Reprise label, which was owned by Frank
Sinatra, who had final approval on album releases.
Sanders notes many of the songs Kupferberg wrote tended to be on the
ribald side. "He wrote satirical, erotic songs," Sanders said,
rattling off titles such as "Morning, Morning," "The Garden is Open"
and "Kill for Peace."
Kupferberg, who also was a poet, produced cartoons for the Village
Voice and had a longtime television program on the Manhattan public
access cable channel, Sanders said. He posted some recent
performances, which he called "preverbs," on YouTube, including,
"Backward Jewish Soldiers (Hug your Gentile brothers)," which was his
adaptation of the classic, "Onward Christian Soldiers."
He is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children and three
grandchildren.
Online: http://www.thefugs.com/
.
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