Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Pacifist poet, anarchist author, countercultural cartoonist and co-founder of the band The Fugs (28 September 1923 – 12 July 2010), born Naphtali Kupferberg.
Tuli Kupferberg
While it wasn't unexpected the news that Tuli Kupferberg left this life around midday New York time on 12 July 2010 is something that can't be allowed to pass without comment from this quarter. Two strokes in 2009 had left him weak, and news of his state of health had not been encouraging.
In mainstream society the news would probably be greeted with a Tuli Who? so I ‘d start by pointing out that here was one of the last links back to the bohemian subculture that brought forth the Beat Generation, and that Tuli was the one who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge...and walked away unknown and forgotten in Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Tuli's version has it as the Manhattan Bridge, but the other details are more or less the same.
These days we tend to be dismissive when it comes to historical antecedents, and I guess that the Beats are largely forgotten, but pause for a moment to consider what the music of the last half of the twentieth century would have been like without the influence of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
Tuli Kupferberg never found himself in that stratospheric company, but as long term resident and key figure in the Greenwich Village subculture he was part of the scene that produced the Dylan who played a major part in transforming rock music from the early sixties onwards.
If there wasn't a thriving Greenwich Village scene, there's every chance that Chas Chandler wouldn't have found a certain guitarist playing at the Cafe Wha in 1966. When we're looking back, we tend to see big figures and overlook the factors that shaped them.
So who was Tuli Kupferberg, the self-proclaimed world’s oldest rock star? Well, he wasn’t a star in any mass culture sense of the term but he passed at age 86 and apart from Spirit drummer Ed Cassidy I can't think of too many other candidates for that title who are in the same age bracket.
Tuli's main claim to fame is his status as cofounder of The Fugs, that gloriously anarchic combo that combined poetry, politics, theatre and countercultural subversion and dates back to 1964. At that point he was already a forty-year-old Beatnik celebrity and anthologised poet.
Tuli's contribution to The Fugs were largely lyrical. He couldn't read music, Sanders was some way ahead of him in that regard, and he's on record as saying the only thing I know how to play is the radio but his songs included Supergirl, Nothing, CIA Man, Kill for Peace, and Morning Morning. If asked to come up with two personal favourites I'd have to go with The Real Woodstock Festival's The Post Modern Nothing and Einstein Never Wore Socks.
Apart from a flow of albums through the sixties including the wonderfully titled It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest, The Fugs played innumerable benefits and antiwar rallies, including the exorcism of the Pentagon in 1967 that formed the basis of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.
At the same time it appears they had serious musical ambitions and Golden Filth, my aural introduction to the band was significantly better than I expected in the musical department, perhaps unsurprisingly so, given that late-sixties line-ups included Danny Kalb (Blues Project, Blood Sweat & Tears), Chuck Rainey (check his discography as http://www.chuckrainey.com/), Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar (David Crosby, Carole King, Graham Nash, Carly Simon and James Taylor) and Charles Larkey (for a time, married to Carole King).
On the steps of a church hall in suburban Townsville I met a backpacker from New York who claimed they'd booked The Fugs for his high school prom, so we're talking about significant countercultural figures with unexpected links to the mainstream.
Unlike some of his contemporaries (Yippie leader and Chicago Seven defendant Jerry Rubin became a successful businessman) Tuli continued along in more or les the same vein for the next four decade, selling satirical cartoons on the street, performing on and off with The Fugs and other luminaries and, most recently posting his perverbs on a YouTube channel called tulifuli.
What was that line about old dogs and new tricks?
Some links:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/tuli-kupferberg-poet-and-singer-dies-at-86/
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-tuli-kupferberg-20100713,0,2767548.story
http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/michael-simmons-evo-tuli-and-the-kiss-corps/#more-30780
