United States

Sorry it took so long for this post, but I’ve never been so glad to be back home. I got ‘detained’ for a few days trying to get back in the US from Canada. Turns out that my name popped up on some ‘watch list’ because of some of my past narco-anarchist shenanigans. Seems like Homeland Insecurity wanted to flex their little muscles & (flashback to the 60s) hassle the hippie (some of the photos they had were ancient..I sport a military grade buzz-cut these days…course the tats don’t help). Anyhoo, the graybar hotel was the usual shitty overnighter. Being a vegetarian, I couldn’t even get three hots with my cot, but they didn’t really have anything solid to keep me, so now I’m home sweet home. Here goes…

This one has been the toughest pick so far. So much musick to choose from outa the rock US. So many of my all-time favorite bands. As I said on my post when Don Van Vliet died in December 2010: “He always has been & always will be my #1”. (Here’s the song I posted then, “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles” from Clear Spot. It not only is the Captain at some of his finest, but was featured in The Big Lebowski, which is one of my favorite movies as well).

Pere Ubu is so close on The Magic Band’s ass that it’s almost gay. Then there’s Iggy, Funkadelic, The Mars Volta, The Ramones & Patti Smith, & the list goes on & on. How do I pick one?

Then I got the great (another one) idea to have US bands. Not just from the US, but like America, UXA, Chicago, USSA, United States of America, Gary “U.S.” Bonds, Presidents of the United States, John Denver, US Bombs, All-American Rejects…well, it’s a swell idea, but the swelling soon went down when I realized I had a way of narrowing things down, but most of the bands, well, not really sucked but not what I’d really call a finale to this incredible journey.

So on to Plan Q.

I have decided to tell you the story about the first record I ever bought. Then I’ll feature the band that started this whole nothin’ thing. I believe that will be appropriate to this journey around the world, end at the beginning, so to speak.

I was born in southeastern Pennsylvania in the village of Intercourse. When I was five years old my parents relocated to the exact opposite corner of northwestern Pennsylvania, to an even smaller burg twenty miles from the New York state border & twenty million miles from civilization. The hamlet we moved to was Beantown (not Boston, just Beantown, named after the family that originally settled there). We used to call it Bum Fuck, Egypt but that was doing a disservice to Egypt. The greatest thing about living in a cultural vacuum like that was that it somehow as if by magick sucked in radio signals from far & wide.

I lived by The Radio. I worshiped at the Church of Radio. It was my only salvation. I had a tiny transistor radio (originally AM, but after a while enough stations had gone for that NEW thing, FM that I got a new AM/FM transistor). At night after I’d gone to bed, I’d crawl under the covers, pull the pillow over my head, stuff the earplug into my ear & start scanning the dial to hear what I could hear. I even wired up the plug end with two ear plugs so I could hear heavenly music & nothing else (it was still monaural, no stereo, but two ears were better than one).

On clear, crisp nights I could pick up stations from the real world that was out there to be sampled. Someone told me about something called skywave or skip that is the propagation of radio waves reflected back toward Earth from the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere. Since it is not limited by the curvature of the Earth, skip can be used to communicate beyond the horizon. Whatever…all I know is that I was living in the skip zone for a lot of good music.

I lived only about 90 miles from Cleveland, Ohio, so it was plenty close enough to pick up if their wasn’t a lot of interference. I listened to Wicksee (WIXY) & WHK (Alan Freed was long gone by this time, but Cleveland almost always came in good). Some of the further stations skipped into my ears even better & were much more desired. About the furthest & one of the best was WBZ in Boston, a favorite of mine until they got too heavy into live play-by-play sports (Bruins – Celtics, I don’t know). By that time, though, my favorite had become CKLW in Detroit (really in Windsor, Ontario…Canada’s southernmost city & Detroit’s sister…they played the Hitsville USA/Motown greats but because of Canadian fair-play laws, also Guess Who & other Canadian acts). I also listened to WLS from Chicago & several New York City stations. Early on I listened to Cousin Brucie on WABC or Murray the K on WINS, but by the mid 60s they were so into the Beatlemania thing that I searched elsewhere around the dial (spoiler alert - I’ve never been a Beatle’s fan). Also in New York was WMCA with The Good Guys. In 1960, led by Ruth Meyer, the first woman radio programming chief in New York City history, WMCA began promoting itself by stressing its on-air personalities, who were collectively known as the Good Guys. The Good Guys outdid the other stations by playing the top 25 (as opposed to the top 20 elsewhere) along with Sure Hits & Long Shots which were not on the charts yet. They were also always a few weeks ahead of the other stations at airing new music.

There was one other station that I came to love out of New York that eventually led to this long-winded tale & my transformation. That station was WBAI, a listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio station. Their signal reached only a hundred miles or so from NYC usually, they just were not as powerful, but on a clear night, it was the cat’s pajamas. In 1963 Bob Fass's program Radio Unnameable first aired. From the beginning the show featured the work of & impromptu interviews with counterculture figures such as Paul Krassner, Bob Dylan, & Abbie Hoffman. A long list of musicians have appeared on Radio Unnameable, including Townes Van Zandt, David Peel, Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, The Fugs, & Phil Ochs. Jerry Jeff Walker & David Bromberg introduced the song “Mr. Bojangles” on the show. The Incredible String Band came over from Scotland & stopped in to chat & play music. The first performance of Arlo Guthrie's “Alice's Restaurant” was on WBAI.

Late one night in mid-summer 1966, I was listening to WBAI ("Good morning, cabal"). It had been coming in unusually clear & it was cracking me up. Fass was one of the creative genii of free-form radio, each night creating a program with no format, an improvised mélange of live music, speeches, & random phone calls. Radio Unnameable was a forum for eyewitness reports from war zones & urban conflicts, recitations of poetry & prose, solicitations for political causes, testimonials for illegal drugs, & experiments with noise & silence. As I was listening, I heard an 11+ minute long song called “Virgin Forest” by a band named The Fugs that blew my mind.

The Fugs self-titled album, which I erroneously assumed was their first album (it was really their third album & second to be released…their second album was released third…never mind, we’ll straighten this out shortly) was released in March, 1966, with liner notes by Allen Ginsberg. The Village Fugs' debut album, The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction, had been released by the Broadside subsidiary of Folkways Records in 1965. The group simplified its name to the Fugs, & the album was reissued by the independent jazz label ESP as The Fugs First Album. ESP initially rejected the band's second recording as obscene. They followed instead with an album called The Fugs. This album somehow broke into the pop charts in July 1966 & reached the Top 40 during a six-month chart stay even with tunes like "Kill for Peace" & "Group Grope".

Well, as I said earlier, by the end of “Virgin Forest” my life had changed. I had never bought a record before in my life. I told you I lived by The Radio. But my parents had a stereo console record player/AM/FM radio unit (the Hi-Fi they called it) in the den & they had records, mostly religious (I remember Tennessee Ernie Ford was my mom’s favorite & my dad was partial to Vic Damone). I listened to some of their records sometimes, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Harry Belafonte, & Glenn Yarbrough (“Baby, the Rain Must Fall”), but until I heard The Fugs I had never wanted to buy one myself. After all, I listened to the radio. New music every week, every day, every hour.

I didn’t really know how to go about buying this record. There were no record stores where I lived & anywhere that did sell records sure wouldn’t have The Fugs, but where there’s a will, there’s a way, it is said. I called Radio Unnameable late one night a few days later, after my parents had gone to bed. I snuck downstairs, dialed the operator, she connected me to the number, & after not too long of a wait, I actually got to speak to Bob Fass. I told him I lived in Bum Fuck, Egypt but listened to his show on my transistor & wanted to buy my first record album, The Fugs – The Fugs. He gave me the information for contacting ESP Records & I did. I found out the information, sent them cash (well concealed in a letter, as we were not to send cash in the mail), & waited.

My uncle Dean was post-master in a nearby town that had the closest Post-Office. I had the album sent there for him to hold for me so my parents wouldn’t find out if it got delivered to our house. I told my uncle it was a surprise for my parents to insure his silence. When it finally arrived, I snuck it up into my tree-house & ripped it open. Even before I read the liner notes by Ginsberg, I read the song list in awe: “Skin Flowers”; “Group Grope”; “Dirty Old Man”;  “Kill for Peace”; & at the end of Side 2, the incredible 11:20 (who had ever heard of an eleven minute song?..I listened to the radio…songs were three minutes) “Virgin Forest”. Now all I had to do was wait until my parents were gone with my younger brother & sister & I could actually listen to it.

In the meantime I read Ginsberg’s words so many times that I knew them by heart. “It’s war on all fronts. ‘Breakthrough in the Grey Room’ says Burroughs – he meant the Brain – ‘Total Assault on the Culture’ says Ed Sanders…On one side are everybody who make love with their eyes open, maybe smoke pot & take LSD & look inside their hearts to find the Self-God Walt Whitman prophesied for America…Who’s on the other side? People who think we are bad…”

Finally I got the chance to listen to the whole album, cranked up as loud as I dared. By the time it was over, I was certain which side I was on…I wanted to make love with my eyes open & all those other things. Every opportunity I got I listened to this record, eating it up in big bites. But of course, the inevitable finally happened, but it was beyond my imagination & led where I could never have known.

One day as I was listening to Side 1 at maximum volume, I failed to hear my mom return. She came into the den in the midst of “Group Grope”. She had a look of rage on her face that I had never seen. She picked up the album cover, looked at it, looked at me, & went into action. I had never seen my mom do anything in the least bit violent, but I had unwittingly found that button, pushed it, & she snapped. She yanked the record from the turntable & I heard the scream of the stylus ripping through the fatally wounded vinyl. Then she gripped the record in both hands & began furiously twisting it left & right, back & forth, shaking with rage, veins popping out on her neck & the sides of her head, her eyes wild with…HATRED. Somehow she managed to rip the record into several pieces. Then she started in on the cover. When she was finished, she stared at me for a moment with sweat & tears running down her face. “Don’t ever bring that FILTH in our home again,” she said so quietly I almost missed it. Then she turned, walked out, & threw all the pieces of my first record into the trash.

I was embarrassed. I was dumbfounded. But I was on to something here. This was musick. She HATED it. She called it FILTH. I knew in an instant which side she was on.

The next album I bought was The Virgin Fugs. This was the one that ESP had originally rejected for being ‘obscene’. Oh, boy.

By then I had met a friend who had a record player in her bedroom. Her name was Isabel. She wore only black, wore heavy black make-up. This was before a style called Goth. This was the era of Munsters & Addams Family. We listened to The Fugs & other tastes. We smoked pot. We made love with our eyes open.

I never brought ‘that FILTH’ into my parent’s home again. As soon as I was old enough I moved out on my own. Isabel moved to Washington, D.C. but we kept in touch. In January 1969 when I returned to the East Coast from California for the Nixon Anti-Inauguration, I visited Isabel. She was working with some Embassy Staff from Argentina. They were bringing in pharmaceutical LSD₂₅ in their Diplomatic pouches. We had a good time & laughed about the bad influence of bad musick. But that’s another story for another day. It’s bedtime now, kiddies. Get out your transistors & earplugs.

The Vilage Fugs, later just The Fugs, are a band formed in New York in mid-1963 by poets Ed Sanders & Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel & 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.

In 1964, the band surfaced on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Fugs became an important part of the American counterculture of the mid to late 60s. The band’s frank lyrics about sex, drugs, & politics aroused a hostile reaction in some quarters, enthusiastic interest in others.

Their first album was The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views [sic], and General Dissatisfaction, released in 1965 on Broadside #304 & Folkways FW 05304. It was re-released in 1966 on ESP as The Fugs First Album with alternate takes/edits of at least three songs.

On The Fugs, The Fugs are: Ed Sanders – vocals; Tuli Kupferberg – tambourine & maracas; Pete Kearney & Vinny Leary – guitars; Lee Crabtree – piano, celesta, & bells; John Anderson – bass; & Ken Weaver – percussion, with Betsy Klein – backing vocals.

 The Fugs – The Fugs, ESP Records ESP 1028, 1966. 

all decryption codes in comments

Side A –

Frenzy

I Want to Know

Skin Flowers

Group Grope

Coming Down

Dirty Old Man

Side B –

Kill for Peace

Morning, Morning

Doin’ All Right

Virgin Forest

The Village Fugs were: Ed Sanders & Tuli Kupferberg – vocals, tambourines, & maracas; Steve Weber & Vinny Leary – guitar; Pete Stampfel – guitar, fiddle, & harmonica; John Anderson – bass; & Ken Weaver – drums, with The Fugs – backing vocals.

 The Fugs – The Fugs First Album, ESP Records ESP 1018, 1966.

Side A –

Slum Goddess

Ah! Sunflower, Weary of Time

Supergirl

Swinburne Stomp

I Couldn’t Get High

Side B –

How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field

Seize the Day

I Feel like Homemade Shit

Boobs a Lot

Nothing

On Virgin Fugs, The Fugs are: Ed Sanders & Tuli Kupferberg – vocals & percussion; Steve Weber & Vinny Leary – vocals & guitars; Peter Stampfel – vocals, guitar, banjo, fiddle, & harmonica; Lee Crabtree – vocals, keyboards, & percussion; John Anderson – vocals & bass; & Ken Weaver – vocals & drums.

 The Fugs - Virgin Fugs, ESP Records ESP 1038, 1967.

Side A –

We’re the Fugs

New Amphetamine Shriek

Saran Wrap

The Ten Commandments

Hallucination Horrors

I Command the House of the Devil

Side B –

C.I.A. Man

Coca Cola Douche

My Bed is Getting Crowded

Caca Rocka

I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rot

The Fugs - Live from The 60s, Big Beat CDWIKD 125, 1994.

Tracklist –

Doin’ All Right

The Swedish Nada

Homage to Catherine & William Blake

I Couldn’t Get High

Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel

J.O.B.

My Baby Done Left Me

The Garden is Open

The Exorcism of the Grave of Senator Joseph McCarthy

Yodeling Hippies

A Medley from The Fugs’ first concert – The Ten Commandments/ Swinburne Stomp

According to the copious 40-page full-color liner notes that accompany this strictly limited-edition three-CD set, Electromagnetic Steamboat: The Reprise Recordings gathers "every unique master recording of The Fugs that was delivered to & survives in the Reprise [Records] archives."

This includes not only the four LPs: Tenderness Junction, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest, The Belle of Avenue A, & Golden Filth, but also an additional 40 minutes of material that never made it onto a standard commercial release.

After their somewhat acrimonious split with ESP, The Fugs signed with the decidedly West Coast Reprise Records. The band's revolving door personnel features a few familiar session musicians during this era. Among the more notable names are: Danny Kortchmar – guitar; Charles Larkey – bass; Bob Mason – drums; Richard Tee – organ; jazz legend Julius Watkins - French horn; & Ken Pine  - guitar. Remaining at the inventive center of The Fugs were still Tuli Kupferberg - vocals, Ed Saunders – vocals, & Ken Weaver – vocals & drums. Even with the lack of stability in the lineup, the nature of the band remained pure.

Golden Filth is conspicuous as the only live album of the Reprise era. It was recorded at Bill Graham's Fillmore East. The set includes "I Want to Know," in addition to other tracks from their ESP days, including "Coca Cola Douche," which is titled "CCD" for obvious legal reasons.

 The Fugs – Electromagnetic Steamboat, Rhino Homemade RHM2 7759. 2001.

Disc 1 – Tracks 1 through 10

 Originally The Fugs - Tenderness Junction, Reprise Records RS 6280, 1967.

Tracklist –

Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out

Knock Knock   

The Garden Is Open

Wet Dream

Hare Krishna

Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon October 21, 1967

War Song

Dover Beach

Fingers of the Sun

Aphrodite Mass (in 5 sections):

I. Litany of the Street Grope

II. Genuflection at the Temple of Squack

III. Petals In the Sea

IV. Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite

V. Homage to Throb Thrills

Disc 1 - Tracks11 through 30

 Originally The Fugs - It Crawled into My Hand, Honest, Reprise Records RS 6305, 1968.

Tracklist –

Crystal Liaison

Ramses II Is Dead, My Love

Burial Waltz

Wide, Wide River

Life Is Strange

Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel

Marijuana

Leprechaun 

When the Mode of Music Changes

Whimpers from the Jello

The Divine Toe, Part I

We're Both Dead Now, Alice

Life is Funny

Grope Need, Part 1

Tuli, Visited by the Ghost of Plontinus

Robinson Crusoe

Claude Pelieu and J.J. Lebel Discuss the Early Verlaine Bread Crust Fragments

The National Haiku Contest

The Divine Toe, Part II

Irene

Disc 2 Tracks 2 (somehow) through 11

 Originally The Fugs - The Belle of Avenue A, Reprise Records RS 6359, 1969.

Tracklist –

Bum's Song

Dust Devil

Chicago

Four Minutes to Twelve

Mr. Mack

Belle of Avenue A

Queen of the Nile

Flower Children

Yodeling Yippie

Children of the Dream

Disc 2 – Tracks 12 through 20

 Originally The Fugs - Golden Filth (proving my mom right), Reprise Records RS 6398, 1970.

Tracklist –

Slum Goddess  

CCD

How Sweet I Roamed

I Couldn't Get High

Saran Wrap

I Want to Know

Home Made

Nothing

Supergirl

Disc 3 – Tracks 1 through 15

 outtakes & alternative cuts

Tracklist –

Knock Knock

Wet Dream

Carpe Diem

Nameless Voices Crying for Kindness

Aphrodite Mass

Turn On-Tune In-Drop Out

Knock Knock

The Garden is Open

Wet Dream

Hare Krishna

Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon October 21, 1967

War Song

Dover Beach

Fingers of the Sun

Crystal Liaison

Fug Off,

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