Tuli Kupferberg and George Steinbrenner
An excerpt from Dean Wareham’s blog. Wareham is one of my favourite musicians and it’s a good investment to pick up music from any part of his career, be it Galaxy 500, Luna or as a solo artists with Britta Phillips.
Tuli Kupferberg, singer with the Fugs, poet, cartoonist and long-time peace activist, passed away last week at age 86. Kramer produced and released an album (Tuli & Friends) with him on Shimmy Disc in 1989, and Kramer liked to say that Tuli was the wisest person he had ever met. My last contact with Mr. Kupferberg was a couple of years ago when I called him about reprinting the lyrics for his amusing anti-war song “Kill For Peace” in Black Postcards. Luna had performed this song at the Knitting Factory on the night that the Iraq invasion commenced. About a month earlier (March 2003), Kupferberg and I had both performed at Joe’s Pub, part of an evening titled “Songs of the Vietnam Songbook.” The Iraq War had not yet started, but everyone in the room knew it was coming. I remember Tuli predicting that “the war against Iraq will be a short war, but the war against the United States will go on for a long time.” It seems he was mistaken with the first part of that equation; the war in Iraq has now been going on for eight long years. Maybe he wasn’t anticipating that the initial shock and awe would be followed by a disastrous occupation. Or perhaps he was only observing that what looks at first like a quick and easy war turns into something else. It seems a fundamental truth of the modern world that most people will no longer tolerate foreign occupiers — no matter what their supposed intentions. In the 19th century European powers could control vast colonies without facing much resistance, as historian Eric Hobsbawm has observed. It doesn’t work that way any more. But enough history, here is Tuli reciting a poem about a superior billy club (this from his 1966 LP “No Deposit, No Return.”