Tuli Kupferberg
No Deposit No Return

Can we call an album like this musical? I would say yes... it is possible... it is recommended to define it as musical... knowing English is essential, at least to have a lot of laughs at the expense of the American people, as even Tuli Kupferberg himself almost confirms in the notes: "America is probably insane"!!!

It was back then, in 1967, when "No Deposit No Return" was released, and it is today!!!

It's an album that, beyond its absurd content, makes you think. It's more relevant today than ever, in an era of globalization the entire planet has become a population of insane people!!!

Tuli Kupferberg is a poet of the very late beat generation, a personal friend of Allen Ginsberg. In the '60s, he was among the founders of the theatrical show of the Fugs, and subsequently of the band that bears the same name, even though he is not a musician in the traditional sense. He writes texts, organizes musical theater evenings, and was nonetheless a fundamental component of the first formation, the one associated with the two Holy Modal Rounders (the music mentors of the Fugs, so to speak). At the time, he lived on the East Side in the Village of New York City and, along with Ed Sanders, managed a sort of black hole where one could buy books by the most underground authors from all over the planet, often publications on the edge of legality and printed in mimeograph. Kupferberg himself writes and publishes everything, from collections of poems to small compendiums, from the book of tips on how to live without working to that on how to make love well. After actively collaborating on the first two Fugs albums, Kupferberg along with Gary Elton conceives, puts together, creates, and produces this incredible record, probably the last tail end of the beat generation.

Specifically, the good Tuli, defined by most as "the gentle poet of underground New York", does nothing but read advertisements, matrimonial notices, and other similar nonsense taken from various newspapers and periodicals of the time. Gary Elton contributes to the montage and overdubbing of various noises and sounds: detuned pianos and sitars, old marches and military hymns, pop or classical music recycled from 78 rpm records, choruses of lumberjacks, cats in heat, glasses shattering, men getting beaten by the police or whipped sadistically for pure sexual pleasure, strange verses, screams of pain? (or pleasure?), duck-billed calls, mouth harmonicas playing the wedding hymn, wrecked touring planes, bulldozers, superhuman howls, penis pumps, toy cow moos, dragging chains, work tools, diner brawls with the inevitable intervention of the strong arm of the law, village fairs, Russian musical proclamations to perfect socialism, housewives humming while waiting for the gigolo ordered by phone, the song "Howard Johnson's Army" and much more.        

The "let's call it noisy" part fits perfectly with the topics covered, themes recited by the warm voice of Tuli while his dramatically irreverent "prose" retrieves from the ads, defined by the same as "pop poetry", forms the core content of No Deposit No Return. In fact, there are no texts from the author; everything that is heard on this record is social studies based primarily on school sexual education, as childish as they are pointless, governmental attempts to dissuade young people from using drugs, announcements of people with rather bizarre sexual tastes (including pedophile) looking for spicy company, gratuitous insults always and inevitably present in magazines and newspapers, shopping and relaxation tips recited as if they were prayers, medicinal recipes for male sex, instructions on the use of strange pump machinery to be used to enlarge penis size or to make the best use of artificial vaginas, various uses for rubber gloves, including a guarantee of success in case of brawls, Playboy announcements on gigolos willing to satisfy the various desires of older ladies, matrimonial ads of sexually repressed old women, and much more...

All this is of course covered by the guarantee of the seller or the one who publishes the announcement!!!       

What Tuli Kupferberg wants to represent with this work is quite clear, and it is also clear that Ginsberg's multiple-trialed "Howl" was a mere child’s play compared to what the average American proposed or purchased in magazines, of what was their trite and sad social reality in stark contrast to the sunny and yet introverted doctrine aimed at real freedom of the spirit advocated by the beatnik companions. United States of America, the best of possible worlds, the land of knights without stain and fear that had succeeded in the feat of winning a world war and conquering the world. Kupferberg with this record shows us in about fifty minutes the contrary.