The Fugs are probably the greatest among the great rock bands that have been forgotten by succeeding generations. A case in point is Virgin Forest, the first collage piece in the history of popular music, one of music's most creative expressions, and almost totally unknown. The Fugs were also the first politicized group in the history of rock, also perhaps the greatest, the standard bearers of punk-rock. The sarcasm of their songs and the nonconformist mode in which they played them inspired Frank Zappa. Their free style compositions, although sometimes chaotic, anticipated progressive rock. Their specialty was the satire that reintroduced the political vaudeville of Brecht/Weill in the era of peace marches, sit-ins, and Bob Dylan. Few musicians were as original as the Fugs, at a time when the charts were dominated by the Beatles and the Monkees.
The Fugs were formed at the end of 1964 by two seasoned members of the intelligentsia: 43- year-old journalist Tuli Kupferberg and 32-year-old poet, movie maker, bookseller and editor Ed Sanders, who had served a year in jail for pacifism, where he penned "Poem from Jail." A self-declared "body-rock singing group," the Fugs circulated among beatniks and folk singers. Their music, a series of manifestos that proclaimed their intention to carry out a total offensive on mainstream culture, was even too methodical.
Their corrosive lyrics, the soul of their craft, mocked the American way of life and all its contradictions - the hypocrisy of government, the sexual repression, the consumerism, the persecution of drug users.
The Fugs put to music the demystification of capitalism and the removal of social taboos. They attacked the 45, the charts, the image of the bourgeois singer, manufactured stars like Presley and the Beatles, entertainment marketing and the entire anomalous machine of musical consumerism. They hurled themselves against secular taboos to create an alternative music regulated by alternative codes. In short, they laid the foundations for the genesis of rock and alternative rock for the remainder of the century.
