Fugs performances were real-time meeting grounds for writers and pop stars. At one such event, the Fugs performed sets at an Andrei Voznesensky reading at the Village Theater in May 1967, an occasion that also featured readings by John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Gregory Corso, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, and Jackson Mac Low. Yet the Fugs’ presence at events such as these was as much an opportunity to celebrate poetry as it was a chance to make fun of it, whether it was poetry written by canonical authors or the Fugs’ own friends and contemporaries. It didn’t matter who the poets were—if they were self-important and too serious about being “radical,” the Fugs were coming after them. Even Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) found himself subject to the Fugs’ satire. Baraka, arrested in 1967 for illegal possession of firearms, was the author of the much-maligned poem “Black People!,” which was read out as evidence against him during his trial. The poem contained one of Baraka’s more notorious lines—“Up against the wall, motherfucker this is a stick up!” A cause célèbre following his arrest, Baraka was the last poet one could imagine making fun of. Sanders recalls a 1968 show in the East Village:
It was our annual concert in [Tompkins Square Park]. We had a new tune, which we performed with straw hats and canes and delivered in a kind of Al Jolson water-mouthed vocal, “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” (borrowed from a famous Amiri Baraka poem). The tune also satirized the group called the Motherfuckers, whose leaflets I’d often printed gratis at Peace Eye, whose logo on their publications was UAW/MF.
The Fugs’ refusal to take anything too seriously included both the histrionics of rock stardom and the radical chic of figures like Amiri Baraka and the Motherfuckers. While the Fugs certainly loved poetry and rock ’n’ roll, they actively satirized anyone who exploited either form to position him- or herself above the crowd.
"Do You Have a Band?"
Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City
Daniel Kane
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