The Fugs

In the closing months of 1964, the Fugs assembled at the Peace Eye bookstore in New York's East Village, widely viewed as the earliest underground rock ensemble. Ed Sanders, who owned Peace Eye, and poet Tuli Kupferberg supplied the stable center through repeated membership shifts. Although rooted in the beat literary world, the pair, like their associate Allen Ginsberg, drove directly into the swirl of 1960s activism and psychedelia. Joined by an assortment of strays from the New York folk and jug-band milieu—including Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, some barely competent on their instruments—the group insisted on performing rock & roll on its own terms, saturated with political and social satire plus explicit profanity and sexual references still absent from records in 1965.

Their first album appeared on the storied avant-garde ESP label and mixed comparable measures of disorder and appeal, yet compositional skill and instrumental command advanced rapidly enough to produce a second LP that was unquestionably the most inflammatory and satirical release ever to reach the Top 100 at the time of issue. After completing an unreleased album for Atlantic, the band shifted to Frank Sinatra's Reprise label and delivered several further sets of equally barbed material whose instrumental finish had grown more refined while the lyrics stayed equally caustic. By shattering lyrical prohibitions in popular music, the Fugs cleared ground for the still bolder provocations of the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, and others.

The group dissolved around 1970, after which Sanders and Kupferberg kept writing prose and poetry and occasionally created or performed music separately or during Fugs reunions. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Sanders and Kupferberg formally resumed touring and recording as the Fugs, issuing the praised albums No More Slavery in 1985, Final CD, Pt. 1 in 2003, and Be Free! Final CD, Pt. 2, tracked between 2005 and 2009 and released in 2010. The reactivation also triggered the box sets Electromagnetic Steamboat: The Reprise Recordings on Rhino Handmade and Don’t Stop! Don’t Stop! on Ace, which paired the first two albums with numerous unreleased tracks. Kupferberg's health nevertheless deteriorated in the late 2000s, most sharply after two strokes in 2009. He died in Manhattan on July 12, 2010, at the age of 86, ending the Fugs story.