The Underground's First Album
If there was a rock underground in 1965, The Fugs were it. The combo —initially the work of vocalists Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders, plus 'percussionist' Ken Weaver— would've never defined themselves as rock'n'rollers; they were poets, burnouts, beatniks, punks; impish provocateurs out to slyly satirize America by co-opting popular music form. The only problem: they didn't know how to their play instruments. Which, as a long line of musicians would join The Fugs in discovering, wasn't actually a problem at all.
Taking their influence from the volumes of ethnomusical folksongs unearthed by Harry Smith, The Fugs made largely-vocal music that was staggeringly simple, their sing-song ditties driven forward by vocals, often to little accompaniment. On "Nothing," whose repetitious lyrics symbolize the emptiness of human existence(!), they borrow a Jewish folk-tune from Kupferberg's childhood, and turn it into a vocal hymnal on the oft-unspoken modern condition.
The song originally stood as the closer on the first version of their first LP. Initially released as The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Points of Views, and General Dissatisfaction before being repressed shortly thereafter as The Fugs First Album, this debut stood proud in its unmusicality decades before the DIY movement would take hold.
Counter to the Counter Culture
The Fugs First Album was largely recorded in one three-hour jam session in April of '65, and it sounds like it. At numerous times, you can hear people picking up the song —singing backups, bashing percussion, tenuously 'playing along'— in mid-stride. It's clearly the sound of a bunch of smart-asses goofing around, essentially making up things up as they go along.
This approach —not to mention their vocal criticisms of the US conflict in Vietnam— position The Fugs well on the underground fringes; on, in many ways, the cutting edge of culture. Though their music is, often, just sheer obnoxiousness —like the way they gleefully hijack "The Ten Commandments" in song; or "Slum Goddess"'s ironic dismantling of rock cliché— it's artfully-minded obnoxiousness.
In 1965, rock'n'roll itself was seen as a subversive counter-cultural movement, but The Fugs were early in identifying the orthodoxy of the genre itself (making the connection between the sound and sporting machismo tangible on the ridiculous faux-locker-room anthem "Boobs a Lot"). Arming themselves with satirical perversion and the complete absence of careerism, they sought to mark themselves as a musical 'other': becoming, some might say, the first-ever alternative rock band.
Record Label: ESP-Disk
Release Date: November, 1965
