THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,276) The Fugs — “Dirty Old Man”
I don’t give a fug, but I do give you the Fugs’* (see #67) “timeless, hysterically funny, howlingly scatological, barely musical rant[] and rave[]” (Jim Derogatis, https://www.wbez.org/jim-derogatis/2012/11/28/return-of-the-original-freak-folks-the-fugs), “[s]ung to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” . . . a riotous parody, a reductio ad absurdum of the other side’s stereotype of the Fug-like hippie, the bearded beatnik with “thrill pills for all you chickies, funny cigarettes for you boys.” (John Reed, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/3/25/the-fugs-penter-the-fugs-greenwich/)
Open a time capsule, and read John Reed’s thoughts on the Fugs from the March 25, 1967 issue of the Harvard Crimson:
Greenwich Village folk-rock preacher-lovers who have sprung full grown and screaming from Allen Ginsberg’s beard. Champions of moral disarmament, they sing out for the people who, according to Ginsberg’s liner notes on their second album, “make love with their eyes open, maybe smoke pot & maybe take LSD & look inside their heads to find the Self-God Walt Whitman prophesied for America.” . . . The lines are drawn. “Total assault on the Culture,” orders Ed Sanders, the Fugs lead singer, as he strikes out with ballads of contemporary protest points of view, and general dissatisfaction.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/3/25/the-fugs-penter-the-fugs-greenwich/
DOM is from the Fugs’ second album. As Wikipedia summarizes things:
After the release of their first album on Folkways Records, The Fugs signed a contract allowing ESP-Disk to publish its material in exchange for usage of an Off-Broadway theater as practice space and what Fugs’ frontman Ed Sanders describes as “one of the lower percentages in the history of western civilization.” While finding the contract binding and disadvantageous in many ways, The Fugs were pleased with the opportunity to work with and at the studio of Richard Alderson, who allowed them to experiment with his state-of-the-art equipment. The album was produced over a four-week period through January and February 1966 at the same time that the band was performing weekly at the Astor Place Playhouse . . . . The band’s controversial lyrics and stage antics allegedly attracted the attention of the FBI and New York City fire and building inspectors and eventually resulted in their being banned from Astor Place Playhouse. According to Sanders, the FBI’s final report of its investigation of the band concluded that “The Fugs is a group of musicians who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers, i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. …. it is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene.”
Of the album, Matt Fink opines:
The Fugs, retitled The Fugs Second Album for a later reissue, finds them sounding more professional than on their debut, and still sounding very ahead of their time lyrically, expressing sentiments in ways that just hadn’t been done before. . . . [T]he Fugs’ weakness for crude humor puts a damper on the whole affair. Sometimes the jokes work (“Dirty Old Man”), sometimes they don’t . . . but they’re always entertaining. . . . Like [Lou] Reed, the revolutionary tag is placed on the Fugs for the sheer frankness they used to deal with the taboo. But whereas Reed dealt with the dark sides of promiscuity and drug use, the Fugs celebrate it, and most times in a very exhibitionist way.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-fugs-second-album-mw0000429485
Oh, and David Bowie picked it as one of his 25 favorite and personally-owned vinyl albums, saying that:
The sleeve notes were written by Allen Ginsberg and contain these perennial yet prescient lines: “Who’s on the other side? People who think we are bad. Other side? No, let’s not make it a war, we’ll all be destroyed, we’ll go on suffering till we die if we take the War Door.” I found on the Internet the text for a newsprint ad for the Fugs, who, coupled with the Velvet Underground, played the April Fools Dance and Models Ball at the Village Gate in 1966. The F.B.I. had them on their books as “the Fags.” This was surely one of the most lyrically explosive underground bands ever. Not the greatest musicians in the world, but how “punk” was all that?
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/david-bowie-favorite-albums
As to the Fugs, Jim Derogatis tells us that:
[The Fugs] released four albums between 1968 and 1970 full of hippie rewrites of traditional folk tunes and typically literate, ’60s flower-power odes inspired by the like of William Blake and Algernon Swinburne. Think of a second-generation Beat musical answer to Allen Ginsberg. The primary constant and driving force of the band, Ed Sanders, first made his mark on the New York scene that nurtured Bob Dylan by running the Peace Eye Bookstore, the East Coast version of San Francisco’s famous City Lights. He became a respected social activist and lauded poet, winning both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; wrote the definitive accounts of both the Beat-era Lower East Side (Tales of Beatnik Glory) and the Manson clan (The Family) and eventually moved to Woodstock and took up inventing strange musical instruments . . . . [T]he great rock critic Lester Bangs. . . . hailed the Fugs as “the first truly underground band in America,” as well as hugely influential predecessors of punk via timeless, hysterically funny, howlingly scatological, barely musical rants and raves . . . .
https://www.wbez.org/jim-derogatis/2012/11/28/return-of-the-original-freak-folks-the-fugs
Richie Unterberger elaborates:
Arguably the first underground rock group of all time, the Fugs formed at the Peace Eye bookstore in New York’s East Village in late 1964. The nucleus of the band throughout its many personnel changes was Peace Eye owner Ed Sanders and fellow poet Tuli Kupferberg. . . .[who] had strong ties to the beat literary scene, but charged, in the manner of their friend Allen Ginsberg, full steam ahead into the maelstrom of ’60s political involvement and psychedelia. Surrounded by an assortment of motley refugees from the New York folk and jug band scene (including Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders), some of whom could barely play their instruments, the group nonetheless was determined to play rock & roll their way — which meant rife with political and social satire, as well as explicit profanity and sexual references, that were downright unheard of in 1965. Starting on the legendary avant-garde ESP label, the Fugs’ debut was full of equal amounts of chaos and charm, but their songwriting and instrumental chops improved surprisingly quickly, resulting in a second album that was undoubtedly the most shocking and satirical recording ever to grace the Top 100 when it was released. . . . unleashing a few more albums of equally satirical material that were more instrumentally polished, but equally scathing lyrically. By breaking lyrical taboos of popular music, they helped pave the way for . . . even more innovative outrage . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-fugs-mn0000763301#biography
* The Fugs were “[n]amed for the cuss-word euphemism Norman Mailer was forced to use in the first edition of The Naked and the Dead“. (Jim Derogatis, https://www.wbez.org/jim-derogatis/2012/11/28/return-of-the-original-freak-folks-the-fugs)
Here’s Chuck:
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