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The Fugs, An Encore After Forty Years"Rock 'n' Roll Dissidents, Fearless for 4 Decades" Woodstock, N.Y. — Four decades ago Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg founded the Fugs in an East Village bookstore on a bedrock of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and poetry.
And though Mr. Sanders, who is 63, and Mr. Kupferberg, who turns 80 in September, have reached what one of their lyrics calls the "time to think of ultimate things," they still sing about sex and peace and poetry (though not about drugs so much anymore).
Mr. Kupferberg has always operated just outside the bounds of propriety — he suggested the band's name, taken from Norman Mailer's copulatory euphemism in "The Naked and the Dead" — and on "The Fugs Final CD" his talent remains poignantly intact. In "Septuagenarian in Love" he rewrites the 1959 hit by Dion and the Belmonts, "A Teenager in Love," as a bitter complaint about sexual dysfunction in the twilight years, with graphic illustrations and a crying chorus: "Each night I ask Venus up above/Why must I be a septuagenarian in love?" The Fugs included a rotating cast of poets and musicians with Mr. Sanders and Mr. Kupferberg at the core. The group made six albums and had more than 700 performances at the Players Theater on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Sanders made the cover of Life magazine in 1967 before the band broke up in 1969. In 1971 Mr. Sanders wrote "The Family," an investigative book about Charles Manson and his cult that has become a true-crime classic and has sold more than a million copies. He also began writing what he calls investigative poetry, completing "1968: A History in Verse," two volumes of his projected nine-part series "America: A History in Verse," and four volumes of "Tales of Beatnik Glory." On his grounds in Woodstock, Mr. Sanders houses a countercultural archive that fills his garage to the ceiling. He has voluminous files on Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and of course Mr. Manson. "Final CD" is the Fugs' first album of new material since 1987. The inspiration for the revival, Mr. Sanders said, was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Mr. Kupferberg had watched in horror from his apartment window as the World Trade Center was destroyed. The attacks awakened feelings of political outrage and set Mr. Sanders and Mr. Kupferberg to writing a pile of new songs. As it was in the 60's, the Fugs' approach to protest music is a combination of juvenile antics, black humor, sweet hopefulness and pointed satire. "Go Down, Congress" accuses the Bush administration of having ties to terrorists in the Middle East and argues for that claim in a printed insert that comes with the CD. Mr. Sanders and Mr. Kupferberg are both radical utopianists, but from different perspectives. Mr. Kupferberg's "Short History of the Human Race," for example, is just six lines, ending with: World War I: The human race stinks "Tuli's more anarcho-syndicalist," Mr. Sanders said, "and I'm more social democratic." Mr. Kupferberg said: "We're both looking for the path that will take us closer to where we want to go. Marx was quite good at analyzing what was wrong with capitalist society, but he was wrong in formulating the approach to his utopia. The anarchists have the right idea, but they don't know how to get there." Mr. Sanders insists that rock music remains a viable method for political dissent. And the catchier the tune — and the raunchier the lyrics — the better. "Rock 'n' roll can be incredibly dappled with dissent," he said. "It's a mnemonic art form, in the sense that people can remember the messages in both parts of the brain. There are eros and lust and mating associated with certain vowels and certain forms of singing, so there's a kind of lusty, dissent-dappled fabric to rock 'n' roll." Mr. Kupferberg, who joined a Communist youth group called National Student League while in high school in the 1930's, has learned to avoid what he calls the "big utopias." Instead he expresses his aims in the song "Advice From the Fugs." |
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