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Rating: The Fugs, in their own way, were revolutionary, as counterculture activists and as pioneers of Underground music.
New Yorkers, from Greenwich Village, Ed Sanders, an anarchic poet, and Tuli Kupferberg, an epigone of the Beat Generation, eager to experiment and apply their verses and paroxysms to melody, formed the “Fugs” in 1964 with the aim of subverting the dominant culture through poetic-satirical and protest songs. With offensive, obscene lyrics openly against the system, they targeted both cultural totems and taboos, and military interventions aimed at blocking the expansion of the communist area, champions of a freedom of expression, like never suspected before, at least in the popular music scene. The love for William Blake and especially for contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski is evident in their licentious, unsuited, and shameless writing, which places them in continuity on the line that leads from the Beatniks to the Hippies, and differentiates them from the political commitment of Guthrie and Dylan, by virtue of a penchant for exaggerated and corrosive caricature, and for delirious and libertarian vaudeville.
“The Fugs”, 1966, reissued and expanded in the nineties as “Second Album”, replicates the official debut, with its anarchic spontaneity (a melting pot of Folk, Rock, Spiritual, Doo Wop, and Jugband Music), with a sound, first of all, more professional and refined, a consequence of the entrance of Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, of the Holy Modal Rounders, into the collective. This time indeed, they seem to brush against what is commonly designated by the term “playing", something that eventually had slipped out of hand in the first albeit immense masterpiece. If there they inaugurated, in hypertrophic and wild amateurism, “all” the Alternative Rock trend, by virtue of the disorder and deformation of the musical execution standards (and at the same time of listening), now, proceeding in that direction, they reach unforeseen results. Perhaps because “The best interpreter of dreams is he who makes them.”, as Ch. Bukowski had decreed.
The poor instrumentation, somewhat exotic, and the tavern choruses, or, at best, from a circle of disenfranchised folk singers, are in tune with the ungraceful, nasal singing of “Ed & Tuli”; their “Free Speech” obscures the Folk harmony, in an overwhelming urgency, this time markedly Rock, “against”. The coarse humor prevails, also this decidedly ahead of its time. So gross will we find it in the brilliant Dead Kennedys of Jello Biafra or in the histrionic ideas of the Butthole Surfers. But the innovation of the forms is, perhaps, and right here, their main legacy: with their Comedy Rock and Folk Rock, more intellectual-b-like than intellectual, they were able to be Proto Punk, Pre Garage-Rock, and also precursors of Psychedelia. Avant, in the end, in every possible way. Their importance decidedly surpasses the beauty of their songs, obviously adorable, because they managed to go truly beyond themselves.
Let’s take the track “Virgin Forest”, a hodgepodge of natural noises, elongated sounds, tribal rhythms, conflicting cacophonies, maniacal, paranoid, and belluine screams, clipped, sewn and juxtaposed patches. This unusual “jam” boasts at least three merits: presenting a very primitive, embryonic psychedelia, which we could associate with the more experimental and eccentric side of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. Being, probably, the first Noise Rock track in history, since it precedes the extraordinary “Free Forms Freak Out” by the Red Crayola. Anticipating, with its multifaceted and ever-changing pace, the sound collages of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention in “Freak Out”, and especially in “Absolutely Free”.
Among the other tracks, noteworthy are: the R'n’R/Rhythm’n’Blues of “Frenzy”, the mantra-like “Morning Morning”, a duet with a delicate female voice, to soften Kupferberg, “I Want To Know” worthy of the melodic, more “light” episodes of “The Velvet Underground & Nico”, and lastly, “Kill for Peace”, a mocking, emblematic, disruptive, damnably analytical anthem in its biting oxymoronic value.
The Fugs, from the name that distorts the most common and colloquial slang term (i.e. “Fuck”), in 1960s America, decidedly made a form of art out of nonconformity: bare, but provocative, approximate, but irreverent and politicized, coarse, but exceedingly creative. Fugs docent. Then “learn the art and put it aside.”
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