the FUGS • the FUGS (ESP-DISK, 1966)

We are a country of heathens...well, we always were...but now we have become the something worse; clucking our tongue at the sight of genitalia, and jerking off with a free hand. How did we become so joyless? Wasn't there a period of general hilarity only some 30 odd years ago?

One of those relics is the second album by The Fugs. Titled simply the FUGS the advancement from the first record is evident. Losing the Holy Modal Rounders Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver were now becoming, with the aid of some ESPdisk's better side men a formidable entity, one that was not afraid to show it's collective intelligentsia coated in pure greasy teenage pimple cream. Songs about Group Gropes and Doin' Allright ("I get more pussy than a Spade") sit along the political aggression of Kill For Peace, and the gentile sadness of Morning Morning. This song shows the same direction that The Velvets would take a year later with Sunday Morning, but where Reed's poetry is based on simple street wise rhyming schemes, Sanders and Kupferberg use the meter of classical Greek poetry. Both band came from the fertile cesspool that was the Lower East Side in the 1960's. Some how even though they were locals, they couldn't have any more been from two different worlds. The Velvets being sexually ambivalent with an scoring of violence, and the Fugs goofy (with out being hippy dippy) and decidedly straight.

Lyrically a reference point that modern readers can use is the (loathsome) Bloodhound Gang. But thank God that the Fugs had a brain. One that could point out the hypocrisy of "normal" society and the lurid mind that the Counter Culture would swear they left behind.

The last track gives a glimpse at what would be the pinnacle of the Fugs recording carrier; "It crawled into my hand, honest", done for Reprise in 1968. Virgin Forrest is a Naked Lunchesque suite of seemingly random yet interconnected routines. Sound effects give way to Ovidian proclamations of sex. Before you can get worked up from the command to Aphrodite to take the penis, Tarzan breaks the mood explaining basic fucking to a noisy jungle, in appreciation come a chorus of turkey squawks. At some point the Photo Falling, Word Falling, Breakthrough In The Grey Room is quoted and the mind is clearly destroyed. In requiem delicate melody is rolled in, and logically a rousing hymn of Death Stay Thy Phantoms closes the cut up. Proving once and for all this world is hilarious, but man, it has to be taken seriously...

Fleshing out the CD reissue on Fugs Records are two live tracks recorded in 1967 and three from the aborted album for Atlantic. The live tracks are so-so and are nice to have for historic value. The same could not be said for the unreleased material, beside the reworking of Carpe Diem from the first record, and the embryonic take of Wide Wide River, is the unreleased Nameless Voices Crying For Kindness that's amazing in it's deceptiveness.

It's practically a discourse on the self, it's place in the universe, and purpose. To keep things from getting too dry, there's some references to fucking and it's all scored to a Doors back beat...Socrates enters the Hollywood Bowl stage, behind him the band, dressed in paisley togas tune up...he leans over the lip of the stage zeroing in on a honeydew of a teenybopper asking the nubile girl seated in the front row "How are ya? Where'd yah go to skewll? Do you know where the seat of man's soul is located ?" She faints dead away, her mind and pussy wet...both moist with ideas and possibilities...

Please click on the review title for selected track: Kill For Peace

Sun Ra And His Solararkestra • Other Planes Of There (Saturn, 1965, 1966, or 1967)

Is that the past I am viewing from the spaceships porthole? The inhabitants of the planet we have landed on are upright crab-men. Clothed in Neanderthal loin cloths, they are armed with laser shooting spears...you'll forgive me, I was looking through some old photos I had taken...wonderful times the 1990's...

There are places in the galaxy where the primitive and modern rest side by side. How often have I heard the drunken party guest mutter "Ape with a microwave", only to be reassured by the host that it was just a general observation. I shouldn't take it personally...

Sun Ra understood these contradictions. Listening to the title track of Other Planes of There ones ear has to quickly reassemble it's inner calendar. While the album as a whole is a study in contrast, it's the opening that embodies the concept.

Opening with a blast of dark chords , not unlike modern 20Th century classical, quickly it shifts to lopsided jazz consisting of sharp piano chords and reeds. Meandering in this mode for a while we are gradually taken to some sort of ancient Melody. Oboe painting a picture of the Serengeti. Not content to stay too long there, Ra's piano starts rumbling low end notes bringing us back to modern times. Content to shift from focus to focus, like most Ra compositions it ends when he's run out of notes.

Side two uses the same floor plan, only breaking the focus up into separate pieces. Quietly skittering in on sparse snare drums, tapping out a rhythm that seems more like a lead line, Sound Spectra/Spec Sket is then married to hunting call horns bathed in reverb. From there the maelstrom of side one resumes.

Next comes the tack Sketch. Duping the listener with what would seem like a normal swing style played by the piano, it's John Gilmore's sax that ups the oddball factor. What is the more Fortian moment here? The presentation of swing as a primitive movement, or Gilmore solo that sounds like he's playing along to a radio broadcast heard through the wall of the next room? The sonic slight of hand is the reverb. Used a cloaking device, it starts to muddy the sax to the point where the treatment becomes an instrument in it's self. Then jarringly shut off, the sax appears almost out of nowhere.

Sandwiched between the Sketch and the mammoth album closer Spiral Galaxy, is the aptly titled Pleasure. Languidly drifting in a sea of bowed bass and light piano, we are given another example of a sax solo that plays around the tune rather than join in.

By albums end, Spiral Galaxy show us that the tempo of the Heavens can be marked in 3/4 time. An ancient sounding military precision is kept here, framing a fussy sounding woodwind section - not unlike a tornado visible on the horizon. Jabs of shrill oboe crackling over piano.

Reverb is heavily placed on the woodwind segments, only to be quickly withdrawn for the other instruments to come through. All the while the 3/4 is being kept, but with small additional beats, shifting the focus. Just as it seems that it's winding down, some new squall of sound arises and your off again. Eventually it does end, but not in grotesque crescendo but with the tapping of some percussion. You've arrived safely back to the present time. Ra and Arkestra have taken you through various time shifts, and you barely moved an inch.

Like most Sun Ra recordings, it's a little hard to pin down the where and whens. While this session was recorded in 1964/65, it may not have seen print until 1966, or 1967. By then Ra had moved the Arkestra further in to space, employing the Moog as his main instrument. So a piano based record seems even further antiquated.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Sound Spectra / Spec Sket