THE FUGS: NYC'S ORIGINAL PUNKS

With what’s about to go down in the US, it seems timely to tell the outrageous story of THE FUGS with main man Ed Sanders, once America’s most wanted by the F.B.I.. (Record Collector, 2008)

Early 1965: The Charlatans are about to galvanise California’s acid rock revolution at the Red Dog Saloon, Jimi Hendrix is still playing R&B standards on the chitlin circuit while the UK still rides the beat and R&B booms unleashed by the Beatles and Stones. With the Velvet Underground yet to appear, New York is attracting attention for the folk movement that had spawned Bob Dylan in the West Village. Meanwhile, across town on the Lower East Side, a ramshackle gaggle of degenerate beat poets and artists called the Fugs are unwittingly foreshadowing the future by celebrating unfettered sexual liberation and recreational drug use while lobbing lyrical Molotov cocktails at a government plunging its country further into the Vietnam war, taking up the activist template laid by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and putting it to discordant racket.

Led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, the Fugs have been credited with starting everything from underground counter-culture to punk rock. ‘[The Fugs] invented the Underground,’ wrote Miles in a 1968 International Times while Lester Bangs called them, ‘the first truly underground band in America’. They predated DIY proto-punks like the Stooges, lyrical taboo-stompers the Velvets, the MC5’s ‘fucking in the streets’ manifesto and out-freaked the Mothers Of Invention. Ten years before CBGBs thrust New York back into the spotlight the Fugs pioneered punk-style disruption under their Zap! Zap! Total Assault On The Culture banner; unable to play instruments, swearing live and on record while being thrown off record labels and banned from venues. The Fugs caused deeper-rooted moral panic than the Sex Pistols ever would and if relaying graphic urban narratives over primitive beats constitutes rapping then they can be considered hiphop pioneers too!