Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Fuggin’ Addendum: More Kupferberg

Tuli Kupferberg — 86 year old beat poet, musician and activist, and famed leader of the avant-folk band The Fugs — has been on the news lately. An article on him appeared in the New York Times in late January , another piece was published here, in the Forward just last week, and Tablet carried a podcast, as well.

Tuli’s friends are trying to raise awareness of his life and work, in the light of the musician’s recent stroke, which left him almost blind and in need of constant medical care. Bowery Poetry Club held a tribute concert on Saturday March 6, to collect funds to help cover Kupferberg’s medical bills — and celebrate the decades of his wild anarchist art.

Downtown poet and erotica writer Tsaurah Litsky got up on stage and sang Tuli’s pacifist anthem “Go F***| Yourself With Your Atom Bomb.” She proceeded to reminisce about the day she lost her virginity, when she felt Kupferberg’s invisible presence in the room, prodding her “go, bubbaleh, go!” They both grew up in Yiddish-speaking households, she explained, and sang out “Ikh liebe dich, Tuli!”

The club was completely packed, and no wonder: Among others who came to celebrate the work of the artist were David Amram (who’s played with Jack Kerouac and Charlie Mingus), downtown poet Steve Dalachinsky, John S. Hall and his newly reunited King Missile Band, and many others. All joined wishing the man a speedy recovery, and more fuggin’ productive years, for, as Penny Arcade (punk-cabaret singer and Andy Warhol’s protégé) put it: “I think Tuli showed us, better than anyone… youth has nothing to do with age.”

Those interested in assisting the musician to manage his medical expenses, can donate via his band’s website: http://thefugs.com/

Watch an audio slide show:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.