Beat Meetings #4: Gottfried Distl & Ed Sanders
In our latest link-up, a European multimedia arts performer recalls a conversation with a post-Beat writer and rocker in the city of Vienna
Gottfried Distl is an Austrian poet, musician and performance artist whose latest book From the Underground: Multimedia Art, Performances, Beat Poetry, Pop Stories 1972-2022 was published earlier this year. Beat heir Ed Sanders (b. 1939) is a poet, musician, journalist and cultural historian who continues to work with the Fugs, the band he established with the late Tuli Kupferberg in the 1960s and with whom he continue to perform and record. The group’s new album Dancing in the Universe will be released this summer.
Who did you meet?
Ed Sanders.
Where did you meet him?
At the Vienna Poetry School.
When did you meet him?
In June 2011.
How did this meeting come about?
My Beat poet friend Christian Ide Hintze, who founded the Vienna Poetry School with a little help from Allen Ginsberg, invited Ed Sanders to come to Vienna and let some magic secrets out of his poetry box.
Pictured above: Ed Sanders and Gottfried Distl
What did you talk about?
Ed Sanders had written a poem about the death of Jim Morrison and we talked about that. This poem was an example of his ‘Investigative Poetry’ and showed how a pusher named Count Jean de Breteuil provided the dangerous, un-cut heroin that killed Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison with the alleged involvement of Pamela Courson and Marianne Faithfull.
From this ‘Threesome in the mesh of Death’ as Sanders called de Breteuil, Courson and Faithfull in his poem ‘The Final Times of Jim Morrison’ we took a short cut to another rock music legend who died young: Jimi Hendrix. Ed Sanders told me that in the mid-Sixties his band the Fugs shared the stage at some concert event with Hendrix and it was at this occasion that he, Sanders introduced Jimi to the wah-wah pedal that later became Hendrix’ signature sound.
Then we talked about Jack Kerouac’s daughter Jan, who Sanders knew very well and liked a lot. But about her father Jack, Ed said: ‘He had a miserable life.’
What were your impressions of the Beat you met?
Ed Sanders is exactly like Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him when he was interviewed by Ron Whitehead. Ferlinghetti said: ‘Ed Sanders is very educated. He’s a great wit. He’s like Mark Twain. He even looks like Mark Twain. He wears white suits and he’s got the Mark Twain moustache.’
In the years since, has that meeting left any particular memories with you?
When my friend Ide introduced me to Ed Sanders he said to him about me: ‘He was a wild guy in the 1970s’. And I said to Ed Sanders: ‘I was a wild guy thanks to men like you.’
Are there another thoughts you would like to share? Have you read his work and, if so, what?
I discovered Ed Sanders through his rock band the Fugs when I grew up in the 1960s and I followed the American Sixties Underground scene so I knew of his Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts project.
I loved his subversive satirical poetry, his Fugs songs ‘Frenzy’, ‘Skin Flowers’, ‘Group Grope’, ‘Coming Down’ and ‘We’re the Fugs’ and I liked the way he turned sex into a comic and into a cosmic poetic force. Later I learned that he also composed several biographies and a history of America in verse. inBut, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, ‘Ed Sanders is not only a great poet, he is also a brilliant journalist’.
When I read The Family in the early 1970s, the book in which he examines the Charles Manson murders, I couldn’t believe how good it was. That’s a masterpiece of reportage writing up in the class of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
‘Because of my book about the Manson family,’ Ed Sanders told me with his Mark Twain grin, ‘Charles Manson sentenced me to death.’ So it’s great that Ed Sanders is still alive and well and in good shape at the age of 83 and I am looking forward to enjoying the new album he has just recorded with the Fugs.
See also: ‘Book review #14: From the Underground’, February 12th, 2023; ‘Get the Fugs out’, March 3rd, 2023; and ‘Beat Soundtrack #23: Gottfried Distl’, September 17th, 2022
Tales of Beatnik Glory: That’s what you get when you meet legendary Beat Poet Ed Sanders. ‘Gregory Corso and Ed Sanders those two guys are really all that’s left of The Beat Generation,’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti told Ron Whitehead in 1999. But since Gregory Corso’s death in 2001 Ed Sanders is the Last Man Standing. I had a great time talking to him at the Vienna Poetry School in 2011. The Fugs’ Ed Sanders is one of the kings of Literary Rock & Roll who put the beat behind a Charles Olson poem and upgraded Allen Ginsberg’s ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’ to ‘I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock’. And William S. Burroughs had to say this about Ed Sanders legendary ‘Tales of Beatnik Glory’: ‘This irresistible book’s droll charm leads the reader through a generation’s coming-of-age. As the ‘Beatniks’ gave way to the ‘Hippies’, Ed Sanders was there at the crossroads, directing traffic and shaping the decade.’