Interview with Ed Sanders

Sanders, Ed ; McKiernan, Stephen

Ed Sanders is a poet, author, musician, and activist who grew up in the state of Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri and New York University where he earned his Bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek. After college, he opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in New York City and started Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas were all early influences as Sanders tried to bridge the concerns of Beat Poetry and the counterculture of the 1960s. He is the author of many collections of poetry where he received several honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Sanders has written many books of prose, a non-fiction book, The Family, and published a bi-weekly newspaper, the Woodstock Journal. He is the founding member of the satirical and subversive folk-rock music group, The Fugs.

ND

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

77:17

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Ed Sanders
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Carrie Blabac-Myers
Date of interview: ND
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(Start of Interview)

0:04
ED: Get ready to go.

0:07
SM: Still there? Okay. When you think of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

0:15
ED: Liberation and the utilization of the Bill of Rights.

0:24
SM: Is there one specific event in your life that shaped you when you were much younger? One specific happening in our world or society?

0:33
ED: Um, I do not think so. I suppose, you know, the death of loved ones is always a pounding from the universe. My mother died when I was in high school in 1957. Others are, the most formative one in the (19)60s for me, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when many people really did think that our eyeballs might melt in a nuclear confrontation.

1:11
SM: Um hmm

1:12
ED: I went to bed that night in October thinking that might be curtains for ̶

1:22
SM: So you were probably watching that black and white TV set too when Kennedy came on?

1:27
ED: I did not have one but nobody in my nascent beatnik crowd had a telephone much less a television. No, we watched it at Stanley's Bar. It is depicted in my short story [inaudible] from Volume One of Tales of Beatnik Glory.

1:49
SM: Mm hmm.

1:49
ED: It tells it like it is, like it really happened. So I would say that the Cuban Missile Crisis and then to get out of class at NYU and all of the phones were dead because Kennedy had just been shot. I mean, we tend to be [inaudible] as we measure out our lives in [inaudible] in the (19)60's we measured on our life in assassinations and government ̶

2:23
SM: One of the things in recent years, particularly in the 1990s, and into the first couple of years of this century, there was a lot of criticism of the boomer generation as to the reason to why we have a breakdown in American society. The breakdown of the family, the drug culture, lack of respect for authority; really attaching most of the negatives we have in our society on that particular group of young people, which was about seventy million. Do you think that's fair? Or is it just blowing air?

3:03
ED: I think it is bullshit. The boomers are not to be marked out as betraying their nation any more than any other generation: the lost generation of twenties, the Dadaists of Zurich any art generation the [inaudible], the beatniks, the hippies, the neo-realists. I mean, in all these movements, in other words, that what it is life is it really truly a fabric in a very complicated, weave. The boomers are just part of the overall weave. You know, some of the great things are still being done in the society by the remnants of the Roosevelt era in the (19)30s. The boomers began in this horrible scams, that used Red Scares (that started in 1948) just to prop up the defense contractors. And through Truman and McCarthy and the Korean War, which really did not have to happen, so boomers were given a loaded deck from the civilization and I thought they did pretty well. Especially beginning in the late Eisenhower era, around (19)58 (19)59 when they began to sniff that there was a lot of freedom guaranteed by the constitution that was not used.

4:32
SM: Mm Hmm.

4:32
ED: The generation of the late fifties and the early sixties started using that freedom and as a result, the content of television programs is much more freedom based than it was in say 1939 when the producers of Gone with the Wind had to pay a $5,000.00 fine because Clark Gable uttered the word "damn."

5:03
SM: I did not know that. Oh, wow.

5:05
ED: So flash forward to the early (19)60s when say Lenny Bruce was persecuted in the city. And they tried to ban Howl, Allen Ginsberg's poem in 1958 and there were others, there was William Burroughs Junky hug, William Burroughs Naked Lunch, they tried to ban. But anyway, one after another, these are artificial bans on artistic freedoms were translated to the society as a whole. I do not think there is a breakdown of the family at all, I think there is a definition of family has expanded vastly in our era, so that there are different modes of raising children. The issue is raising sane and honest and ethical and energetic and useful children who grow up to fill the various niches that society needs, from digging ditches, to flying airplanes, to being scientists, inventors, being singers and musicians. All the different spots to get people to fill those then. So there are different combinations of human beings that are raising children now. I think there is not a background, there is not a ̶ the code of Hammurabi type of ethics and the strict reading of the ten commandments is, except for things like: Thou shall not kill, which is of course, never followed by the government, especially one that has force. But anyways, I think all those rules from ancient civilization have been reassessed in a very widespread way. Now the boomer generation that you are writing about, I guess they are getting, they are not quite geezers yet. What are they forty-eight? They are about sixty-one now?

7:08
SM: Sixty-two.

7:08
ED: Yeah, so they are getting ready. They can have early Social Security, some of them if they need it. And in another three years they will be getting Medicare, hopefully, Obama will have adjusted Medicare so it actually pays for things like dentistry, eye glasses and long term health care, long term nursing care. If that happens they will have a good road to the Happy Hunting Ground. Of course, longevity is going to increase the First World War vet just passed away. I mean, the remaining the First World War vet there are very few if any, and others not in England, but maybe there is a few in the United States. So the boomer vet, the boomer gen, veterans of the boomer generation will live on and on and on, thanks to modern healthcare.

7:49
SM: Right.

7:58
ED: The revolution, they may last to, maybe 120 or 130 years old. I think certainly their great grandchildren will have long, long lives.

8:19
SM: If you were to put some just real quick adjectives, some strengths and weaknesses of that generation, what would you put down?

8:33
ED: Um? Strengths and weaknesses?

8:40
SM: Yeah.

8:41
ED: I do not really think like that.

8:43
SM: But it is okay.

8:44
ED: Because it is not really one homogenous generation, many, many different types of people. You can lump them all together because they grew out of the victory over Hitler and Mussolini in the energy of the post-atomic era, they exploded out. You know, they were not making cars in the years before that generation so there was this huge need for automobiles and baby clothes and new houses and jobs. An explosion in the economy in the (19)40s and (19)50s based on all this kind of energy and hunger from the generation that defeated Hitler and the others.

9:38
SM: I asked you earlier about, youth.

9:40
ED: No, no. It is like. The answer to your question is that, it is like, you cannot really say there are blue states and red states because within each state like very right wing states, I have very, very good liberal progressive friends in Texas.

9:59
SM: Mm Hmm.

9:59
ED: Or Arkansas and in Georgia for instance, they are more center left more center left than I am! But they are in these states that are judged to be red states. So it is the same way with the boomer generation it is a wide and diverse tapestry of people that have, through no fault of their own, been brought together as this entity, as they approach old age. So they are like a huge scientific experiment, I guess. And guys like you or, or the scientists that are analyzing them. Anyway, do you have another question?

10:42
SM: Yeah, it was a question about when do you think the (19)60s began? What do you think was the watershed moment? Now, you mentioned your watershed moment in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, but for the generation, what do you think?

10:57
ED: That was personal but generational? Well, there were many good things, I would think the invention of the wah, wah pedal in 1966, which gave Jimi Hendrix some of his most beautiful songs. In general the rise of technology to support the arts in the (19)60s. New types of paints and acrylics and techniques, such as the [inaudible] painting hybrid that was used by Andy Warhol or the montage collage carpentry of Robert Rauschenberg. And then in music, the rise of technology. The Beatles recorded many of their early tunes on four tracks, and then all of a sudden they had eight track and then finally twelve and sixteen tracks, and the same and so the recording technology, the ability to do overdub, to perform in public, they had to build new sound systems so that Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones could play baseball stadiums and not blow out speakers. And there was a huge rise in an artistic technology in the movies. The invention of the video camera around 1967, which allowed Roman Polanski and others to film, their daily rushes in video and then run them right away and see how it was going. So there was all of this technology I think, starred in the mix of the best part of the early years of the boomers.

12:52
SM: When boomers used to say and many still do think that they were the most unique generation in American history because they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society in so many ways. How do you respond to boomers who think that way? Not only then but now?

13:11
ED: Put up or shut up.

13:13
SM: Good point. That, that was all I needed to hear. That was excellent. Because one of the concerns I have had and we've talked about this at our university in certain programs, even Jennie Skerl has been bothering him before she retired is you know, some people copped out and some people continued to go on and on fight for issues. So how important were college students in ending the Vietnam War?

13:48
ED: Well, because they are part of that species known as young people, and young people they can extend, they often have others who are supporting them or helping support them so they could take time out they could go to freedom summers, they could go down to Selma to march. They could go sit-in against nuclear testing in Nevada. They could go to a commune learn how you know, life is. They could take time off to write a book that might not make them a lot of money, so they have time. You know, and they have, the college kids are part of that. Certainly one of the key things that these college kids did was to end the draft which finally ended in 1971. So, it was a huge effort to end that draft. I think ending the draft has prevented a whole bunch of wars that could have happened that now cannot happen because they never have enough troops. Really the Vietnam War had to start winding down because in like 1968, the military realized they did not have enough soldiers to fight in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Thailand, all the other bigger wars. As well as to protect the homeland. The military has a default charge, and that is one which is foreign protection, foreign interest foreign wars, and then to protect the homeland. And after the riots in (19)67, and after the riots that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of (19)68. The military had to start pulling back because they did not have enough soldiers to deal with all that. Ending the draft really prevented the military from expanding wars excessively throughout the world. So I think that the long answer to a short question is that it was a great gift of the young people and college kids, to end the draft.

16:17
SM: Do you think they have done a good job? Some are grandparents now the boomers and some are still having, are still parents, and grandparents. Do you think that they have been passing on some of their activism down to their kids and grandkids? Or?

16:33
ED: Well, you do that by two ways. One is by example that your children can easily observe and understand and appreciate. Or two, by teaching, reading and making sure your kids are exposed to the right music, the right songs, the right books, the right and take them out to protest demonstrations and show them what it is it to be against the war. Take them to meetings so that they can understand how grassroots activism is conducted. That is another method too. Many parents do not pass on the torch which is one of the tragedies of that era is that the torch was extinguished. And then now grandchildren. I do not know, it is a difficult thing because you never, suddenly a grandchild can take an issue, take an interest in issue and become very involved, it is really hard to predict. The fact that we do not have universal health care. The fact that we are in two or three or four maybe more wars right now, that you have things like Somalia, in the jungles of the Philippines, as well as Iran and Iraq. We, the boomer generation, the (19)60s generation, the (19)50s generation, the last three or four generations have failed to turn the United States civilization into a more humane, caring society in general, although we have a lot of freedom. We are really like the civilization depicted in Bertolt Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany. Everything is possible, everything is allowed, as long as you have money.

18:28
SM: This is a question and I want to read this because this has to do with the issue of healing. We had a chance I took a group of students down to see Ed Muskie, former senator before he passed away. He had just gotten out of the hospital and we took our students there. And I read him this question.

18:43
ED: Oh did he have cancer?

18:44
SM: Yeah, yeah, he died. I think he died of cancer. But he was in remission for a short time before he came back and it did him in. Do you feel boomers are still having problems from healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth? Division between black and white, divisions between those who support authority and those who criticize it, division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? What role has the wall played in healing these divisions or was this primarily a healing for veterans? Do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this or has forty years made the statement "Time heals all wounds," a truth? And I want to just finish by saying that when I asked Ed Muskie, that question, he had just gotten out of the hospital and he had been watching Ken Burns' Civil War series when he was in the hospital. And so he and he did not answer the question right away. He waited about a minute. And then he had tears in his eyes. And then he we had fourteen students there and they were all kind of looking at each other what is going on here. And he basically said, we have not healed since the Civil War, and then he went on to be talking about you know, the all the loss of life from that particular war and the loss of generations of kids that would have been born because the population during that war was a lot smaller than it is here so the proportion of men in America and the number of kids they could have had was astounding. But just your thoughts on, you know, whether healing should be an issue here within the generation. Ed, could you speak up just a little bit too?

20:31
ED: It used to be that the Swedes, rode out and sailed out of Sweden for instance or from Denmark, the Danes, toward England and landed and then slaughtered everybody they could find. Steal the women and the food and the jewelry and the people [inaudible] Fast forward four or five centuries and you know, Denmark and Sweden are [inaudible] pretty advanced [inaudible] marvelous health system and pretty advanced systems besides those, Denmark but it takes four or five hundred years often for a society to reveal its moral identity [inaudible]. However, with respect to the Civil War, I agree with Ulysses Grant, who said that the civil war could have been God's punishment for America undertaking the Mexican War, evil and the injustices, and slaughter, in the Mexican War and the karma of that, oozed forward into the karma of the Civil War. I think the Civil War leads directly back to greedy English planters in Jamestown, and from say, after the founding, in 1607 up to say, 1690 those first eighty years, deliberately bringing in more and more and more and more and more slaves from the dungeons of no return in Africa to do long term damage to the soil through first growing tobacco, this nasty tobacco from the Indies and then cotton. Those lines of slavery and the terrible exploitation of blacks [inaudible] Virginia in South Carolina down in the south, the karma of that leap forward to the Civil War and beyond. And then, you know there was plenty of people that were raised as racists even, especially among the boomer generation, and anti-Semites, there is plenty of anti-Semites, anti-black, and there is plenty of anti-Portuguese. The Italians put down the Irish and Irish sometimes sneer at the Italians. The Germans called Swedes stupid and the Swedes called the Germans cruel and barbaric and the Norwegians could not stand above them all the Scotch-Irish have carried their mean streak forward in America ever since they were shoved out of Ireland and Scotland you know, after the triumph of 1649 to 1660, after the Protestants took over. Who is that guy?

23:47
SM: Martin Luther?

23:48
ED: No, no, no. This is 1649.

23:50
SM: Oh 1649.

23:51
ED: 1660, he was the Protestant head of England and then after he died, his son tried to rule and then they brought back Charles the second.

24:02
SM: Cromwell?

24:03
ED: Cromwell. Ollie baby! So, you know, the, Cromwell was so mean to the Irish and then there was all this division of land and pushing out and they, they stole all the, all the common lands. There were these ancient common lands in England and all through the seventeenth century they closed off the commons and drove everybody out and some of them came to America and they were you know, bitter and angry kept those mean streaks going right up to now, some of these. I mean, I am Scotch-Irish. I am part Scotch-Irish anyway.

24:44
SM: That is what I am.

25:00
ED: Well, anyway, everybody brought their, their racial characteristics and their karmic characteristics into the boomer genesis, post-Second World War boomer generation. And they, people submerge their personal problems, they submerge their idiosyncrasies, and they submerge their mean streaks at least for a while into the general flow of getting up, getting to a job, having children, getting married, you know, eek out a living, set a little aside for when they are old, and just to get by as Americans. So but they cannot escape those plantations of a Jamestown and they cannot escape the evil of the Mexican War that [inaudible] protests against and what Ulysses S. Grant wrote about, and then the horrible slaughter of Antietam.

26:01
SM: Oh yeah.

26:02
ED: And all throughout Gettysburg and oy Shiloh. Oy! Oy! Oy!

26:09
SM: Mm Hmm.

26:10
ED: But then it goes back also to George Washington's surge in the late eighteenth century against the natives, the Indians of Western New York, just to clear land really and for further development by the Europeans who were surging to the west. Now that the English were defeated more or less in the Revolutionary War. So all this karmic gnarl cannot be separated if you know anything about history from this generation. This generation the boomer generation did not spring like dragon's teeth from the soil of America. They have karmic knots that go way back but they did good, it was an inventive era you know, the transistor and I do not know, they did interesting things and also the American culture. Jazz! Jazz poetry. Modern painting. Inventions and movies. There is science discoveries, longevity, cancer cures you know, we do not all eventually die of breast cancer thank god anymore, or some people are even starting to survive with pancreatic cancer for much longer. And so there is a, it is all a big fight against the Grim Reaper.

27:30
SM: Right.

27:31
ED: And also a fight for human dignity and freedom. And sharing really, people do not like to use the word sharing but it is to spread the wealth around to everybody. There is a decent drive, the baby boomers, a good portion of them to do just that.

27:49
SM: Um hmm. And I wanted to ask this, do you feel the Beats had a direct influence on the (19)60s and (19)70s, even though they were often identified with the (19)50s?

28:00
ED: Sure, because a lot of them live on and on and on. Kerouac died in 1969. Gregory Corso lived until (19)91. Ginsberg died in (19)90, no excuse me, Corso lasted until 2001, Ginsberg died in (19)97, and Burroughs also (19)97 but they were very active culturally. And this Beat generation was like a deliberate plan, they got together you know, they were going to call themselves a generation and they knew they had really smart men and women aboard that generation so they floated it and it worked.

28:38
SM: How did you become a Beat?

28:41
ED: Well, when I was when I was in high school, it is in my short stories, my book: Tales of Beatnik Glory. The story, one of, where I describe reading Howl when I was in high school.

28:59
SM: Okay.

29:00
ED: And I memorized it. I used to recite when me and my friends drove around drinking beer around the county courthouse, I would scream out Howl and I memorized it. It sort of saved my life. I always tell audiences I might have been an Eskimo Pie driver if it had not been for Howl.

29:21
SM: [laughs]

29:23
ED: So Howl. And then Allen became one of my best friends. And I knew all of them. Corso, Gary, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs was a friend, Corso was a friend, Gary Snyder's a good friend. I wrote a book about Allen Ginsberg: Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, so I was very tuned in to him.

29:44
SM: You know, the beats are often defined as rebels and do you think this mentality through their writings and lifestyle subconsciously filter into the boomer generation in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s? Were the feelings like it is okay to be different? And not be silent.

30:01
ED: That is true. It is okay to be different than they were perceived as being different. The girls wore a lot of Egyptian eye makeup modeled on Jean Paul Sartre's girlfriend Juliette Greco and they would wear sheer-toed high heels and mesh stockings, maybe a leather vest and very daring not to wear a brassiere back in (19)58 or (19)59 or they would wear these [inaudible] beatnik sandals. The guys for their part might sport a Florida maritime turtleneck sweater and a black jacket and sandals themselves. So it was a visual thing in part. And berets. Men wearing berets. Then of course when the hip you know they would never beatniks would have never have worn necklaces, it was not a few years later when the sixties hit that men started wearing necklaces, wore their hair long, and they wore robes and silk gowns and that was different. But the Beats were, came out of Second World War so they were, their dress was pretty dark and somber. Very existential. And they were, I guess you could call them rebels. You know, they smoked pot. They, they all of them knew John Coltrane riffs or knew Charlie Parker riffs. There was Lester Young. Went to Lester Young performances and knew a lot about jazz and picked up from the jazz singers use of marijuana and of course people like Neal Cassidy were; took a lot of uppers. But when I was in school in the (19)50s everybody took Benzedrine. The whole boomer generation. You know, in my opinion, the whole boomer generation got through college on coca cola and a few uppers to help them pass the test. They would never admit it but, uh.

32:27
SM: It is interesting that when I interviewed Hettie, I asked her this question, and she really well, she had some interesting comments, and that is why did the Beats want to be different in the first place? And secondly, obviously they challenged the norm during a time few people spoke up. This is kind of what the boomers did during their college age, some of them, maybe 15 percent of them because we were only talking about a percentage of the boomers, and describe you there is a link here to me between the silent generation and the boomer generation.

33:02
ED: Maybe there is always they always say that young people are more willing to shake the wall and make some changes. The older people who have been through a lot been through scrapes and through illnesses, and one or two marriages and worried about paying their bills that they have a different attitude. Many people tend to lose their youthful arrogance or their youthful; some young people can be a real pain, you know, they, they have this attitude of a, you know, I have, we have received the knowledge and 'go fuck yourself' so you know, I do not know, that's not a lot of kids but there are. I remember the socialist Irving Howe he was at a meeting and being harangued by studying was not sufficiently of the left was not enough for the people. Howe said something like this you know where you are going to be doing in a few years young man? You are going to be a dentist, so I always think of that. Sometimes I get a little static. I do a lot of college gigs and I answer their questions all of the time after my readings or lectures, there is a faction out there, very rarely, but they think they know it all without having read too many books.

34:52
SM: Yeah, that is what we try to always tell students, you know. Emotion is important. You got to have emotion when you believe in something, a passion but you also got to have knowledge. And when you have the combination of knowledge and emotion, it is hard to beat. Just all these movements took place during that period, too, because I have interviewed a lot of people and they know that the civil rights movement was kind of a model for the, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, Native American, Chicano, environmental movement, a lot of different movements of that particular time that continued through today and have evolved. Were those Boomer, do you give that all credit to the boomer generation for those movements after the civil rights movement?

35:38
ED: I do not know. I think what the civil rights movement was, was a double empowerment, it was an empowerment of young blacks and also religious blacks. And also young whites, and then of course more established whites who formed bonds to decide that their goals on the surface of it were not that bad. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted an end to poll taxes and they wanted to drink water at fountains and ride buses, wherever they wanted and to use public bathrooms and restaurants. You know, and then, of course, Martin Luther King and [inaudible] brought the additional factor of, they want jobs. Jobs and economic interest between blacks and whites. So demand for economic equity, and these other, other civil rights things were I guess you can say that some of them, many of the participants were of the boomer generation. But I do not think, I do not know who invented the word Boomer, but I do not I do not think it was invented by the time of the great, by the lunch counter sit-ins or the freedom riots in (19)61.

36:17
SM: Right.

37:10
ED: The pool integration in (19)62. The commercial worship in (19)53. Selma in (19)65, voter registration and John Lewis; (19)56, (19)57, leading to the portion of (19)64 and Voting Rights Act in (19)68, the Great Society Acts. The real big cram with the boomer generation, was the Great Society legislation where basically a white congress voted in place beginning in the four ̶

38:03
SM: Uh huh.

38:03
ED: A law, the Medicare, all the other karmic acts, all the great, great society cats ̶

38:16
SM: Did you come in this is an area that, you know, you end the year with the Fugs and all the music? How important? Obviously we know it is but I like your thoughts on the music of that of the boomer generation, the music of the (19)60s in the (19)70s. And I talk about the music, it is not it is not just all the great bands and performers, the folk musicians, Motown. Just your comment and how important that was for this seventy million people. And second part of this question is, when I talked to Pete Seeger this past weekend, he talked about that, you know, he was always raised with the belief based on how his father raised him that that music was it's the words is what's important. It is not so much the musicians as it is the words of the young people will take the social messages and people take the social messages, and they will always remember them and pass them on. And there seem to be a lot of messages in the music of this particular time, just your thoughts and how important music was to the 70 million boomer generation. And I am going to change my tape here one second. Certainly you are involved in this. If you could speak up just a little louder too, thanks.

39:48
ED: Well of course, music is always important to every nation in every civilization. What was different about the music of the (19)60s into the (19)70s was that as I mentioned, there was a huge rise of recording technology so that you could do multitrack recording and then overdub and add vocals. Up till the early (19)60s the recording was done of like ten generation mono to mono. In other words, the orchestra would play on a mono between two fancy tape recorders then Frank Sinatra would lay down his vocals. And then they would run the same tape over, and then they would add the harmony singers and maybe some strings and other instruments. So it was very labor intensive. The beginning was the Beatles in (19)64 or (19)65, with the Fugs and other bands this new technology was suddenly there. And there were all these marvelous amplifiers. And more importantly, the music could be heard because they were out there, the sound systems that evolved even in little clubs but also in big places such as baseball stadiums, bigger venues so that the word could star in the mix. And that words, assumed great importance, because of the impact of people like Woody Guthrie and Harry Smith's anthology of American folk music, and the other Folkways albums.

41:38
SM: Mmm hmm.

41:38
ED: They would listen to it and then things like Pete Seeger who adopted a song he learned from a woman I think in North Carolina, and it became We Shall Overcome.

41:49
SM: Right.

41:50
ED: And then all the religious songs came about: Ain't Going to Study War No More and everybody was adopting these religious tunes Down by the River Side and We Shall Overcome. I have Been Buked and I have Been Scorned from the great March on Washington: Mahalia Jackson and Peter, Paul and Mary adopting folk music, folk songs, simple American folk songs, or European folk songs, adopting them. Putting secret messages in them, you know. Folk music, it often exists, like the Bible and has layers of meanings We Shall Overcome can be just as much of "we'll have a good life" but it also can mean we'll end slavery or we'll end racism or we'll win social equity. All these great songs evolved and they were singable, and of course music is more memorable. All ̶ We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance, that John Lennon wrote in 1969. You know, that, that did more to in the war in Vietnam, than any street demonstration.

43:15
SM: If you were to pinpoint, I know, there is so many of them, and it's not fair to others to exclude them but if you were to pick three, four or five of the top entertainers from that era, that really were the top echelon of that kind of music, who would they be?

43:34
ED: What were you talking about?

43:35
The musicians that influenced the boomers, whether they be folk musicians, rock bands, or Motown singers.

43:45
ED: Well who knows you know, you could start out with popular singers, some more scholarly and get into other things you could hear. You could hear Elvis Presley and then say, well what is this rockabilly stuff maybe I should look more into it ̶

44:11
SM: Mm Hmm.

44:11
ED: You know, you start with Elvis or you might start with Mac the Knife by Bobby Darin and then go discover Bertolt Brecht that way. So you know, there are the obvious great musicians, Elvis, the Beatles, of course Bob Dylan, Joan Baez who had this huge impact on the generation with Hush Little Children Do not You Cry all that first album All My Trials. But somehow (Bob) Stravinski had a big influence on the avant-garde and people who wanted to change the world.

44:58
SM: Mm Hmm.

45:02
ED: I knew [inaudible] Stravinski and Joan Baez personally [inaudible] but then you go back into Bill Haley and the Fleshtones and Mickey and Sylvia: Love is Strange. Mr. Earl, that song. I do not know there was a lot of rock and roll that people were exposed to that, it truly was the harbinger of racial mingling.

45:31
SM: Mm Hmm.

45:31
ED: It was obviously a black phenomenon as was jazz. I grew up in Kansas City, I was exposed to a lot of jazz when I was a kid, but just I thought it was just regular music. I did not realize that when I was very young [inaudible] it was just good dance music.

46:03
SM: You mentioned that you thought John Lennon's music or song had a lot to do with ending the war as anything. What, why? Why did the war in Vietnam end in your opinion?

46:19
ED: Well, yes. Well, you know, it takes a long time, they started it basically, they started doing the defoliation in 1962 [inaudible] in (19)63, the supposition of the end and then, it did not really begin until (19)65 and then (19)66 through [inaudible] (19)68 I think because of all the scholar activists, all the people that were studying what was going on while raising their voices against it. And then the huge anti-draft movement.

47:09
SM: Uh huh.

47:10
ED: It took, people had to spend their whole lives every day protesting and raising money to stop this war. And the whole; it was: you know, they wanted to just like MacArthur wanted to drop H-bombs on North Vietnam, North Korea, or China on the border between North Korea and China. So too did people like General LeMay wanted to drop nuclear weapons on China.

47:41
SM: Yes. Yup.

47:39
ED: So it was what we prevented, more than anything. It was written that Nixon was thinking of using nuclear weapons in 1969. And so they sang John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance at the mobilization rally in DC in the fall of 1969 and Nixon was aware of that demonstration and said he realized [inaudible] and demonstrations all over America that they could not increase the war in Vietnam and they had to start pulling it back. A long, long I mean it was (19)75, six years and then hounded him out of office. I mean you know, it was so evil and such an injustice. However, they can build walls, honoring the dead, and I am sorry, there were any dead there and veterans, you can build a wall between here and the moon, but you are not going to do away with the evil of the Vietnam War. Never.

48:49
SM: What, in your opinion, were the best books that were that the boomers read in their growing up years that may have had an influence on them?

48:58
ED: I have no idea. I had my own life by then. I was reading my own classics. I have a question here and then; I just cannot figure out figure out what; you know, they start out reading books you know, Catcher in the Rye and branch out into you know different uh; they might have read, read Che Guevara's diary as part of a college class. They might have; who knows what avenues to read lead.

49:33
SM: I know that a lot of people with Mao's book. Chairman Mao's book.

49:39
ED: Yeah, because the, I forget what group was Maoist but they printed a lot of those. I had a bookstore. I had a bookstore for a number of years on the lower east side and somehow I would get these little red books and they were like free, they would get dropped off.

49:58
SM: [laughs]

49:58
ED: And they would urge me to sell them.

50:01
SM: Right. I have a question here on trust. Um, one of the things that this is this is definitely part of the boomer generation is a lot of the leaders lying to, lying to them and lying to the American public. Because you saw that was what Watergate was all about and certainly, Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin, Eisenhower in the U2 incident, even in recent years, President Kennedy and his linkage to the Coup of Diem and knew and of course, Ronald Reagan. It seems like at that particular period, I can remember when I was in college, and I went to SUNY Binghamton, a lot of students did not trust anybody. They did not trust the president, they did not trust anybody in any leadership role, whether it be vice president of Student Affairs, they did not trust the minister in the church, the rabbi, the head of a corporation, they did not trust anybody in a position of responsibility. And, and I have seen, I do not know if that has been passed down to their kids. But my question is basically this, I was in a Psychology 101 class in my first year of college and I remember the psychology professors telling the students that if you cannot trust in your life, then you will not be a success in life. That trust is a very important quality and I am just want your ̶

51:24
ED: Tell that to John D. Rockefeller who you know, used distrust to take over all of the oil in America. I do not know it is a terrible thing to have. On one level, it's the Beavis and Butthead isolation of American civilization where there is a culture of impoliteness that spreads which is not that good ̶ you see it at events and public all over the place, sort of against general rudeness that's one thing. Another thing is, you grow up and every ̶ everything is a lie so you can either isolate yourself from everything and we were told basically to be existentialists, to be alien; and be alienated by the fifties. Being alienated [inaudible] say James Dean or Marlon Brando that was a public icon to be alienated. So, but if you take it to the extreme and feel alienated from all this, then you can become isolated or you become a pawn of the military industrial complex or a right wing capitalist who will take advantage of that alienation. You have great authoritarian control, and you have you know, the situation of 1984, where everybody is suspicious and there is rule and neo-fascism. So it is a difficult situation because especially when the government has shown for so many decades to have lied so much about many things. Even some of our elections like the 2000 election. So, the idea of having stolen elections [inaudible] computer voting, wars you do not know what they really mean. Can you really count on the government? And so you say fuck it I am just going to drink beer, play a little golf and head off into the sunset.

53:46
SM: What does that mean to activism though?

53:49
ED: Well, some people have it in their blood, you know, they vow to go out in a blaze of leaflets. My vow was to always stay very active in local politics. I stay active and I think a lot of people in our generation too, I mean, I admired people like Tom Hayden for instance.

54:07
SM: I interviewed him for this project.

54:10
ED: I stayed pretty active.

54:15
SM: When the best history books are written, you know they are usually written fifty years after a period. What do you think they will be saying about the boomer generation?

54:27
ED: I do not know. They may not even use the word boomer generation.

54:31
SM: Hmm.

54:31
ED: They may put, they may decide that the generation began with the first experiment in the Manhattan Project in 1939 or (19)40. They may begin it with Einstein's letter to Roosevelt to build the bomb. They may begin it at some date that Marian Anderson's concert at the ̶

54:58
SM: Sure.

55:01
ED: I do not know. Or they may be accepted as the bona fide movement that lead to maybe something wonderful happening in the next twenty or thirty years, I do not know [inaudible] the spirit to America that will transform.

55:20
SM: The last part of the interview is just quick responses to just some terms or names.

55:25
ED: I am not going to be able to talk anymore. I got to get to a meeting. You should take your email you were supposed to call me at one. You are welcome to call another day. And I can conclude.

55:36
SM: Okay.

55:37
ED: I got to run and get to a meeting.

55:40
SM: All right.

55:40
ED: But you can call, you know what day you want to call?

55:44
SM: Well. I am going back and forth between New York, somebody just had open heart surgery up there.

55:51
ED: Who did?

55:52
SM: One of my relatives.

55:53
ED: Oh well, sometime within the next few days, I do not care. Call any time after noon, after like one and I am available. I just got to run to a meeting that I forgot about.

56:05
SM: All right, well, I only have about fifteen more. I think this, when we left the last time, I think I only have about twenty – twenty-five minutes and that will be it.

56:15
ED: Ok.

56:16
SM: Because it is basically there is just one little section left. But I want to ask a couple questions before I get into you responding to some of the personalities and the terms from that era. Could you go a little bit more into how the Beats, how important the Beats were in shaping the boomer generation, just for their attitudes and the way they lived.

56:46
ED: Um, well, define these people: Corso, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Huncke. In certain ways Charlie Parker and Diane Di Prima, in other ways Gary Snyder. They came out of the World War II generation out of the (19)40s and out of the post war boom, the thought boom of the release in the United States after World War II the created abstract expressionism, detective novels. And both from the synthesis of the east and west coast. The Beat generation who flourished with the beginning with the publication of Howl and they flourished as a kind of statement against the McCarthy era and against the squareness and the constrained culture of the 1950s and caused the generation of the boomers, so-called boomers to relax a little bit and not to be afraid to be more individualistic and follow their own life. America always has had a streak of individualism and people who do not motivate it but the Beats helped push the generation along the so-called boomer generation and also by demanding more freedom under the Bill of Rights. The battle of William Burroughs over publication of Naked Lunch and the battle around his thirst for sexual freedom and for acceptance of overt homosexuality and for the fight, the struggles, you know, the Feds tried to stomp down Howl when it came out and so he helped prevail on that and Allen also helped a lot in the trial, the court case where they tried to squash Naked Lunch. So they helped create a greater sense of freedom so that in our own time shows like The Sopranos even or some of these shows that use language and overt gayness on television and movies. The Beats helped liberate the personal freedom areas and art forms. They had a big hand in helping to set the new freedoms.

59:45
SM: Hmm. Through the years as some of the Beats are getting older, whether it be Burrows, Ginsberg or Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ann Waldman, who was one of the younger ones, Snyder, Amiri Baraka and Ken Kesey, yourself. What did you think of this boomer generation? They were, you were a little older. And what was the feeling when some of these things were happening? Because obviously, the Beats in the (19)50s were pretty tight knit group. And, and there is a lot of camaraderie there. And then this new generation is happening with all these issues and whether it be drugs, the music, the dress codes, and everything, just your thoughts on how, what they thought of this generation when you were around them.

1:00:45
ED: I did not even realize anything about this thing called boomer generation until a few years ago, I mean, it did not occur to me. I mean it is obvious that when you have a literary generation, or a musical generation or a painting generation that there will come along, another generation nipping at the heels. And as you walk off the plank of life, they will emerge on the deck of the ship and say, it's all ours! So I do not know, I did not really think about them. I knew that there were always going to be younger, emerging art forms and artists but I did not think of it in terms of a general huge mass of people called the boomer generation. Again, what is the designation? They were born after the atomic bomb was dropped?

1:01:36
SM: Yeah, in 1946 to (19)64 that was the years they put down for them.

1:01:43
ED: They are all spoiled brats!

1:01:46
SM: [laughs]

1:01:46
ED: They swelled in on an empire that was not yet beginning to fade. So they, they were kind of spoiled little [inaudible] thinking everybody would cow tow to the United States. The battles seemed to be over.

1:02:08
SM: What is really interesting is that of all the Beats that I remember, and it is the Allen Ginsberg seemed to be around everywhere. Uh, and uh

1:02:20
ED: He had the metabolism of a chipmunk. He had a high metabolism. And if you look at history, I mean look, I wrote a book on Allen Ginsberg's life called The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. And in research and I knew him intimately for, oh from 1964 till he died in the spring of (19)97, so thirty-three years.

1:02:42
SM: Mm hmm.

1:02:43
ED: We were in almost daily contact so I realized what fanatic, fantastic energy, the guy had, he never really had to sleep. Sometimes I stayed at his house when I was in New York on business and he would be up in the middle of night doing work. I do not know if he ever really slept. He had a high metabolism and he was always in motion, he did more benefits than anybody in world culture. He must have done thousands of benefits for a wide variety of causes. But also, personal appearances at colleges here, in China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Europe, all over Europe and India. He was always giving readings. And so I was always amazed at the huge numbers wide the wide cultural swath he made. People were coming from India from China from Japan. I mean, he was famous in Japan from Italy from Germany from France from England, from Scotland, from Wales. The guy at cultural connections to a huge plethora of countries. Pretty amazing.

1:03:58
SM: I just remember that time that he was on TV with William Buckley. Do you remember that?

1:04:02
ED: I did not see that show but I heard about it.

1:04:07
SM: Yeah, it was amazing because Buckley of course, being the conservative that he was, was fascinated by him. Literally fascinated.

1:04:15
ED: Well, they were friends. One good thing about Buckley, of course, not my cup of tea, but nevertheless, you know, took the stance against the far right. The anti-Semitic right and also was capable of having friends among liberals. He was a friend of Howard Lowenstein and in a way was a friend of Allen Ginsberg.

1:04:42
SM: You were in a band called the Fugs. How did the boomers look to that group?

1:04:51
ED: Oh, I do not know. We still get fan mail some younger people. I do not know. I am not sure how they? (19)46? Well, there was one born in the late (19)40s and early (19)50s would have been, could have been Fugs fans, [inaudible] around (19)67 or (19)68.

1:05:13
SM: Right.

1:05:13
ED: I remember they were always hiding Fugs records from their parents.

1:05:01
SM: [laughs]

1:05:10
ED: They would write in and complain that their Fugs records, that their parents had broken a Fugs record across their father's knee or something. They were indignant. If the definition is (19)46 and onwards then many of them, heck, probably our whole fan base was boomers.

1:05:38
SM: If you were described the Fugs' music, how would you put it in a few words or a few sentences?

1:05:50
ED: Well, it grew. It started out as a kind of primitive, acoustical folk music. We did not go to Juilliard School, so we taught ourselves. We grew up in the great school of American Jazz, American folk music and American civil rights songs and American rock and roll. Everything from, and also Country and Western and Hasidic. You know, we brought a lot of Jewish melodies to our music. I grew up in the happening, movement. So we were a happening. We were spontaneous. We were like action painting but for music. But over the years, our music, and a mixture through what was artful and experimentations that our music grew and grew in skill and quality. So by the time we did our final records for Warner Brothers, it evolved into [inaudible]. We rose up and did a major album. So our music always grew. We started out primitive. Got less primitive. Got into different types of music. So now like forty-five years after our founding, I have had a band together for twenty-five years and they are very, very, very accomplished. So, how to describe it? They have to listen to us. The Fugs are not a visual thing. We are all we are our songs. All The Fugs ever will be even apart from the stage remains the recording studio and live. We are the ̶ our stage.

1:07:32
SM: When we just had the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, in fact, I think the last when I spoke to you the first time it was a couple of weeks before the big happening was going to take place and Richie was going to open, Richie Havens. I think you had a concert there in fact. What when you look at that Woodstock, do you think that that was more about fun, more about culture? More about issues? What, how would you describe it?

1:08:06
ED: Well, it was an act, part activism and part planning. I mean I guess 300,000 young people pushed out to Sullivan County you know and many of them were against the war in Vietnam, many of them wanting a new, a new living arrangement. Living outdoors so it was kind of a good commune. The food was free cooked by Wavy Gravy and the hog farm. Wavy Gravy you know, into the microphone, at I think it was on the first night, or? First morning or second morning of Woodstock? Said, "What I have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000 people." And then it also had the kind of medical system that we need in the United States, free medical care. I have a good I have a doctor friend who's now an eminent neurologist, who was a volunteer at the freak-out tent at Woodstock, so people who were having medical problems that got free medical attention from volunteer doctors/ Plus free food. The ticket system broke down so there was free music. There was a celebration of beautiful farmland it was on a huge I think 50 or 60 acre farm; a dairy farm. Celebrate the beautiful American out of doors. Then celebrate also the kind of music that was rising up at that time with Jimi Hendrix and his great National Anthem which was performed at dawn on the final day with this new miraculous instrument in the United States called the wah, wah pedal and his active patriotism. In its own way. It was very patriotic. He set the tone for the (19)60s with that one National Anthem. All the other singing? I do not know, it was also a triumph of technology because it was not until a year or so before that you could play the music through speakers that can be heard by 400,000 people so the technology rose very quickly. With Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the others. So it was good. Technology, sharing, free medical care, all the outdoors. And then of course, a lot of pot and I guess there was acid there. Mainly pot I think. And beer. Pot, beer, acid, rock and roll, technology, love of the out of doors and having a good time.

1:10:59
SM: Who did you personally look up to? Who were your ̶ Well, I am not going to overstate this thing. Who are your heroes? Or who were the role models that inspired you?

1:11:12
ED: From those days?

1:11:13
SM: From those days or anytime? How did you become who you became?

1:11:21
ED: I do not know. I had heroes. It's like when they asked Michael Dukakis who were his heroes from the (19)88 election. You find heroes in your life from you know, Sunday school all the way up to performers and writers of course, teachers, I had a bunch of teachers [inaudible] like Sappho [inaudible] here other musicians that I admired [inaudible] when I was a kid. And also, rock and roll stars you know that rose later. I do not know. When I became an adult, Allen Ginsberg became my mentor. Carl Wilson before he was my mentor. [inaudible] friend, early on was one of my mentors. I looked to people for advice. You know, I am reading [inaudible] normally every week I read his stories for a while. I do not know, Norman Thomas was a mentor. Ghandi was a mentor. John Paul Sarte was big in my mind, and Samuel Beckett was an early hero as a writer and then somebody to emulate, at least in his persistence and overcoming his really [inaudible] world worldview with great art.

1:13:03
SM: How would you like to be remembered? What would? When you are gone what do you would, would you would like people to say about you? Or hope that people would say about you and secondly your writing. Your gift to people?

1:13:23
ED: Well, I hope with respect to my writings that they will, find, poems inside the body of my writing or short stories or other kinds of [inaudible] for 300 years from now.

1:13:43
SM: It in that this is very general and, and maybe impossible to answer but if you were to, if we were to ever bury seventy million people in one grave, which is the boomer generation and we put a tombstone on there, what do you think the, the epithet was say? The epitaph?

1:14:16
ED: [singing voice] Things go better with Coca Cola.

1:14:24
SM: Laughs.

1:14:25
ED: [singing voice] Better with Coke. Or we came, we saw. The word is not conquered. We came, we saw, we completed, man. I mean, you know, it is a generation. They come, they go. They are doomed. We used a plank image before. I mean, you know, you get born. What is it that Samuel Beckett said? You part with your? [inaudible] other ways to stride the grave really, it is not sing-song all the way but the idea is to have fun. One thing about the boomer generation is that their parents, having lived through World War II and all the, which really was a great triumph of American civilization. You know America defeated the militaristic Japanese which really is a wonderful thing. And so that generation told their kids, you know, have a little fun. You know? So I think the boomer generation was not afraid to have fun. [inaudible] now they are getting old.

1:15:50
SM: Let us hope that they are still having fun.

1:15:51
ED: Oh, well their arthritis causes them to not have as much fun.

1:15:55
SM: Yeah. Two quotes that come out of this era. One was one that Bobby Kennedy used a lot and another one was a Peter Max one. And, and the question is, which one better defined the boomer generation. And of course, the Bobby Kennedy one is, some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not? And the other one is Peter Max, You do your thing, and I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful. Those are two extremes.

1:16:32
ED: The quotes a little hippie dippy. I mean, you know [inaudible] that is the whole problem with 'do your own thing'. You know, I mean, that is what Hitler would say. Doing your thing is always um, problematic. But Robert Kennedy, Robert's, really, now that I am getting on in years, Robert Kennedy is emerging as a personal hero. I writing a book about him but it I do not know if it will take long enough to; if I figure out how many books to write, maybe I'll finally write my book about Robert Kennedy.

1:16:32
SM: Let me switch deep here and then we will get into these questions on the people hold on a second.

(Only tape one of the interview is available)

ND

Stephen McKiernan

Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders is a poet, author, musician, and activist who grew up in the state of Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri and New York University where he earned his Bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek. After college, he opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in New York City and started Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas were all early influences as Sanders tried to bridge the concerns of Beat Poetry and the counterculture of the 1960s. He is the author of many collections of poetry where he received several honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Sanders has written many books of prose, a non-fiction book, The Family, and published a bi-weekly newspaper, the Woodstock Journal. He is the founding member of the satirical and subversive folk-rock music group, The Fugs.

77:17

English

Binghamton University Libraries

1 Microcassette

Poets, American, Singers--United States; Human rights workers; Environmentalists—United States; Authors; Publishers; Sanders, Ed--Interviews

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Roosevelt Era; Baby boom generation; Red Scare; Activism; Vietnam War; Universal Health Care; Senator Edmund Muskie; Slavery; Beat generation; John Coltrane; Lester Young; Jazz; Neal Cassady; Silent Generation.