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The Fugs is an American rock band formed in New York City in late 1964, by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders. Kupferberg named the band from a euphemism for fuck used in Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead.

The band were supported by folklorist Harry Smith, compiler of Anthology of American Folk Music, who helped them sign with Folkways Records. They became prominent leaders of the 1960s underground scene and the American counterculture of that decade. The group is known for its comedic, satirical and explicit lyricism as well as their persistent anti–Vietnam War sentiment, which culminated in Ed Sanders leading an "Exorcism of the Pentagon" in 1967. Since the 1980s, they have performed at several events regarding other U.S. involved wars.

Background

According to Ed Sanders, the idea of forming a band arose in late 1964 after a poetry reading at Café Le Metro on New York's Lower East Side. He and fellow poet-artist Tuli Kupferberg, already known in the downtown scene for his anarchic humor and protest art, spent an evening discussing how to bring the immediacy of Beat poetry into the idiom of rock and roll. Sanders later recalled proposing “a poetry-rock group that would combine the joy of verse with the noise of the streets,” to which Kupferberg instantly agreed.

Both men were active in the Lower East Side's countercultural network of poets, artists, and folk musicians centered around St. Mark's Place and the East Tenth Street galleries. Sanders soon opened the Peace Eye Bookstore—part press office for his mimeographed journal Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts and part salon for radical poets—which quickly became the group's headquarters and rehearsal space.

In early sessions held behind the bookstore's shelves, Sanders and Kupferberg were joined by drummer Ken Weaver to set their poems to rudimentary rock and folk rhythms. They described the result as “holy anarchy”—a blend of chant, satire, and street theater intended as both entertainment and political protest. From these experiments the Fugs were born, formally debuting at the Peace Eye opening celebration in December 1964.

Career

1960s

During the mid-to late 1960s, the Fugs' core members, who were Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver, were augmented by a rotating cast of New York musicians. Among those who appeared in the 1960s were guitarists Danny Kortchmar and Eric Gale, keyboardist Lee Crabtree, bassist Chuck Rainey, clarinetist Perry Robinson, and others.

In early 1965, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders briefly joined the group and contributed to rehearsals and the sessions for their debut album. Folklorist Harry Smith, compiler of Anthology of American Folk Music, became an early supporter and facilitated the Fugs’ signing to Folkways Records who released their debut album The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction. However, ESP-Disk' promptly re-released the album and put out their follow-up The Fugs. In October 1966, writer Norman Jopling reported in British music magazine Record Mirror: "Three labels, ESP, Atlantic, and MGM are battling to sign the Fugs whose first LP on ESP has been on the Billboard' LP chart for fourteen weeks without any air play".

Additionally, Andy Warhol briefly considered the Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders for his multimedia series the Exploding Plastic Inevitable before selecting the Velvet Underground. Warhol attended early performances at Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore and appeared at the group's anti-war benefit Night of Napalm, later inspiring their improvised track “Spontaneous Salute to Andy Warhol.”

By 1966, the Fugs had become fixtures of the Lower East Side scene, performing at anti-war rallies and benefits. The band soon became prominent within the 1960s counterculture. On January 1, 1966, New York police raided the Peace Eye Bookstore and arrested Sanders on obscenity charges; he was later acquitted with ACLU support, which increased the group's notoriety. Ed Sanders also performed at the 1967 March on the Pentagon, where he and others attempted to “levitate” the building—an event chronicled in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. A recording of the ritual, titled “Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon,” appears on the Fugs' 1968 Reprise album Tenderness Junction.

In February 1967, the group briefly signed with Atlantic Records and recorded an album titled The Fugs Eat It, which was never released. Later that year, they joined Reprise Records, releasing Tenderness Junction (1968) and It Crawled into My Hand, Honest (1968). On leaving ESP, Sanders later joked that "our royalty rate was less than 3%, one of the lower percentages in the history of Western civilization."

The band toured Europe twice in 1968, performing in Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany at the Internationale Essener Songtage alongside Tangerine Dream, Peter Brötzmann, and other underground musicians. In 1969, the FBI investigated the group for obscenity after a broadcasting executive described them as "the filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive." No legal action was brought.

1970s–1990s

In 1971, at a General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Fugs song was castigated by Ezra Taft Benson, a high-ranking elder who would go on to become its President. In a speech condemning rock music as Satanic, Benson said "the cynic defends his degeneracy by ridiculing his critics with confusing metaphors". He complained that critiquing "The words of the rock recording 'I Couldn't Get High'" caused people to call for the LDS hymn "High on the Mountain Top" to be dropped from songbooks. Benson disputed the retort that "If one sees filthy implications in a popular song, it is because he has a dirty mind", saying "No filth is [merely] implied in many of the lyrics. It is proclaimed."

One of their better-known songs is an adaptation of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach". Others were settings of William Blake's poems "Ah! Sun-flower" and "How Sweet I Roam'd". Another, "Nothing", is a paraphrasing of the Yiddish folk song "Bulbes".

For most of their later career, the Fugs were composed of the primary singer-songwriters Sanders and Kupferberg, together with composer and guitarist Steven Taylor—a long-time collaborator of Allen Ginsberg—percussionist and vocalist Coby Batty, and musician-producer Scott Petito.

After pursuing individual projects over the years, in 1984 Sanders and Kupferberg re-formed the band and staged a series of Fugs reunion concerts. On August 15, 1988, at the Byrdcliff Barn in Woodstock, New York, the Fugs performed one of their first real reunion concerts. This incarnation of the Fugs included, at various times, the guitarist and singer Steve Taylor (who was also Allen Ginsberg's teaching assistant at the Naropa Institute), the drummer and singer Coby Batty, the bassist Mark Kramer, the guitarist Vinny Leary (who had contributed to the first two original Fugs albums), and the bassist and keyboardist Scott Petito. The re-formed Fugs performed concerts at numerous locations in the United States and Europe over the next several years.

In 1994 the band intended to perform a series of concerts in Woodstock, New York (where Sanders had lived for many years) to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which had actually occurred near the town of Bethel, some 50 miles away. They learned that a group of promoters were planning to stage Woodstock '94 that August near Saugerties, about eight miles from Woodstock, and that this festival would be much more tightly controlled and commercialized than the original. Consequently, the Fugs staged their own August 1994 concerts as "The Real Woodstock Festival", in an atmosphere more in keeping with the spirit of the 1969 festival. The basic Fugs…