Ed Sanders Celebrates the 60th Anniversary of the Fugs

October 21, 1967. Washington, DC.

Ed Sanders and his notoriously confrontational band the Fugs, along with 100,000 other protestors, are outside of the Pentagon as part of a march organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Their stated mission: stage a ritual that will magically levitate the 6,636,360-square-foot Defense Department headquarters 300 feet in the air, spin it around, and expel the evil forces within. After some incantations, Sanders leads the crowd, which includes fellow provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman and Kenneth Anger, in chanting, “Out, demons, out! Out, demons, out!”

The building doesn’t budge. But of course that was never the point, anyway. The real aim was to make a collective statement against the war and rattle the regime, whose troops that day respond with tear gas and arrests—a bad look, to Middle America—and in some cases by dropping their rifles and breaking ranks to join the antiwar cause. The war wouldn’t end until 1975, but, in a way, it was “mission accomplished.” 

In the years that have followed Sanders and the Fugs have led audiences in exorcisms of the White House, and they’ll meet the moment by doing so once again this month when they celebrate the 60th anniversary of the band’s first performance with a pair of concerts at the Byrdcliffe Barn in Sanders’s adopted hometown of Woodstock.

Howling at Cows

Sanders was born in 1939 near Kansas City, Missouri, a hard-swinging hub of jazz. “I saw Big Bob Dougherty, Jay McShann, and a lot of other great jazz acts,” he recollects. “Then rock ’n’ roll came along, and I saw people like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley and the Comets. Hank Williams was big, so I got exposed to him and I went to country and western shows.” The bigger bang, however, came not from the literary, not musical, side. “I bought a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems [1956] when I was a senior in high school and it changed my life,” Sanders says. “We lived in the country and there were bulls and cows lined up in the pasture next to our house, and I used to scream lines of ‘Howl’ to the bulls and cows—‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness!’…Moooo!” In 1958 he decided to drop out of the University of Missouri and head to one of the two Beat centers. “I was either going to San Francisco or to New York,” he says.

It would be the latter. Sanders was accepted to New York University, so he packed his copies of Howl, Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and a few Dylan Thomas titles and hitchhiked east. An early member of the brewing anti-establishment movement, he was arrested in 1961 for protesting nuclear armament and in his cell penned the breakthrough “Poem from Jail” on toilet paper. While at NYU he studied Greek and met his future wife Miriam, a painter and writer with whom he bought a mimeograph machine, and in 1962 started publishing a literary journal with the attention-getting name Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts. 

In November 1964, he opened Peace Eye Bookstore, which quickly became a nexus for the Lower East Side’s bohemians and radical poets. One of them was New York native Tuli Kupferberg, who lived next door to the shop on East 10th Street. “He was a famous Beatnik poet, I used to read his poetry in the Village Voice,” recalls Sanders. “I’d seen poets dancing to [the Beatles’] ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and Roy Orbison songs by a jukebox at a bar on Saint Mark’s Place, and that had inspired me. So one night in late 1964, I approached Tuli and said, ‘Why don’t we form a band of poets and write some songs, and just float it and see what happens?’ We started thinking of names. I wanted to call it the Yodeling Socialists. But Tuli suggested the Fugs. ‘Fug’ had been a euphemism for ‘fuck’ in Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, so we went with that.”

Fuggin’ it Up

As the Fugs, Sanders, Kupferberg, and drummer Ken Weaver added Holy Modal Rounders members fiddler Peter Stampfel and guitarist Steve Weber and made their March 1965 debut at the new Sixth Avenue location of scene maker Izzy Young’s Folklore Center. Nowadays described as protopunk, the band concocted a sneering, satirical, and unapologetically scrappy sound. Their songs took in classic poetry as well as bawdy mainstream-baiting and their uproarious gigs quickly made them the band to see in underground New York. Filmmaker, Anthology of American Folk Music compiler, and all-around Beat luminary Harry Smith produced their 1965 debut The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction for the Folkways label (reissued in 1966 as The Fugs First Album), and 1966’s The Fugs and 1967’sVirgin Fugs followed. Through head shop sales, adventurous college radio airplay, and word-of-mouth, the Fugs became the underground’s musical figureheads via button-pushing gross-outs like “Coca-Cola Douche” and revolutionary rants like the anti-war “Kill for Peace.”

The New York Police Department was not amused by Sanders’s provocations and raided Peace Eye in 1966 and charged its proprietor with obscenity. Sanders couldn’t have asked for better publicity: An ACLU lawyer helped him successfully fight the charges and he even made the cover of Life magazine. “Sotheby’s auction house recently listed a full run of all 13 issues of Fuck You for sale at $45,000,” the publisher notes, mentioning that he received death threats the year of the trial. “I wish I’d saved some more of them.” Likewise not enamored of Sanders was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, whose secret files on his band, he learned years later, labeled them “the filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could conceive.” But, seemingly sensing a civil-liberties outcry, the FBI stopped short of calling for their prosecution. (Coincidentally, Golden Filth would be the title of an archival Fugs live album.)

Nevertheless, the Fugs had made their mark, and were cited as an influence by Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, Frank Zappa, and the next generation. “For my 14th birthday in 1969, my parents let me pick out an album at a department store,” remembers Bob Bert, who has been the drummer of Sonic Youth and other influential bands. “My choice was [1967’s Fugs album] Tenderness Junction. A few days later, I came home from school to find the album broken into pieces and the cover torn up on my bed. Not a word was said at the dinner table. My sisters had ratted me out to my mother about the dirty lyrics.”

By 1969, though, despite the band’s signing to Atlantic and becoming a top touring name on the countercultural circuit, Sanders had had enough. “We needed to keep a lawyer on retainer because of all the heat we were getting, and the other guys in the band were on salary,” he explains. “It was costing a lot of money. I didn’t want to have to deal with that. I just wanted to be a Beatnik poet.” He dissolved the group and made a well-received country rock album, Sanders’ Truck Stop, before returning his primary focus to writing poems. 

In the Family Way

As Sanders points out, “Poetry and starvation are good friends.” He needed a sideline, and prose looked like the way. His 1971 book The Family, about Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, turned out to be an acclaimed, runaway best-seller. Infiltrating the circle of violent Manson associates during the book’s research, though, had been a risky process, one that, the author says, forced him “to live a protected life for a while.”

He and Miriam were familiar with Woodstock, and by the mid-’70s they’d escaped the big city for the arts-friendly Ulster County town; in 1981, they purchased a small house on one of its quiet roads. As he had with the Fugs, Sanders blended his first love, poetry, into his now-prioritized book work. Via 1976’s Investigative Poetry, he established the so-named literary movement that saw him writing book-length poems on Anton Chekhov, Allen Ginsberg, and the tumultuous year 1968. Thus far, he has written five of the intended nine volumes of his epic America, A History in Verse.

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Sanders’s staggering shelfful of other literary endeavors includes the two-volume Tales of Beatnik Glory (1975, 1990), the 1988 American Book Award-winning Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961–1985, and many more; among numerous other laurels, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1987. Settling in Woodstock and befriending and assisting its late historian Alf Evers awakened in him an intense interest in the process of archiving and in the area’s history; the latter passion led to his participation in local politics during a 1984 fight against the proposed building of a convention center in the center of the town. “I came up here as a countercultural voice,” he says. “I could turn out a leaflet in 30 seconds.” In the wake of the beaten-back project, Sanders helped write a town zoning ordinance that’s still in use today.

Secret Index

The Fugs have occasionally reunited to record and for rare concerts, including 1994’s “The Real Woodstock Festival,” staged in response to that year’s more commercialized Woodstock ’94. Although Kupferberg passed in 2010, the band, whose lineup has otherwise been the same since 1984, soldiers on and “seriously consider[s] further performances” as offers arise. Sanders is currently finishing The Secret Index to the Past, a new solo album that includes tracks like “Just Get Going,” the rollicking tale of his band’s portentous first recording session, and a version of the Fugs’ “I Want to Know” that features fellow Woodstocker John Sebastian on harmonica.

The Fugs reconvened in 1984, Sanders says, because it was the year that George Orwell’s dystopian novel was named for as well as the start of Reagan’s second term. One can’t help but wonder if besides 2025’s being the group’s 60th year, the return of Trump also prompted the decision to reform the famously insurgent band.

“It’s extremely important for a society to protect, cultivate, and augment its flow of creativity,” he offers, “You gotta do something, right?”  

The Fugs will perform at the Byrdcliffe Barn in Woodstock on August 22 and 23. Tickets are $30. The Secret Index to the Past is out soon on Olufsen Records.

The Fugs 60th Anniversary

Aug. 22-23, 8-10 p.m. 2025

Location: The Byrdcliffe Barn, 485 Upper Byrdcliffe Road, Woodstock

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This article appears in August 2025.