T. Kupferberg of Fugs dies

NEW YORK - Tuli Kupferberg, a founding member of the Fugs, the underground rock group and staple of 1960s anti-war protests, has died.

Kupferberg, who had suffered strokes in the past year, died Monday in a Manhattan hospital, said his friend and bandmate Ed Sanders. He was 86.

"I think he will be remembered as a unique American songwriter," Sanders said in a phone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. "Tuli had an uncanny ability to shape nuanced lyrics."

Sanders, who is writing a new memoir about the Fugs, said that he visited his friend in the hospital on Thursday. Although Kupferberg was clearly ailing, he leaned into his ear and sang him the lyrics to a Fugs classic, "Morning, Morning," Sanders said.

"And then I said, 'goodbye,' " he said.

Kupferberg's contributions were recognized in January when Lou Reed, Sonic Youth and others appeared at a benefit concert in Brooklyn to help pay his medical expenses. He was too ill by then to attend the show, but recorded a 10-second video message, according to the New York Times, thanking the audience.

"Now go out there and have some fun," he said. "It may be later than you think."

The Fugs were formed by Sanders and Kupferberg, who were neighbors on Manhattan's Lower East Side in early 1965, according to the band's Web site. Their name, a substitute for a common expletive, was inspired by Norman Mailer, who used it in his classic, "Naked and the Dead."

The band ran in the same circles as Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other icons of the 1960s. It often performed at peace protests.

Kupferberg once referred to the band as "the U.S.O. of the left," according to the Times.

The group disbanded in 1969, but re-formed several times since.

Kupferberg, who also was a poet, produced cartoons for the Village Voice and had a longtime television program on the Manhattan public access cable channel.