“I would go on the Greyhound bus and sneak away to New York,” recalled film director John Waters, a devotee of Jonas Mekas’s screenings. “I’d go to the Bridge Theatre. I went to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. I went to see the early Warhol movies, Jack Smith movies, all that stuff.” He also attended Play-House of the Ridiculous shows, and developed a shared sensibility with downtown artists like John Vaccaro, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol. “I went to a lot of the John Vaccaro stuff,” Waters said. “Also, Charles Ludlam was my friend. That’s what influenced my movie Multiple Maniacs, like the lobster rape scene. It was the Theater of the Ridiculous.” Waters even attended New York University briefly, until he was expelled after being busted for marijuana possession. “But it wasn’t really NYU’s fault,” he said. “I didn’t go to class. I went to Times Square every day and saw movies. I stole books from their bookshop and sold them back the next day to make money. I took drugs. I probably should’ve been thrown out.”

From Chapter 10 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

“Announcing the Fugs Cross Country Vietnam Protest Caravan, October 8–28th,” trumpeted Ed Sanders’s press release in advance of their 1966 tour. The group planned to promote their antiwar message across America, and the primary destination was Berkeley, California—another site that fostered the emerging peace movement. At the University of California, the Fugs played among the Bunsen burners on the chemistry room’s demonstration table, along with Allen Ginsberg and the first-ever performance by Country Joe and the Fish. Back in New York, the Fugs were banned from their regular venue, Astor Place Theatre, after they burned a flag that was printed with the words lower east side. The point was to illustrate how burning a symbol didn’t actually hurt the thing it represented, but newspapers claimed that the group burned an American flag—which led to an FBI investigation. The Bridge Theatre came to the rescue and gave the Fugs a new home, where they settled into a successful residency that ran for seven hundred-plus performances from late 1966 through 1967. The Bridge was above the Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, which benefited from the abundant Greenwich Village foot traffic, so the shows were often sold out. “The theater was filled,” Sanders recalled, “and the shows were fluid, well done, and hot. It was the peak time for the Fugs.”

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

The Fugs rehearsed at the Peace Eye Bookstore, where they recorded the number “Spontaneous Salute to Andy Warhol” during a rehearsal, which appeared on a later Fugs release. “Warhol came to a number of Fugs performances,” Ed Sanders said. By the end of the summer of 1965, they played an antiwar benefit at the Bridge Theatre titled “Night of Napalm,” which Warhol attended. After playing “Kill for Peace” and “Strafe Them Creeps in the Rice Paddy, Daddy,” they enacted a ritual dubbed “The Fugs Spaghetti Death”—for which they boiled pots of noodles and filled a wastebasket with them. Food fight! Chanting the phrase “No Redemption,” the band flung pasta at the audience and themselves, slipping and sliding in the noodles onstage. “I spotted Andy Warhol in the front row,” Sanders recalled. “It appeared that he was wearing a leather tie—then blap! I got him full face with a glop of spaghetti.”

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore