We tried to levitate The Pentagon: Ed Sanders trickster god of US counterculture

Ed Sanders, now 87, is presented as a central figure of 1960s New York counterculture: a poet, musician, activist and author whose band blended street theatre, dadaist spectacle and rough rock to agitate against the Vietnam war and mainstream mores. A new feature documentary about the Fugs uses archive footage and contemporary interviews to revisit the Lower East Side scene where Sanders ran a radical bookstore, published an explicit mimeographed arts zine that printed Beat writers, and formed friendships with figures from Allen Ginsberg to Jimi Hendrix. The band never topped the charts but shared bills with the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and the Grateful Dead, and its eclectic recordings mixed protest anthems, Yiddish songs, chants and absurdist sketches.

The Fugs operated as much as a protest troupe as a musical act, organizing theatrical spectacles such as the 1967 Pentagon human chain and staged exorcisms that drew national attention and earned a place in antiwar lore; one of those protests was captured on a later album release. Repeated clashes with censorship and record-company prudery - an offensive song cost them a promised major-label release - did not deter Sanders’s free-speech fights or his long-term activism. Now more professorial than hippie, he remains politically engaged and optimistic, and the film reframes the band’s messy, provocative legacy as a formative influence on free-speech battles, antiwar spectacle and later punk irreverence.