Chapter Six
Accounts differ about when the Fugs were formed—1964 or 1965—but all agree that Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were the founders. Tuli was a Beat hero who published magazines called Birth and Yeah and sold them on the street in the East and West Village. Sanders’s operation, Fuck You Press, published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, which he sold at his Peace Eye Bookstore on Avenue A in the East Village. The name Fugs was reportedly derived from Norman Mailer’s use, in his novel The Naked and the Dead, of “fug” as a substitute for the word everyone knew it replaced.
After the Flying Machine broke up, the Fugs hired Kootch. He brought with him a killer driving rhythm guitar and a seemingly unlimited supply of outrageous licks. But his real love was black music in any form. Danny was a good-looking kid from Larchmont, New York, an affluent town in lily-white Westchester County. Coming of age under the heavy influence of R&B, soul, blues, gospel, and jazz, he had listened and practiced until he had mastered some of the sounds of the guitar players he admired in the genres he favored, and then he had listened and practiced some more.
Danny’s gig with the Fugs didn’t afford him much of an opportunity to develop his skills in his preferred genres, but it did come with a couple of distinct advantages for a young man: it was a steady job, and the Fugs attracted plenty of women willing to provide companionship. Often, after the show, Danny would emerge from the stage door wondering if he would wind up going home with one of the young women waiting to hook up with someone in the band. It never occurred to Danny—handsome, smart, funny, and reasonably well brought up—to be anything other than nice and polite to the girls waiting outside. This of course made the girls want to have nothing whatsoever to do with him. They had come to hang out with the bad boys and by all that was unholy that’s what they were going to do. Thus it was Tuli and Ed coming out the door—snarling, cursing, and projecting all the dark glory of their outrageous personae—who got all the chicks.
Danny was just beginning to think about leaving the Fugs when an L.A. band called Clear Light offered him a job if he was willing to move to California. Kootch left the Fugs, flew to the West Coast, and moved in with a group of hippies and musicians living at the home of Frazier Mohawk. The hazy discussions around Frazier’s coffee table often included the observation that living in Laurel Canyon was a much more desirable option than, say, getting killed in the jungles of Vietnam. Southern California was the center of everything fresh, young, and current. The beautiful people, the gorgeous weather, the burgeoning music scene, and the free and easy lifestyle were a siren call to young men around the country, and they were responding in droves. One was a musician I’d known on the East Coast who would add a lot more than music to my life.