So I’m reading” Fug You ” the memoirs of Ed Sanders, founder of the seminal freak folk band the Fugs, denizens of the NYC underground scene in the 60’s. The book chronicles the early daze before the advent of hippiedom, when it was just a bunch of beatniks and speed freaks writing poetry on the Lower East Side. Sanders palled around with Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs, who was fresh from his travels in the Amazonian rainforest in search of Ayahusca, the psychedelic vine, which he wrote about in his book ” the Yage Letters ” ( City Lights 1963 ) Sanders was self publishing ” Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts ” and had wrote them asking for submissons. Their asthetic was ” total assault on the culture.” For being an underground paper, mimeographed by hand in a one room railroad flat on Avenue A, what he called his ” secret location, ” “Fuck You ” had a far reaching influence. Sanders later went on to open Peace Eye Book Store Eye Bookstore at 383 East Tenth Street and the store became a gathering place for writers and radicals. All was well ’til January 1, 1966, when police raided Peace Eye Bookstore[and charged Sanders with obscenity, charges he ultimately fended off with the aid of the ACLU.
