A Dipper Full of Fire
By Ken Weaver
Notices
“Ken Weaver is an alchemist. He successfully turns base metal into gold. He has taken a traumatic childhood and forged from it a wonderful sense of humour and humility. He survives and shows us all how to be a human being.”
—Barry Miles, author of Call Me Burroughs and Ginsberg, a Biography
“Reading Ken Weaver’s A Dipper Full of Fire is devastating, like falling in a stream of rapidly moving water and then going over the falls. My view of children has been forever affected by it. It shows the wonder mixed with the terror of childhood—in this case, an unusual amount of terror—and contributes to the cause of empathy for the plight of all children everywhere.”
—R. Crumb
Ken Weaver is best known as one of the three founding members of the radical ‘60s protopunk group, The Fugs. He grew up in the hardscrabble poverty and violence of East Texas, the son of an absent tugboat captain and a wild half-Cherokee beauty.
At eighteen he escaped East Texas via the Air Force, where he was taught Russian and flew around the borders of the USSR from Turkey and Iran, intercepting Soviet pilots’ radio chatter. At the end of that stint he relocated to New York City to be part of the Beat Generation, living by selling blood then moving up to working at the 8th St. Bookstore and Ed Sanders' Peace Eye. He’s remembered from those days tromping across the Lower East Side with waist-length hair and a Viking fur hat. He went on to compose and perform with the Fugs all over the US and in Europe, with his evenings off in the company of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, the Hells Angels, et al. “I Couldn’t Get High,” “Slum Goddess,” and “Crystal Liaison” are among his most memorable titles.
After that period he went to ground in America, working as a sawmill operator, an oil field roughneck, a Russian instructor at the University of Arizona, a Russian translator, a Child Protection Services case worker, a zoo keeper, a Harley rider, a surveyor, a copywriter, a volunteer at a battered women’s shelter, and various occupations in between. He is also the author of Texas Crude, a compendium of Texas folk sayings with commentary, illustrated by the cartoonist Robert Crumb (E.P. Dutton Inc., New York, 1984).
Currently Ken Weaver lives with his second wife, Maxine, in the Languedoc region of France. After thirty years of hard drinking, he’s been sober for almost forty, and he continues to bring all his powers of intelligence and heart to the fight against the demons of his childhood.