- In the early 1960s Tuli Kupferberg started performing in the streets of lower Manhattan. Too old to be a hippy, not self-serious enough to be a beatnik, too obsessed with immature humour to be a communist; he carved out his own space in the city of New York with his band The Fugs and his satirical art across various mediums.
Forty years later, Jeffrey Lewis emerged from those same Manhattan streets as an “anti-folk” musician and cartoonist. He had a similarly irreverent and eclectic approach to his art as Tuli Kupferberg, who was still creating and performing.
The two became friends, and when Tuli died aged 86 in 2010, Jeffrey Lewis began organizing annual concerts to honour his memory. Those concerts were the seeds for Works by Tuli Kupferberg, a new album of Lewis performing Kupferberg compositions spanning five decades.
Fans of Jeffrey Lewis will know he has history with the idea of tribute albums. In 2006 he recorded 12 Crass Songs, a remarkable album of folk covers of the anarcho-punk band Crass. This album differs from that one in that Tuli Kupferberg’s folk rock and anarchic poetry are much more similar in style to Lewis’ own work. So the album plays less like a startling recontextualisation and more like a sincere tribute to a friend and inspiration.
A distinct theme of the album is mortality. It’s tempting to think this is due to Tuli living to be an old man and, seeing the deaths of many of his peers, having plenty of time to contemplate the subject. This theory is complicated by the fact a song like Carpe Diem actually comes off the first Fugs album from 1964.
Undoubtedly it’s a recurring theme in Kupferberg’s work, but I think the emphasis might be more to do with Lewis and his reasoning for the project. In some ways art is a kind of immortality – the things we create live on after us. This album is a way of Jeffrey Lewis encapsulating the legacy Tuli Kupferberg left on his own life.
So what does it sound like? Mostly folk-rock sing-alongs, often with group vocals. Hard to cover all the elements of a body of work as vast as Tuli’s; but Jeffrey gives it a go – bad taste humour, hippy nature ballads, anti-war protest, and one poem compiled entirely from advertising materials.
In the end, Tuli Kupferberg is likely to be remembered as a loveable eccentric rather than a great songwriter; but this album is a useful addition to the Jeffrey Lewis catalogue in that it shows where the roots of New York anti-folk lie. It’s also an enjoyable listen and a worthy tribute to Tuli Kupferberg and his influence on those Lower-East Side streets he called home for so long.
- Andy Paine.