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Tuli Kupferberg passed away yesterday, July 12, at the ripe old age of 86. Before he teamed up with Ed Sanders and Ken Weaver to form the Fugs, Kupferberg was already, as described in my book All Hopped Up and Ready To Go,

a “beat hero” known for hawking his own magazine Yeah on the Village streets, and for reputedly being the character who, in Ginsberg’s Howl, “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away.”

As I then go on to describe of the Fugs’ formation,

Late 1964 found the “free-formist” Kupferberg forty years old already (he dismissed much of his twenties and thirties as a blur of “mystery and history”), living above a wholesale egg market on East Tenth Street between Avenues B and C, recording his poetry to tape in song form. When Sanders, newly graduated with a degree in Classics, rented the store next door to open a vegetarian coffee house and bookstore, the pair began collaborating on these poem songs: the Beatles and the Stones had opened up new avenues of creativity for a pair who were hardly restrained to begin with. “Ed was a wild, crazy, mid-Western young man,” said Kupferberg, “and I was a New York radical Jew. So together we had everything or, as some people would say, nothing.”

“Nothing” became the title of Kupferberg’s “minimalist dirge,” which closed out the Fugs debut album from 1965, The Village Fugs– Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction. In an earlier draft of All Hopped Up, I described “Nothing” as follows:

“the bongo accompaniment … did not make clear whether it was poking fun at the group’s beatnik roots or just playing along, as it recited every icon of their New York lifestyle – the Village Voice, New Yorker, Sing Out!, Folkways, Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg all in one verse – and determined of the all that they were “Nothing.”

You can hear “Nothing” in its entirety here. It may help better understand the song, however, if you first listen or watch Kupferberg talk about the Fugs’ formative years in this video below.

Kupferberg can also be seen, in all his glory, in this 1968 Swedish TV footage of the Fugs:

The prototype Bez? No… Kupferberg was more like the archetypal first generation beat. In fact, he may have been the last of the first generation beats. Though he died in relative poverty, Kupferberg did not lack for friends: a benefit for his medical costs in January this year at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn brought out a roll-call of A List New York City artists. Kupferberg was deeply loved by those who knew him personally, and will be sorely missed by all who knew of him via his myriad contributions to literature, music, art and all forms of popular culture. The beat goes on, even without the original beat.

This Mix accompanies “Crystals, Angels and Raindrops,” Chapter 10 of my book All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77. Specifically, it covers the “girl group” sound of the early-mid 1960s, from the Shirelles to the Shangri-Las, via Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and the vibrant scenes to be found at the Music and Brill Buildings of Broadway.

To play the music mix for this Chapter, just click on the button above. The first time you play it, you will hear the tracks in (just about) the order discussed. Thereafter, the tracks will appear in random order. Thanks to 8tracks.com for setting up the mix.

Of all the mixes I’ve put together so far (follow this link for the others), this is the longest. I’ve managed to include what I believe is every song referenced in the chapter, a varied collection that includes the critical/commercial breakthroughs by the Crystals (“Uptown”), the Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back) and the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack” but also “Out In the Streets.”) But I’ve also tried hard to include some obscurities, some novelties and some otherwise important cuts, from Carole King’s version of Neil Sedaka’s chart-topper, “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” (the original of which is relevant for the fact that the Cookies supplied the backing vocals), to Little Eva’s “Up On The Roof,” through to several original versions of subsequent “British Invasion” hits, including the Exciters’ original recording of “Do-Wah-Diddy.”

I’ve also worked hard to book-end this chapter. The first time you play through the mix, you’ll hear it open with the Shirelles’ 1962 chart-topper “Soldier Boy,” a song that sounds thoroughly dated by the time the mix ends, just three years later, with the Chiffons’ positively psychedelic “Nobody Knows What’s Goin’ On (In My Mind But Me)” and the late Ellie Greenwich’s positively mournful solo cut, “You Don’t Know.” There are 28 tracks in all; given the length of most, you could probably fit them on one modern CD. Enjoy.

The Shangri-Las performing “Out In The Streets” on Shindig in 1965. Visit my YouTube channel for more videos relating to All Hopped Up and Ready To Go.

As with all the other Music and Maps that I’ve put together thus far for the book, I’ve also included a Google Map to demonstrate the geographical concentration of talent for this chapter. As you’ll see below, in this case it applies largely to the activity around Midtown: Donny Kirshner’s Aldon Music offices in the Music Building at 1650 Broadway, where Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin and Carole King were all based; Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music offices at the Brill Building down the road, where Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich housed their hits, and Mira Sound around the corner, where so many of these songs were recorded. But you can also see the location of the many high schools that produced these wonderful girl groups: the Crystals, Ronettes and Shangri-Las, to name but three, all emerged from specific schools across the five boroughs. And by stretching the map out to Long Island, you can see how the emigration of people like Ellie Greenwich and George “Shadow” Morton from Brooklyn to the new suburbs came to create a new sound that soon enough found its way back into the heart of Manhattan – and the hearts of millions of music fans. I have a special affection for the music of this chapter. I hope it shows.

View 10) Crystals, Angels, and Raindrops in a larger map

I just had the pleasure of joining Chester and Linda Freeman on their radio show “The Swing Shift” on the Hudson Valley AM Station WHVW. Passionate Lindy-Hoppers (and professional dance instructors), they turned me on to a YouTube clip I’d somehow missed until now: the legendary George “Shorty” Snowden dancing to the music of the equally legendary Chick Webb, filmed all the way back in 1929.

You can read more about Webb, Snowden, the Lindy-Hop and the place where it all happened – the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem – in chapter 1 of my book, All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927-77. That chapter is available, via scribd, for free, here. You can hear a couple of Music mixes to accompany that chapter and see a map of late 1920s Harlem in my Music and Maps section at iJamming!, here. And you can learn more about Webb via this YouTube clip. Within the first minute, you’ll understand that he was the Keith Moon of his day.

Thanks to Linda and Chester. Their radio show is archived here and is an excellent resource for all fans of true jazz music and dancing.

This Mix accompanies “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” Chapter 9 of All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77. Specifically, it covers that period in the early 1960s when the “folk revivalists” of Greenwich Village, the singers who had made a career for themselves covering traditional material, mutated into “singer-songwriters,” performing their own compositions.

To play the music mix for this Chapter, just click on the button above. The first time you play it, you will hear the tracks in (just about) the order discussed. Thereafter, the tracks will appear in random order. Thanks to 8tracks.com for setting up the mix.

This is arguably one of the most important developments in the history of American popular music, and key to the transition was the move to New York City of one Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan. He arrived in Manhattan in January 1961, signed with John Hammond Jr. at Columbia Records in October, and released his first album in the spring of 1962, a rapid rise that was very much the exception, not the rule. Given that the notion of a folk singer performing his own material was considered an oxymoron in 1961, it’s not surprising that only two original songs made it onto Dylan’s eponymous debut album. The one included on this mix recounted his first few months in the City with the biting wit for which he would soon become famous: “Talkin’ New York.” (The other original was a loving homage to his major influence, “Song to Woody.”)

Among the cover versions Dylan included on that debut was “House of the Rising Sun,” which had been showing up on folk albums for decades, almost as a matter of rite. Nonetheless, Dave Van Ronk, who provided bed, board, financial and managerial assistance to Dylan during the transplant’s first few months in New York, was convinced that Dylan had copied the arrangement from his own recent recording. (A version is heard here; it’s not the same one.) The rift in the pair’s friendship was eased only when Van Ronk heard Dylan’s rendition and concluded that it was so bad it would be ignored.

Dylan’s ascent through the Village folk scene was paralleled by the national success of Peter, Paul and Mary – the Greenwich Village trio of Peter Yarrow, Noel Stookey and Mary Travers assembled, with unapologetic commercial zeal, by manager/entrepreneur Albert Grossman. After proving their musical merits and visual appeal with a residency at the Bitter End in the autumn of 1961, they signed not with any of the familiar New York labels, but with Warner Brothers – a new “major label” out of the west coast. Their own eponymous debut album was a runaway hit, the first true pop crossover from the Village folk scene, with “The Lemon Tree” making into the top 40. Surprisingly, they then had even bigger success with “If I Had A Hammer,” the song that the Weavers had written back in 1949 (see chapter 8) in support of American Communists, the “Foley Square Twelve.” Though most record-buyers would not have known of its inspiration, they nonetheless resonated to the notion of “love between my brothers and sisters, all over this land.” The times, to quote a future Dylan cliché, were certainly changing.

As Peter, Paul and Mary soared up the charts, other folk musicians joined Bob Dylan in writing their own songs. Key among them was Tom Paxton, whose enduring “Rambling Boy” was influenced by both Dylan and Van Ronk’s versions of “He Was A Friend of Mine,” and whose dexterity was proven by the vast lyrical difference between two of his other most famous songs: “Goin’ To The Zoo” and “The Willing Conscript.” Phil Ochs, who arrived from Ohio State, had a more singular agenda, penning a piece for Broadside magazine on “The Need For Topical Music” and putting his pen where his mouth was with such songs as “Talkin’ Cuban Blues” (included here from his eventual 1964 debut All The News That’s Fit To Sing, namechecking Gerdes Folk City in the process). He and Dylan, whose own material was also veering towards the issues of the Civil Rights movement, formed a temporarily tight friendship.

Dylan’s first (and arguably most) significant contribution to this particular canon was unveiled in April 1962 at the Gerdes Monday night hootenanny, when Gil Turner performed the newly composed “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The tune had been lifted wholesale from the traditional “No More Auction Block” (which can be heard here as performed by the Village stalwart, Odetta), but nobody seemed to care. “Blowin’ in the Wind” met with immediate acclaim. It was published on the cover of Broadside, quickly recorded by Dylan for his second album (which was then delayed for several months), and released in versions by both Gil Turner’s New World Singers and the Chad Mitchell Trio before Peter, Paul and Mary unleashed a hit version, ahead of their third album, in the summer of 1963.

It was a golden few months for the Village folk movement. The Rooftop Singers, led by Washington Square Park veteran Erik Darling, had a number one hit with the old “jug band” standard “Walk Right In.” The Weavers helped popularise Paxton’s “Rambling Boy.” And Pete Seeger recorded a live album at Carnegie Hall in June 1963, named for the southern-gospel-turned-labor-song that he had helped rewrite, and which had subsequently become the theme song for the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” Crucially, Seeger also included Villagers’ “topical” songs on that album: Paxton’s “What Did You Learn In School Today?” and Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” the latter number included in this mix.

Dylan’s songwriting reputation had become such that he was covered by all-comers, especially his Village peers. Peter, Paul and Mary had another hit with his “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (an earlier version by the New World Singers, featuring Happy Traum and Gil Turner, is included here); Ian and Sylvia, a married couple who had moved down from Toronto, featured “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” on their Vanguard Records LP Four Winds; and Joan Baez recorded Dylan’s classic “With God On Our Side,” as she did “We Shall Overcome,” on a hugely successful live LP of her own in 1963. On August 28 of that year, a 22-year old Dylan then joined Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Josh White – and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his “I Have A Dream” speech – at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., where the songs “If I Had a Hammer,” “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ In The Wind” were performed in front of a quarter million people.

Dylan’s new manager, the now ubiquitous Albert Grossman, had held back release of his second album until his client had achieved success as a songwriter, and it proved a wise move: with its iconic cover image of Dylan and girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down Jones Street in the Village, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan effectively served as a farewell to the folk movement of old, announcing, instead, the Village musicians’ arrival in a distinctly different decade, the Sixties. A couple of months later, at Joan Baez’s new house in California, Bob Dylan wrote a song that went unreleased for the new twenty years until it was featured on the Biograph box set: “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” I considered it a suitable title for a chapter that celebrates the arrival of a new generation of composers.

View 8) The Ballad of Washington Square Park in a larger map

This is the same map as for the previous chapter: The Ballad of Washington Square Park. Most of the locations featured in Chapter 9 (e.g. Gerdes Folk City, the Gaslight, the Bitter End) can be found above. An avid Dylan fan might like to know of other locations like the Earle Hotel (163 Waverley Place), where Dylan first stayed in New York, or 161 West 4th Street, where he rented his first apartment, with Suze Rotolo, in December 1961.

Many thanks to Ian Pickus from my local NPR station, WAMC, for hosting me on yesterday’s “The Roundtable.” The (pre-recorded) interview, about my recent book All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77, came out very well and I’m extremely grateful for the considerable air-time. You can hear it here

This Sunday, from 8-9am, I’ll be on WDST’s “The Woodstock Roundtable” (yep, similar name to the WAMC show) with host Doug Gruenther. This is the third time he’s had me on to talk about the book; it’s taken us this long to discuss the full 50 year time span! This Sunday we should work our way from the late 60s through to 1977. You can listen live at wdst.com, and on demand (I believe) for the following week.