Holy Soul Jelly Roll Celebration – 2 (Tuli Kupferberg)

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) (photo via Flickr (lippemanufacturing )

The St Marks Poetry Project Holy Soul Jelly Roll celebration continues from here.

First up, (at approximately twelve-and-a-half minutes in). Tuli Kupferberg

AG: So the first person to introduce the variety of the music this evening and the poetry will be Tuli Kupferberg, the oldest living beatnik hippie syndico-anarchist alive in the Lower East Side as an active performer, young man, poet, musician, member of the classic Fugs rock group, cartoonist, theoretician, and prose and poetry poet, and father, and family-man – Tuli Kupferberg!

TK:  I’m also a preacher – and I’m going to do a sermon and a song – and you’re all going to join me in a sing-along. I’ll make the sermon short, I think – “Peace dividend” – remember that? – “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the downfall of the Reds… but when are we gonna get our “War Dividend?” – “War dividend?  You see sometimes you write a topical song and it’s wasted because things don’t go the way they were supposed to. So this was about..  this was the poor Industrialists singing about their poor “War Dividend” that was gone but it. never went away,

New York Times, a few days ago, “The US will build a laser to create nuclear fusion and give  1500 jobs to people who live at Livermore Laboratory” – only a few billion bucks to start off with. Therre are at present 8,500 potential mass-murderers working at Livermore. “The US and the USSR no longer have pointed their nuclear weapons at each other but maybe they’re pointing them at their own citizens, We don’t know where they’re aimed at. It only takes an hour to change the.. lucky reception site. There’s supposed to be a problem in Korea about nuclear proliferation on the peninsula. There already is a nuclear power there. Nobody seems to.. The American papers don’t report it. The US  has 150 tactical nuclear weapons there right now. You read about that in the Times? – I didn’t. It’s funny how this issue gets solved just a few weeks before election, Maybe it never was an important issue to start off with. A few weeks ago it was discovered that 300 million dollars was appropriated for a building that was going to be two acres long somewhere in Virginia. It was for an agency that no-one.. a secret agency that no-one had ever heard about, not even the Congressmen. I think the secret job of the secret agency is to trap the secret satellite of our enemy that are tracking our secret satellites tracking their secret satellites!   It recently developed that they’re digging, they’re digging now, it’s good politics, they’ve discovered that there were one thousand radiation experiments on United States citizens from 1950, probably until today, and it involved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of  people. According to the War Resister’s League, which I trust more than I trust their government (you know the word “our” is very mis-used, really) it’s not thirty percent of the federal budget that goes to defence (defence?  they call it defence! – when I was a kid they called it “the War Department”, they were more honest then, at least it should be…if they want a fancier word they should call it “the Offence Department” – According to the WRL, over..  about 52 percent of the 1995 budget will be for war, or past wars, or interest. You see, the government tells you it’s thirty percent, or less, but figures don’t lie but liars figure. For instance, atomic weapons are charged to the Energy Department, some Energy!       I have some of their leaflets explaining that if any of you want it later on.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for, Coby Batty is going to accompany me and this is all improvised now, so here’s  your sing-along  – ok, it’s a simple song, simple monotonous song, but…  oh, by the way, for those of you who don’t have the sheets, there’s a wonderful photo of the father of the Atomic bomb, of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, literally holding a model of the Russian H-bomb. He was in Chelyabinsk a couple of weeks ago. It’s just two old friends saying “Hi”  – so here we go   – “Go,fuck..” – oh by the way, Allen, this is Allen’s, Allen’s first line, and Allen, actually, sings this song on Tuli & Friends, a Shimmy Disc cassette,  (try and find that somewhere!). He does a very good job. I predict a great future for him.  ok..

(Tuli chants and interrupts his chant -“Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb… ‘…”Are you some kind of nut” – I’m sorry we have to start all over,..no..where are we?
CB (gives him the lyric) : “Hey, go get laid..!”
TK: Ok, no wait…oh yeah – “Whats..”.  ( (to audience)  “come on, come on, get into it, you paid ten bucks, you gotta get something out of this, come on”) – (he continues) “What’s bothering you…” … go over the hill, into the woods…”         

 

– and hot news on upcoming Tuli recordings

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