The Fugs

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The Fugs
Origin	New York City
Genre(s)	folk rock
Years active	1965 - 2004
Website	thefugs.com
Members
Ed Sanders, vocal Tuli Kupferberg, vocal Ken Weaver Steve Taylor, vocals and guitars Coby Batty, drums, percussion and vocals Scott Petito, bass and keyboards

The Fugs is a band formed in New York City in 1965 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterwards, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders.

The band was named by Kupferberg, from a portmanteau for "fucking ugly" used in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead.

The band's original core members, Sanders, Kupferberg, and Weaver, were joined at various times in the 1960s by a number of others, some of whom were noted session musicians or members of other bands. These included Weber and Stampfel, bassist John Anderson, guitarist Vinny Leary, guitarist Peter Kearney, keyboardist Lee Crabtree, guitarist Jon Kalb, guitarist Stefan Grossman, singer/guitarist Jake Jacobs, guitarist Eric Gale, bassist Chuck Rainey, keyboardist Robert Banks, bassist Charles Larkey, guitarist Ken Pine, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, and drummer Bill Wolf.

For most of the last twenty-five years, The Fugs has been composed of primary singer/songwriters Sanders and Kupferberg, composer, song writer, guitarist, and long-time Allen Ginsberg-collaborator Steven Taylor, singer/songwriter and percussionist Coby Batty, and Scott Petito, a musician and music producer.

A satirical and self-satirizing rock band with a political slant, they have performed at various war protests — against the Vietnam War and since the 1980s at events around other US-involved wars. The band's often frank and almost always humorous lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics have caused a sometimes hostile reaction in some quarters.

Their participation in a protest against the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, during which they purportedly attempted to encircle and levitate the Pentagon, is chronicled in Norman Mailer's novel "Armies of the Night."

The Fugs have remained committed to literature and poetry with a socio-political thrust and often mine the history of European and American literature as inspiration for song lyrics. One of their better-known songs is an adaptation of Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach. Others were renditions of William Blake's poems: Ah! Sun-flower and How Sweet I Roam'd.

After pursuing individual projects over the years, in 1984 Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg decided to reform the band and stage a series of Fugs reunion concerts. This incarnation of the Fugs included Sanders and Kupferberg and, at various times, guitarist and singer Steven Taylor, drummer and singer Coby Batty, bassist Mark Kramer, guitarist Vinny Leary (who had contributed to the first two original Fugs albums), and bassist/keyboardist Scott Petito. The re-formed Fugs performed concerts at numerous locations in the U.S. and Europe over the next several years.

In 1994 the band intended to perform a series of concerts in Woodstock, New York, (where Ed 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 8 miles from Woodstock, and that this festival would be much more tightly controlled and commercialized than the original. Consequently The Fugs decided to stage 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 roster of Sanders, Kupferberg, Taylor, Batty, and Petito performed in this series of concerts with additional vocal support from Amy Fradon and Leslie Ritter and also with appearances by Allen Ginsberg and Country Joe McDonald.

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[edit] Discography

The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views[sic], and General Dissatisfaction 1965, Broadside 304, Folkways FW 05304. Re-released 1966 on ESP-1018 as The Fugs First Album (with alternate takes/edits of at least three songs and stronger language); ESP version re-released on CD by Fantasy as The Fugs First Album 1994
The Fugs 1966, ESP-1028; re-released on CD by Fantasy as The Fugs Second Album 1994
Virgin Fugs ESP-1038, (possibly unauthorized--outtakes from first album sessions) 1967
Fugs 4, Rounders Score ESP-2018 (unauthorized split compilation album with Holy Modal Rounders) recorded 1965-6, released 1967 or 1975
Tenderness Junction Reprise, 1968
It Crawled into My Hand, Honest Reprise, 1968
Belle of Avenue A Reprise, 1969
Golden Filth (Live at the Fillmore East) Reprise, 1970
Refuse to Be Burnt Out (Live reunion) 1984
No More Slavery (Studio album) 1985
Star Peace (two disk set, an opera) 1986
Fugs Live in Woodstock 1989
Songs from a Portable Forest (best of 1980s reunions) 1992
The Real Woodstock Festival (2 CD set) 1995
The Fugs Final CD (Part 1) 2003