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Edits on the Avengers section: The former lead singer for the Avengers, Penelope Houston wrote a song called "Scum" about an "unnamed person in the record industry". In an interview, former-Avenger's bandmate Danny Furious states that the song is about David Ferguson. According to that same interview with Danny Furious, Mr. Ferguson released an Avenger's album, Avenger's LP, under CD Presents, but none of the members of the band, with the exception of Furious, was paid. When Frontier Records later reissued some of the Dangerhouse Records catalog in 1983, Ferguson sued Frontier claiming rights to the Avengers Dangerhouse recordings but he lost the lawsuit.

David Ferguson (born March 11, 1947) is an international outsider-culture impresario, activist and iconoclast. For both having spent his career in California (mostly in San Francisco) and for long supporting and promoting creative talent dedicated to challenging mainstream sensibilities, Ferguson refers to himself as the "West Coast's Andy Warhol." In addition to recording and promoting underground music artists, Ferguson played a role in creating and sustaining a music distribution system independent of that operated by major music labels.

Ferguson founded and presently heads Institute For Unpopular Culture (IFUC), a San Francisco-based alternative arts organization. IFUC takes a volunteer-grounded approach to business and non-profit management that has guided Ferguson's efforts to promote artists whose work frequently resists commercial categorization. Recognizing his inclination for embracing the underdog and the over-the-top, the San Francisco Chronicle referred to Ferguson as the "godfather of the unorthodox", adding that Ferguson "...not only thinks outside the box—he crushes it, dances on top of it, reinvents it and calls it whatever he likes. He has spent his life making trouble." The East Bay Express commented, "David Ferguson's life story reads like an encyclopedia of the underground." A project of note undertaken by IFUC was promoting and exhibiting the art of William Noguera, a Death row inmate at San Quentin. Ferguson also oversees Big Sound, a film restoration and live event company which commissions silent film restoration projects with newly recorded orchestral scores.

In a career spanning more than four decades, Ferguson has worked with an array of cultural visionaries and influential underground artists, among them Warhol, John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten), Iggy Pop, the psychedelic drag queen group, The Cockettes,  and underground cartoonist Vaughn Bodé. As an activist, Ferguson has organized and led anti-war protests dating back to the 1960s.

Student


In 1965, Ferguson enrolled at the University of Miami. Identified as a "hellraiser" by the university paper, The Hurricane, Ferguson organized numerous anti-war activities. He formed and led the Union of Students to End the War in Vietnam, one of the first student organizations in the Deep South to publicly question U.S. military action in Southeast Asia. His leadership role in these on-campus protests eventually led to his expulsion from the university, but he did score his first public relations coup by bringing Andy Warhol to speak at the campus in 1968. Warhol's largely unknown status outside New York worked to Ferguson's advantage: "The jock students at his college weren't too hip to who Warhol was, so Ferguson had time to strike up a friendship.

The Cockettes
Following his dismissal from the University of Miami, Ferguson relocated to the hotbed of 1960s counterculture, San Francisco. In 1969, Ferguson met the notorious performance troupe, The Cockettes, dressed in full sequined drag queen regalia, on a beach north of San Francisco. Ferguson struck up a relationship with the group who, three years later, asked him to produce some shows. During that time, he also assisted The Cockettes with their worldwide public relations campaign.

Even against the tolerant backdrop of San Francisco, The Cockettes' bawdy performance antics presented thorny PR issues. Anecdotes made the rounds of the tactics Ferguson used to sneak the troupe and its outrageous stage behavior by wary club owners:

Lecture agency
In 1973, Ferguson partnered with Margaret Fisher to form a lecture and appearance scheduling enterprise. This new business challenge gave Ferguson the forum to further pursue the anti-establishment politics that consumed his time as a university student. Through the agency, Ferguson established and maintained relations with the Black Panther Party, scheduling speeches for Elaine Brown, then chairperson of the radical group. In addition to his association with the Black Panthers, Ferguson arranged college speaking tours for a number of luminaries in progressive politics and the counter-culture movement. His clients included Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television), Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia), Malvina Reynolds, Jo Ann Little, Paul Krassner (The Realist), Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog), Michael McClure (Beat Generation poet), Dr. Tod H. Mikuriya (an authority on the uses of medical cannabis), Carlo Prescott (who worked with Philip Zimbardo on the Stanford prison experiment), and Trina Robbins (cartoonist). Ferguson also scheduled performances for the influential underground artist and cartoonist Vaughn Bodé.

In addition to working with Bodé on the lecture circuit, Ferguson also managed the cartoonist's career for a time, representing him in negotiations following the animated movie, Wizards. The visual design of that movie generated claims of plagiarism aimed at Wizards director, Ralph Bakshi. Bodé dedicated his final cartoon, which appeared in National Lampoon, to Ferguson.

Ferguson stopped working in the lecture business in 1976.

Prelude to punk
During the second half of the 1970s, San Francisco was a focal point in a burgeoning underground music scene often thought of as the precursor to punk and the hardcore offshoot that would later rage across North America. Crossing paths with the music before the word "punk" had even entered the cultural lexicon, Ferguson found the DIY tangibles of the music and its live performance thrilling, as he did the ethos of defiance that permeated the whole of the punk community. In 1976, Ferguson moved to Los Angeles and befriended producer, engineer and The Record Plant founder, Gary Kellgren. Kellgren was Ferguson's mentor until his death in 1977 and, more than anyone, encouraged him to devote his energies to exploring music as an art form. Kellgren's mentorship imbued his Ferguson with an understanding of music's potential to galvanize sweeping cultural change—a revelation that buttressed Ferguson's natural inclination to upset the status quo but also broadened that perspective to consider expressions of discontent beyond that of conventional political protest.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, Ferguson produced and promoted shows for Sylvester, The Tubes and Holly Woodlawn ("Holly" of Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side fame). Iggy Pop's 1975 San Francisco appearance at Bimbo's, produced by Ferguson and the Iggy Pop Fan Club, was both Iggy Pop's comeback and one of the first ever punk concerts. Ferguson would later manage underground music groups, including the The Avengers, who opened for the Sex Pistols during their infamous final concert at San Francisco's Winterland in 1978. It was also while managing, producing shows and, later, recordings that Ferguson came to understand first hand the stranglehold major record labels held on both recording opportunities and record distribution.

Public Image Ltd. Concerts


In 1979, Ferguson founded CD Presents as a concert promotion company, which later expanded into a studio and record label. Ferguson's concert promotion career reached its zenith when he was asked to produce West Coast shows for Public Image Ltd. during PiL's first two American tours. The 1980 PiL show at Los Angeles' Olympic Auditorium is remembered for its confrontations between PiL frontman John Lydon and the audience, as Rolling Stone observed, "thirty percent . . . [of whom] were umitigated swine: misfits, outsiders . . . These human dregs coagulated into a swarming, sweaty mass and lent the proceedings the air of a sour, phantasmagoric nightmare. . . And what a show it was. The music was immense and primitive, the crowd was horrifying, and Lydon was staggeringly in control every second." Such histrionics aside, the Olympic Auditorium show proved not only a watershed in U.S. punk annals, but it also marked the first notable appearance of Los Lobos, a then-struggling wedding band that Ferguson welcomed as a last minute addition to the bill.

The L.A. appearance publicly showcased punk music in all its physical alarm; the back room political tensions that strafed the San Francisco leg of the 1980 PiL tour were no less dramatic. In keeping with their iconoclastic posturing, the members of PiL balked at major label promotion to back their tour, insisting instead on working with smaller, independent promoters. This led to the band's association with Ferguson and, with a handshake between the two parties, a deal was struck to allow CD Presents to stage the L.A. and San Francisco shows. But this informal partnership put PiL and Ferguson on a collision course with a formidable set of music industry powers, including Premier Talent, (a top tour agency), Warner Bros. Records, (PiL's U.S. label) and Bill Graham, head of the San Francisco-based Bill Graham Presents and the music industry's most powerful promoter.

Unable to chase Ferguson off his claim to the PiL West Coast shows, both Premier and Warner Brothers eventually backed off. Graham, however, held a virtual monopoly on concert promotion and was not about to let an independent promoter best him on a high profile show in his home territory. From Ferguson's perspective, the San Francisco showdown was a crucible in which his convictions of independent promotion operations would be tested against a ruthless, uncompromising corporate system and the legal and financial resources at its disposal. The high stakes of this power play were not lost on Lydon, whose own reputation as an anti-corporate hell raiser balanced on its outcome: "We've got to play this gig," [Lydon] exclaimed. "It's everything we came here to do on this tour. We gave them six gigs for these two, and we'll see which ones come off the most successful.  That's what they're really afraid of."

Graham stepped in on a number of occasions, using exclusionary rights he held with some Bay Area venues to deny CD Presents/PiL a concert location. Such interference resulted in the show twice being cancelled. Ferguson held firm, and as the final date of the concert approached, Graham maneuvered again, this time trying to persuade San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and the city's police to terminate the show. Fearing riots if the show was cancelled, city officials authorized CD Presents to proceed with the concert—an outcome that Ferguson considered a significant victory for independent music promotion.

Other CD Presents concerts
In addition to PiL, Ferguson would work with many of the most influential bands of the U.S. punk music movement. Through 1982, CD Presents arranged shows in L.A. and San Francisco for the The Weirdos, The Dils, The Avengers, The Go-Go's and D.O.A. Two other seminal bands, The Germs and X, gained prominence thanks to Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization, a concert documentary filmed in part at CD Presents-sponsored shows in Los Angeles. Ferguson and CD Presents also promoted New Wave 1980, the punk music extravaganza that brought together punk and alternative music acts from all over the West Coast, as far away as Vancouver. "Ferguson. You stick with this punk rock thing," advised New Wave 1980 attendee, Tom Waits. "It's gonna be big someday."

Studio
In 1980, Ferguson returned to San Francisco to build a recording studio. He opened the 3,000 square-foot CD Presents studio in 1981 which quickly garnered a reputation for generating outstanding sound quality in its recordings. The studio also became a training ground for aspiring engineers. Veteran engineer and record producer Sylvia Massy, got her start at CD Presents, engineering and mixing Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 3, the last in a series of punk and alternative music compilation albums produced by the CD Presents studio and released by the CD Presents label.

Label
The alternative culture-led backlash against the corporate-dominated entertainment of the Reagan era helped position Ferguson and CD Presents at the forefront of an especially prolific period of punk and alternative music. CD Presents' emerging profile as a label that embraced riskier, anti-commercial music, appealed to an ever-growing cadre of alternative musicians and punk music artists. Eventually, the list of bands either recorded or distributed by CD Presents through Ferguson's Buried Treasure division numbered close to 3,300 artists. At any given time, the CD Presents label recorded either in studio or in concert, The Avengers, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag w/ Henry Rollins, Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Flipper, The Subhumans, D.O.A., Butthole Surfers, Tales of Terror, NOFX, T.S.O.L., Minutemen, MDC, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.), Corrosion of Conformity, Naked Raygun, Mojo Nixon, The Adolescents, and The Dwarves. The San Francisco group The Offs recorded its First Record (1984) album under the CD Presents banner. For that record, Ferguson purchased art from Jean-Michel Basquiat which became what is now recognized as one of the iconic album covers of the punk rock era.

Throughout the 80s, Ferguson would periodically cluster a number of singles of CD Presents' bands and release them as Rat Music for Rat People compilations, Vol. 1 (1982), Vol. 2 (1984) and Vol. 3 (1987). The first volume was a collection of songs recorded at CD Presents-sponsored concert shows. Needing a facility to fix these live recordings moved Ferguson toward building his own studio, thus marking his transition from live concert promotion and production to studio recording and the founding of a label to release the tracks. At the same time that the definitions of punk and alternative music began to loosen, CD Presents signed and promoted an ever broader range of songwriters and bands. The label signed Billy Bragg in 1984, helping the UK songwriter gain an American audience by releasing his first two albums (Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy and Brewing Up with Billy Bragg) in the U.S. In 1987, CD Presents released Hysterie, 1976-1986, a compilation of songs by the avant-garde musician, poet and actress, Lydia Lunch. Electronic music artists and post-punk, avant-garde acts also recorded under Ferguson's label, such as Tuxedo Moon and Minimal man.

Starting in 2004, he began restoring the extensive archives of his CD Presents label at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. The restoration was completed in early 2008, but has not yet been released

Distribution
As with CD Presents, Ferguson built his distribution company Buried Treasure Inc. from the ground up, calling upon the promotion talents and network of contacts he cultivated in his previous incarnations in the arts and entertainment industry. Many such contacts headed independent record labels themselves. When, in the mid-1980s, major record labels began clamping down on illegal importing and squeezing out legal independent distribution channels, the overall indie record industry fell into crisis. Ferguson moved in to assist in 1986. Under his Buried Treasure division, he distributed the record catalogs of nearly 100 labels. Newer labels, too, such as Wax Trax! Records (Ministry), first gained traction in the industry by turning to Buried Treasure, which became Wax Trax!'s first distributor west of the Rockies. Buried Treasure also distributed various singles from pre-Nevermind Nirvana, delivered records for the labels TVT Records (Nine Inch Nails) and Sub Pop (Pearl Jam, Everclear), and distributed product for Epitaph Records, culminating with The Offspring's 1994 breakout album Smash, which sold 16 million copies (the highest-selling independent album of all-time) and, for the first time, established independent distribution as a commercially lucrative business.

Institute For Unpopular Culture (IFUC)
In 1989 Ferguson founded the Institute For Unpopular Culture, which carries on in a nonprofit model the same goals Ferguson championed in the more business-oriented framework of CD Presents."It is our aim to subvert all commercial avenues of art exploitation," explains Ferguson. "It's not that we dislike people who own art galleries, we just think there could be a viable alternative." The IFUC is highly regarded within the San Francisco arts community for its commitment to alternative arts and its ability to mobilize financial and network support for non-profit artistic expression.

Ferguson's and IFUC's stated mission is to discover and mentor outsider artists and creative people by assisting with public relations, business, counseling, opportunities, access to equipment, and funding for their projects.

IFUC launched The Punk Rock Orchestra, a 50-plus member collaboration which recasts punk songs (some composed by punk groups which recorded years before on Ferguson's CD Presents label) in an orchestral format. The Punk Rock Orchestra embodied Ferguson's dedication to balancing the artistic and the flippant: "One shouldn't take David Ferguson too seriously. His Institute For Unpopular Culture and its requisite Punk Rock Orchestra practically legitimize all that is absurdly-and ironically-postmodern." The orchestra has been featured on NPR and CBS Radio's The Osgood File. It was voted San Francisco's Best Local Band in 2005 by readers of the SF Weekly newspaper.

IFUC's sponsorship of William Noguera, an artist who painstakingly crafts photorealistic paintings with thousands of ink dots with a rapidograph pen, has garnered public attention and triggered controversy given that Noguera has, since 1983, been on death row at California's San Quentin State Prison.

In 2002, Ferguson was invited by prominent activists Medea Benjamin and Andrea Buffa, of Code Pink and Global Exchange, to participate in the founding of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of U.S. anti-war organizations. Through his media coordination efforts, Ferguson helped initiate the first public demonstrations against the Iraq War.

Mentor/protégé
The histories of Ferguson's enterprises have been checkered with creative personalities who proceeded on to notoriety in one creative endeavor or another: Courtney Love and both Roddy Bottum and Billy Gould of Faith No More worked at CD Presents while pursuing musical stardom. Fat Mike of NOFX fame also worked under Ferguson's tutelage in the Buried Treasure division. Upon starting his own label, Fat Wreck Chords, Fat Mike fashioned his business model after that of CD Presents, even paying homage to his former boss when he released the CD compilation, Fat Music for Fat People, a play on the Rat Music records released by CD Presents.

IFUC is the latest forum of Ferguson's that is sustained by this same informal mentor-protégé dynamic. He mentored, and has been mentored by, noted Bay Area artist, political activist and radio personality, Dorka Keehn. IFUC also sponsored the Language of the Birds, a sculptural installation in San Francisco's North Beach-Chinatown area, that was designed and unveiled on November 2008 by Keehn and sculptor Brian Goggin.

Big Sound
Ferguson formed Big Sound in 2006 as a means of realizing his ambitions to preserve and present classic silent films in a live setting. Through a series of film restoration projects, Big Sound aims to recreate for modern audiences the experience of seeing these movies as they would have been presented during the silent film era. For each movie in the restoration series, Big Sound will commission a different acclaimed composer to create a new film score. Once a movie in the series has completed its run of major city appearances, Big Sound will release a DVD of that movie and license it for television viewing.

The German classic Pandora's Box, which starred actress Louise Brooks, is the first of Big Sound's restoration efforts. Spearheaded by Ferguson and Big Sound's Vice President of Production Angela Holm, the project also enlisted the George Eastman House, a leader in film restoration, as its archival sponsor. The Eastman House's connection to Pandora's Box is significant since it was their long-time curator James Card who rescued both the film and Louise Brooks from obscurity back in the late 1950s.

Legal History
David Ferguson has been named the defendant in lawsuits filed in the county of San Francisco, against himself personally  and his companies Buried Treasure,      CD Presents, and the Institute for Unpopular Culture. It was determined in the GLUCK, JOHN J. VS INSTITUTE FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE case that the plaintiff, the former conductor of the Punk Rock Orchestra, was not owed any money by Ferguson. Several of these claims are for the non-payment of services or loans. David Ferguson is currently defending two separate claims filed by attorneys who previously represented him.

Discography
CD Presents Discography
 * The Avengers — The Avengers (1983)
 * Billy Bragg — Life's a Riot (Spy vs. Spy) (1984)
 * Billy Bragg — Brewing Up with Billy Bragg (1984)
 * D.O.A. — Bloodied But Unbowed (1984)
 * Lydia Lunch — Hysterie (1987)
 * Minimal Man — Safari (1984)
 * Moev — The Early Years (1982)
 * Norman Salant — Sax Talk (1984)
 * The Offs — First Record (1984)
 * Phantom Limbs — Romance (1983)
 * Phantom Limbs — Train of Thought (1985)
 * Poison Girls — Songs of Praise (1985)
 * Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 1 (1982)
 * D.O.A.
 * Flipper
 * Circle Jerks
 * Bad Brains
 * Crucifix
 * Dead Kennedys
 * Black Flag w/ Henry Rollins
 * T.S.O.L.
 * The Avengers
 * The Dils
 * Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 2 (1984)
 * Butthole Surfers
 * Big Boys
 * Personality Crisis
 * Minutemen
 * JFA
 * Tales of Terror
 * Fang
 * MDC
 * The Dicks
 * D.R.I.
 * The White Lie
 * Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 3 (1987)
 * D.I.
 * Corrosion of Conformity
 * Doggy Style
 * Raw Power
 * Attitude
 * Naked Raygun
 * Verbal Abuse
 * Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper
 * White Flag
 * Sacrilege
 * Adrenalin O.D.
 * Frontline
 * The Adolescents
 * Savoy Sound — Wave Goodbye (1981)
 * Tuxedo Moon
 * Cipher
 * The Sleepers
 * Skankin' Babylonians
 * Ultra Sheen
 * Charlie McMahon
 * Snakefinger
 * The Mutants
 * Easy Teeth
 * The Subhumans — Incorrect Thoughts (1985)
 * Tales of Terror — Tales of Terror (1984)
 * True West — Hand of Fate (1987)
 * Twisted Roots — Twisted Roots (1986)
 * Crawl Away Machine - "Crawl Away Machine"(1985)
 * Fade to Black "Corridors of Gender" (1986)
 * "Tuatara" (1986)
 * The Clean
 * The Gordons
 * Fetus Productions
 * The Verlaines
 * Children's Hour
 * Marie and The Atom
 * The Chills
 * Sneaky Feelings
 * The Great Unwashed
 * The Bats
 * Expendables
 * Tall Dwarfs
 * "Unexplored" (1986)
 * Blam Blam Blam
 * Johnny Bongo
 * Car Crash Set
 * Screaming Meemees
 * Sonya Waters
 * The Androids
 * The Ponsonby D.C.'s
 * Big Sideways
 * Scott Calhoun
 * Martial Law