‘We tried to levitate the Pentagon’: the almost unbelievable life of Ed Sanders, trickster god of the US counterculture — SkimNews
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- Fugs Film!, a feature-length documentary directed by Chuck Smith, gets its UK premiere this week — Sanders, now 87, leads the offbeat folk-garage-psych band he founded in 1964 and re-formed in 1984.
- Sanders' 1971 book The Family, chronicling Charles Manson and his followers' crimes and trials, became a bestseller; Manson himself wrote Sanders a letter saying, 'If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn't be here.'
- The October 21, 1967 Pentagon protest, led by the Fugs, drew thousands forming a human chain around the building chanting 'Out, demons, out!' — an event Norman Mailer covered in his Pulitzer-winning The Armies of the Night.
- Peace Eye Bookstore and the zine Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, run by Sanders in New York, featured writing by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer and Gregory Corso — the NYPD attempted to prosecute Sanders for obscenity over the sexually explicit magazine.
- Atlantic Records courted the Fugs after Jerry Wexler courted them, but dropped the band over a song called 'Coca Cola Douche'; they landed at Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records in 1968, with Sinatra personally approving the signing.
- The Fugs' 50th anniversary protest in 2017 saw Sanders and supporters form a human chain around the White House to 'levitate' it — Sanders draws a direct line from the Vietnam-era activism to opposing Trump today.
- Sanders says the Fugs gave Jimi Hendrix his first wah-wah pedal and shared bills with the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead; he was arrested in 1961 protesting nuclear-armed submarines and says he is now 'protesting against the Trumpster.'
Why it matters: The Fugs, largely forgotten outside dedicated counterculture circles despite sharing bills with the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, get a fresh UK airing at a moment when Sanders — at 87 — frames his work as a single thread running from 1961 anti-nuclear protests through the Pentagon levitation to opposing Trump, making the documentary both a historical archive and a current political statement.
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