The Transcendental Fugs

Wandering far afield from the usual suspects of sacred song, it is possible to hear music that glorifies the individual path and the beauty of the human spirit. In late 20th century Germany, Kosmische music seemed to revivify the spirit of German Romanticism exemplified by thinkers like Novalis and Goethe. In 1960s America, bands like the Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs created a mutant hybrid of old string band/ jug band music that was, by turns, sophomoric and sublimely mystical.

Often listed as proto-punk, The Fugs were vulgar, confrontational and hilariously lowbrow. But they also sang poetry culled from William Blake and Algernon Swinburne. Sometimes they were shocking and sublime in the space of a single song, as in "Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel," which culminates in a gloriously beautiful condemnation of bigotry and violence:

When The Red Angel comes and the TV is cold,
Will you pray in the dawn for the rest of your soul?
When you lie in the dour death coma,
Do you think youre gonna go to heaven, oh Johnny,
With a violent heart? With a violent heart?
Are you ready Johnny? Are you ready?

Ahimsa, oh Johnny, ahimsa!
In the spinning confusion, ahimsa!
In the blood of life, death, and torture,
Ahimsa! Ahimsa! Ahimsa!
Ahimsa, is the seashell of Buddha.
Ahimsa, is the rose and the lamb.

Ahimsa is the philosophy popularized by Mahatma Ghandi, who wrote,"True ahimsa should mean a complete freedom from ill-will and anger and hate and an overflowing love for all." The Fugs not only celebrated this ideal but regularly mocked those who would "kill for peace." At the same time, they celebrated the carnal, the absurd and the underdog.

Some of their songs could be considered hymns for iconoclasts and heretics. The Fugs were not only intimately allied with the Yippies (one of their songs is a recording of the ritual to levitate the Pentagon), Ed Sanders, the group's singer, was the creator of Investigative Poetry, "a poetry adequate to discharge from its verse-grids the undefiled high energy purely-distilled verse-frags, using every bardic skill and meter and method of the last 5 or 6 generations, in order to describe every aspect (no more secret governments!) of the historical present, while aiding the future, even placing bard-babble once again into a role as shaper of the future."

Sadly, a few years ago we witnessed the tragic loss of poet and Fug Tuli Kupferberg, shortly after the release of The Fugs' Final CD, Part 2. But their legacy in song lives on and deserves fresh consideration. Some problems are perennial, which makes many of The Fugs' songs like potent medicine for the heart. Drink up!