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The Fugs’ First AlbumSometimes it’s hard for me to believe that The Fugs ever actually existed— and I was lucky enough to grow up listening to them. Not to this particular album mind you— I didn’t get my hands on The Fugs’ First Album ‘til I was in college— but if I hadn’t happened to stumble upon Tenderness Junction and It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest as an impressionable eighth grader (I found them at the public library! and the librarian actually allowed me to check them out!) I’d probably be a modestly wealthy actuarial accountant now instead of an itinerant musician. Besides their own extraordinary work, The Fugs directly introduced me to the poetry of William Blake, Charles Olson, A.C. Swinburne, Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound, and to the music of The Holy Modal Rounders; by extension, to the writings of William Burroughs (among others) and the music of Michael Hurley. The Fugs shaped my intellectual and spiritual development more profoundly than puberty and MAD Magazine put together. But let’s not get sentimental. None of that makes The Fugs important in terms of Rock History, let alone in terms of Rock Now. Nor does it explain why you ought to be filled with awe and gratitude, that such wondrous creatures as The Fugs ever roam’d this erstwhile vale of tears. So some facts: The Fugs were the very first underground rock band, back when "rock" was still known as "rock and roll." They formed in late-1964 and made their first studio recordings the following spring— this was before The Velvet Underground, before The Mothers Of Invention, before The Byrds even, when the most avant-garde thing The Beatles had done was the feedback at the beginning of "I Feel Fine." Ed Sanders (proprietor of the Peace Eye bookstore in Greenwich Village, anti-war activist, and publisher of the poetry journal Fuck You: A Magazine Of The Arts) and Tuli Kupferberg (compulsive poet and bard— as well as the Brooklyn Bridge jumper immortalized in Ginsberg’s "HOWL"), with partners-in-crime Ken Weaver (a Texan drummer who was hanging around at the Peace Eye), Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel (who had already released a couple of amazing records as The Holy Modal Rounders), showed up on the scene and promptly started pushing every envelope within reach as far as it would stretch, and farther if they could get away with it.
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