Generally I try to find out if someone else has already said what I want to say. But with Led Zep it ain't possible. Do a search and what you get is either unbelievably fawning and worshipful, or some ignorant little netsnipe (I just made that word up) trashing them, generally while demonstrating total ignorance, in both the areas of music, and of literacy
That's because Led Zep was THE biggest band of their era. They absolutely dominated rock music in the 70's, and their shadow loomed over it for another two decades (actually it still looms over it, though it has diminished some). Which is of course, part of the problem. If you grew up like I did, having to hear them blasting out of FM rock radio every 15 minutes, constantly bombarded by their music, their image, and stoner dudes babbling about "Zeppelin" (when they weren't babbling about Ozzy. Or Rush if they were a little more sophisticated), hating them was very easy to do.
But, separated by time and exposure (or lack, should I say), you start to hear things. Twice in my life I've declared that I loathed them and divested myself of any recordings I had around. And twice I've acquired most of those same recordings again. And I've read books about them.
I still hate many things about them. I hate Robert Plant's screechy singing (he's fine when he brings it down to a normal register). I hate the ludicrous Tolkein-rip lyrics, intoned as if they were profound. I hate "Fool In The Rain" and "D'yer Maker." And I could go my whole life without ever hearing "Stairway To Heaven" again, and be happy. I hate their bloated, ponderous live recordings. I hate the "Song Remains The Same" movie, which is boring even if you are stoned. I hate pretty much any of their attempts at blues. I hate the way they helped push rock music into an album-oriented format, killing much of its spirit.
But, I admit - I love the Bert Jansch-ian guitar. I love the production - still the best sounding hard rock records ever - with complete definition but no loss of power. I love the Middle-Eastern and Celtic flourishes. I love the bold - maybe I should call it shameless, experimenting ("Black Dog"!). Most of all I love the sound of "Rock and Roll," and "Four Sticks," and especially "When The Levee Breaks."
Seen in perspective, they were horrible, awful, embarrassing, stupid, a big joke. But at their best, they could be something wonderful, too.
In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n’roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n’roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves. — J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits
It would be almost impossible to have never heard of The CRAMPS. Their career has been the stuff of legend. Dangerously bizarre but most of all cool, The CRAMPS represent everything that is truly reprehensible about rock’n’roll. Founding members Lux Interior (the psycho-sexual Elvis/Werewolf hybrid from hell) and guitar-slinging soul-mate Poison Ivy (the ultimate bad girl vixen) are the architects of a wicked sound that distills a cross of swamp water, moonshine and nitro down to a dangerous and unstable musical substance. Their cultural impact has spawned a legion of devil cults and dance-floor catfights, and created in its wake a cavalcade of cave-stomping imitators. As punk rock pioneers in the late seventies, they cut their teeth on the stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and recorded their first record at Sam Phillips legendary Sun Studios, funded mainly by Ivy’s income as a dominatrix in NYC. They coined the now popular term “psychobilly” on their 1976 gig posters. Their hair-raising live performances are still a total, no-holds-barred rock’n’roll assault. After a quarter century of mayhem, they’re too far gone to even consider any other course. (from the Cramps website)
Cemeteries, rock `n` roll, old mansions, horror movies, a splash of surrealism-add atmospheric clothing (preferably black) and some tongue-in-cheek humor, and the list does a pretty fair job of delineating the wacko-Gothic world of the Cramps.
This is the band, after all, that signed its current contract with Enigma Records at Bela Lugosi`s gravesite in Los Angeles. The band that foreshadowed today`s concerns about nutrition and diet with a 1981 song that cautioned listeners not to eat stuff off the sidewalk, no matter how good it looks. The band that once played a free concert for patients at a California mental hospital after being told by someone: ``You guys ought to play at a nut house. That`s where you belong.``
Formed some 13 years ago after Lux and Ivy migrated from California to New York-and added drummer Nick Knox and second guitarist Bryan Gregory (later replaced by Kid Congo Powers)-the Cramps forged their sound in the Big Apple`s punk/New Wave scene of the late `70s.
But while their early efforts displayed a good deal of punk`s urgency, their primary stylistic stomping ground became an alternate-universe version of rockabilly known as psychobilly-a crazed, take-it-to-the-max form where standard rockabilly vocal hiccups became desperate gulps and gasps, and rockabilly`s sprightly rhythms became stark, dark exercises in the weird and the warped. (Tom Popson - Chicago Tribune)
Conjuring a fiendish witches' brew of primal rockabilly, grease-stained '60s garage rock, vintage monster movies, perverse and glistening sex, and the detritus and effluvia of 50 years of American pop culture, the Cramps are a truly American creation much in the manner of the Cadillac, the White Castle hamburger, the Fender Stratocaster, and Jayne Mansfield. Often imitated, but never with the same psychic resonance as the original, the Cramps celebrate all that is dirty and gaudy with a perverse joy that draws in listeners with its fleshy decadence, not unlike an enchanted gingerbread house on the Las Vegas strip. The entire psychobilly scene would be unthinkable without them, and their prescient celebration of the echoey menace of first-generation rock & roll had a primal (if little acknowledged) influence on the rockabilly revival and the later roots rock movement. (Allmusic)
My favorite band of the original Sub Pop grunge explosion did not even come from Seattle. They came from Denver. And they really weren’t grunge either. The Fluid were for all intensive purposes, a garage punk band but they were really ahead of their time. When Punch N’ Judy came out in 1986, I think the term “garage” was really used for neo-60′s bands like The Chesterfield Kings. Punk was kind of a dirty word at this time. And punk is what the Fluid were all about. Pure unadulterated Punk Rock-n-Roll. The most obvious influence being Kill City era Iggy Pop. Just look at the cover of Freak Magnet. Whaddya think these dudes were going for?
Any music fan with some years behind them knows that there are bands that take you to a certain time and place every time you hear them. Some bands are so closely tied with a certain moment in your life that you cannot ever listen to them without the baggage (good or bad) of the past again. You revisit them years later and you are amazed at how quickly the sounds can transport you. When I hear The Fluid, I am instantly delivered back to 1989. I’m living in a shit-hole in Tulsa, smoking pot all the time. I’m eating a steady diet of Ramen Noodles and the smell of cat piss and incense fill the air. My favorite music is The God Bullies, Nirvana, Helios Creed, The Melvins, The U-Men and The Fluid.
I am stricken today at how totally “on the nod” a lot of this music sounds. Singer John Robinson was not much of a screamer. He liked to mumble his lyrics as if it was taking all he had just to stand upright and deliver them. Freak Magnet was one of my favorite late night, cigarette albums back in 1989. The music is just so debauched and detatched sounding. My favorite album by The Fluid however, is their first Sub Pop release Roadmouth which I bought back in 1989 on tye dye vinyl cuz I’m a pretentious asshole. The Jack Endino production really brings out the band. Even John belts out a few on this one. The band itself, who were made up of ex-Denver scenesters including former members of the proto-grunge outfit The Frantix, really lay it on thick. It and the follow-up EP, Glue, really had “it” whatever “it” was. One more album, Purple Metal Flake Music was released a few years later but by then the moment had passed. It’s a good album but y’know how zeitgeists are.
By Jonny Whiteside, for Rockabilly Hall Of Fame - reprinted without permission)
Singer - actor - wrestling promoter - horror archivist - porn producer Johnny Legend exists in a bizarre cultural vortex whose undertows perpetually whirl him into an episodic cycle of shenanigans that just get curiouser and curiouser. The wild-eyed, weird-bearded, longhaired dynamo, internationally known as the Rockabilly Rasputin, is a manic force, one you can find at just about every unsavory corner of the Hollywood underground. Always vibrating with eerie vigor and scheming up his latest hustle, Legend is possessed with an unrivaled fascination for the offbeat, thrust upon him from earliest childhood: He grew up in San Fernando, where he befriended neighbor Tor Johnson, the hulking, chrome-domed grappler of Plan 9 From Outer Space infamy, but the relationship suffered somewhat, Legend says, "after he let me play with his coffin and I accidentally left it out in the rain." Monster culture was a natural for Legend: "I was at Forry Ackerman's house and got to meet Ed Wood. I had my copy of the first Famous Monsters, and had Wood autograph it. He wrote this strange message: 'Whenever better monsters are made, I'll try. Ed Wood Jr.'"
Legend formed his first band, the Seeds of Time, in 1966. Conducting their own personal riot on the Sunset Strip, they played every joint in town, the same circuit worked by the Seeds, Love and the Doors. "We were kind of a progressive folk-rock band. I got shows at UCLA fraternities, and we started auditioning at places like the Sea Hag, all the Sunset Strip clubs, London Fog, Pandora’s Box. I had an Outer Limits monster costume that I got at an auction, the Giant Garbage Eater from the Henry Silva episode. We'd put somebody in that, hit the Strip and hand out fliers. This was pre-drug, it was really more a Mod thing, then the Seeds had a couple of hits and [Seeds singer] Sky Saxon started coming up and saying, 'Hey, I love you like a brother, but I'm probably gonna haveta sue your ass, so we changed the name to Shadow Legend in '67. That was a harder-edged band, doing more a Yardbirds hard rock, all original songs, playing the Hullabaloo, the Galaxy next to the Whisky. You'd do three sets a night for a week - one night the entire audience was Martha Raye and Neil Young."
In the early '70s, Legend "snuck into the film business," working PR campaigns and writing trailers for American International, and composing soundtracks for semi-hard-core stuff like Sexual Sensory Perception: Sex of the Future - he also appeared in the Z-grade exploitation flick Pot, Parents and Police ("a family film done on a skin-flick budget, which I co-starred in as a crazed hippie who gets stoned on mescaline and falls down the stairs") - and running with the lowlifes who pioneered pre-Deep Throat XXX.
Circa '73, Legend emerged at the forefront of Los Angeles’ rockabilly revival with a new group, Blue Midnight: "What we did wasn't Ruben & the Jets or Flash Cadillac or Sha Na Na - I formed the band for Gene Vincent, and then he died, so I figured what the hell? We didn't do fashion crap or mimic the songs, we just did them in our own versions."
Legend then quickly formed an outfit with volatile German rockabilly fanatic Ronnie Weiser and veteran singer Ray "Caterpillar" Campi. Momentum built slowly; without a major record deal, club dates were almost impossible to nail down at the time. Billy Zoom, later of X, joined up on guitar, and, as the Rollin' Rock Rebels, they embarked on a bizarre endeavor that, Legend says, "only about 10 people were interested in."
The notorious promoter-DJ Art Laboe brought them to the stage at Chino State prison ("Humble Harve was an inmate at the time," Legend says, referring to the KRLA boss jock and spouse killer), and with the assistance of sax honker Chuck Higgins, Blue Midnight began to mix with some of the Johnny Otis R&B stable. But bookings remained a problem; once Higgins had the group substitute for him at a Bell Gardens dive: "This was the scariest place I'd ever seen - a bunch of ex-cons, and within 10 minutes someone had smashed a guy's head through the jukebox; he was bleeding on the turntable." Zoom quietly packed up and left; Legend managed to keep his skull intact with an improvised honky-tonk set.
In the early '80s, Legend, along with several other Rollin' Rock Records players, became K-Tel International recording artists, touring Europe with supercharged 1950s renegades Jackie Lee "Jack the Cat" Waukeen Cochran and Tony "Wild Man" Conn. These were wild, drunken blitzkriegs, with Wild Man and the Cat still raging over career implosions suffered two decades earlier; Legend acted as chaperon and devil's advocate. Legend usually appeared in full Confederate-general uniform, caterwauling "The South Will Rise Again" (from Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs) along with such demented originals as "Soakin' the Bone" and "Mexican Love," the latter a favorite of the late Dennis Wilson, one of a small army of celebrity affiliations Legend seems to magnetically attract.
From Russ Meyer ultravixen Kitten Natividad to the late film noir bruiser Lawrence Tierney, Legend has commingled with just about everyone. The melding of horror movies, rock & roll and lucha libre is hardly novel at this late date, but for Legend, it all converged with a frightening inevitability. He was responsible for the recording of Classy Freddie Blassie's immortal "Pencil Neck Geek" and later the movie My Breakfast With Blassie, and enjoyed associations with such wrestling aficionados as Andy Kaufman and the Aztec Mummy; Legend the horror actor has suffered gruesome ends in movies such as Bride of Re-Animator and Children of the Corn III.
Legend's frantic pace is constant; curating an endless series of underworld sideshows, he pinballs on a hit-and-run, shock-and-thrill spree of film festivals, club dates, horror conventions, wrestling shows, acting jobs. He's always there, lurking in the shadows, rattling off staccato accounts of his bizarre feats, usually climaxing with a statement along the lines of "They finally pulled the plug and everyone went berserk and we had to beat a hasty escape." Legend never exaggerates - he doesn't need to.
The Lyres are, for all intents and purposes, Jeff Connolly - keyboardist, record freak (he earned the moniker "Mono Man" for his refusal to allow stereo recordings into his collection), and all-around madman. The band has gone through literally dozens of line-ups, with members being booted or exiting due to Conolly's legendarily difficult personality (Conolly once gave his definition of a group as "a group of people who do exactly what I tell them to do.")
Of the dozens of bands that emerged in the 1980s garage rock revival, Lyres were one of the few that seemed to realize that the point wasn't about how much paisley clothing you could wear or finding the right vintage effects pedals (i.e. wallowing in nostalgia for an era you were too young to have actually witnessed -- the musical equivalent of living in an episode of Happy Days), but about playing cool stripped-down rock & roll. Jeff "Monoman" Conolly understood that the Sonics and the Ramones were traveling in the same direction, but merely using a different path to get there, and, as a result, Lyres' recordings have an energy and passion that's stood the test of time far better than most of their contemporaries. While Conolly's Vox Continental organ keeps his 1960s obsessions up-front throughout, the rest of the band is capable of generating a hard-driving groove, and the performances capture what was exciting and soulful about 1960s punk without drowning in a sea of "retro." (Allmusic)
The Lyres originated from the ashes of DMZ - essentially the same concept, with perhaps a slightly more new wave/punk approach. DMZ even managed a debut album on Sire(!), produced by Flo and Eddie (!!) though garage fans have dismissed it as too slick.
After DMZ shattered, Conolly founded Lyres with fellow ex-DMZ'ers - who soon enough fell by the wayside. The band made a name for itself with their second album, On Fyre, which sold surprisingly well, even in the US, while establishing them a solid European following. The follow-up, Lyres Lyres, was even better.
After that, the constantly-re-aligning band seemed to lose its inspiration, closing the 80's off with the intermittently successful A Promise Is A Promise, then largely disappearing, poking its head up once or twice in the 90's with a full-length album or another single or EP, as well as a stream of live albums from various sources. The inspiration of their early days showed only in flashes.
The Lyres were inactive for most of the early 2000's, but of late have been touring again, mostly in Europe. Conolly remains Conolly.
Interesting local SJ band. Here's what it says at CD Baby:
Sweet HayaH is composed of Nehal, Devin, Aaron, and Josh.
Devin and Aaron had been in several bands together prior to the birth of Sweet HayaH. Josh had also played in several bands including "Casey Wickstrom and The After Dinner Theater." Later on, Devin, Aaron, and Josh would form "Suburban Meltdown" - still performing locally.
In the Spring of 2011, Nehal met Devin, Aaron and Josh at an Open Mic. That night, they played a 45 minutes improvised set, and knew they would be playing together for a long time.
Shortly thereafter, the four musicians started collaborating on original material, to eventually form the band now known as Sweet HayaH ("HayaH in Arabic means "Life").
Their music is a fusion of rock, soul, blues, and a touch of world.
Devin posses a knowledge of classical guitar, but enjoys playing and composing tunes in various genres including rock, metal, reggae, etc. Josh and Aaron's versatile playing makes it possible for the band to jam out to Nehal's eclectic tunes. Egyptian-born and French-raised Nehal had been a local solo singer/songwriter who started performing in July 2010. She composes mainly on the piano, and writes songs in English, French, and Spanish.
Sweet HayaH is energy and passion-filled, and ALWAYS looking forward to playing for those who want to listen and groove to their tunes.
(Excerpted from an SFGate review of Jeff Tamarkin's "Got A Revolution" - without permission)
One day in 1965, Marty Balin, an up-and-coming local singer who'd recently co-founded a band called Jefferson Airplane (and who would later become famous for leaping off the stage at Altamont, attacking a Hells Angel who was beating a fan, and being immediately knocked out himself), took acid for the first time. He and roommate Bill Thompson, who would go on to become the Airplane's manager, decided to go for a stroll in the Haight, whereupon, Thompson says in "Got a Revolution!": "A guy comes up and takes a knife out and goes 'Hey, man, give me your money.' Marty looks at me and goes, 'Is this part of the trip?' "
Balin recalls, "I'm looking at this guy and he's sparkling. I'm going, 'Man, you are beautiful.' And then I put my arm around the guy. Finally the guy gave up and said to Thompson, 'Hey, man, you better take this guy to a hospital.' "
The combination of shining innocence, glorious vision and potentially catastrophic cluelessness encapsulated in this moment propagates fractal-like through "Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane," in which author Jeff Tamarkin traces the band's history from the childhood of its members to the present.
Born from the explosive convergence of youth culture, psychedelics, rock 'n' roll and outrage over the Vietnam War, the Airplane was, for the late '60s and early '70s, at the forefront not only of "The San Francisco Sound" but also of a movement that saw saving the world from government intrusion and societal repression as not merely possible but mandatory. "Now it's time for you and me/ Got a revolution!" Balin would exhort the crowd in his extraordinary voice.
When band members Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were expecting their baby, Kantner's song "A Child Is Coming" suggested not registering births to keep one's children free of authoritarian clutches. (The baby in question, Tamarkin reports, is now a sober Christian living in Southern California.)
The Airplane sold millions of records, influenced hordes of bands and galvanized audiences around the world. Meanwhile, their music was often eclipsed by their offstage antics. They embraced their role as poster children for the transformative properties of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and rarely lost an opportunity to outrage conventional sensibilities -- as Kantner wrote in one lyric: "We are forces of chaos and anarchy/ Everything they say we are, we are/ And we are very/ Proud of ourselves."
(Sadly, the Airplane morphed into the less-interesting Jefferson Starship - who then morphed into the gawdawful Starship with Mickey Thomas and Craig Chaquico, who once unabashedly admitted that Journey and Styx were his favorite bands)
Teach Yourself Fugging: The Lower East Side's First Underground Band Refuses to Burn Out
The thing you have to accept about the Fugs is that they'll never sound as good as you hope. You assume the Lower East Side's first true underground band will be tough, gritty, minimalist, urban protopunks. Uh-uh. That was the Lower East Side's second true underground band, who were never quite as underground despite their name. Lou Reed was a contract songwriter, Andy Warhol a celebrity artist, so the Velvets signed with a major, where The Velvet Underground and Nico climbed all the way to 171 in Billboard. The Fugs recorded first for Folkways's Broadside "subsidiary" and then for ESP-Disk, conceived to promulgate Esperanto, where they became the first rock act ever to crack the Billboard top 100 on an independent label (an arty one, that is). This feat combined brand placement--Norman-Mailer-for-f**k name in the media capital of the world--with lyrics of a sexuality rarely if ever equalled. But ESP-Disk, which made its mark documenting Albert Ayler and other jazz wildmen, doesn't tell you what you need to understand about the Fugs. Folkways does. Like many daring white American rock musicians of the mid '60s, the Fugs were folkies.
All right, so I'm overstating. There were folkies who were musicians--and then surfaced in the Byrds, the Dead, etc.--and folkies who were fans. The Fugs--meaning Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and not, for now, drummer Ken Weaver--were barely the latter. They were beatnik-turning-hippie poet-politicos who sang "We Shall Overcome" at meetings (Sanders) and had the immemorial folkie habit of pouring new words into old tunes (Kupferberg). That they were hardly musicians at all was definitely kind of punk, and crucial to their sound and achievement. Nevertheless--as was not true of the Velvets, or Bob Seger either--they filled out their band almost exclusively with folkies. Folkies who could play, too, starting with nutcases Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber and ending with technicians who would eventually emigrate to El Lay and back Carole King. Just as important, they had a deep pastoral bent. Lou Reed never set William Blake to music, Frank Zappa either. And you've heard of tree huggers? Here's Sanders's 1966 "Elm Fuck Poem": "How I love to rim/your bark slits/kiss the leaves/above your dripping elm crotch."
The Fugs' Folkways and ESP-Disk sessions remain available (on Fantasy), as does Songs From a Portable Forest (on Gazell), which cherry-picks the politer new material Sanders favored when the band re-formed in 1985, some of which--especially the prolonged, elegiac "Dreams of Sexual Perfection" and "Refuse to Be Burnt Out"--packs considerable power in the poetical mode that usually spells death in rhythm music. But in the '60s the Fugs also signed with a major, two in fact--first Atlantic, which refused to release the resultant album, and then Reprise, where Warners shunted its far-out signings. The Fugs made four albums there, all of which seemed gone forever and will probably be gone again soon. In the meantime, Rhino Handmade, where Rhino shunts its far-out reissues in limited editions of 5000, has brought out Electromagnetic Steamboat: all four Reprise albums plus the previously unavailable Atlantic plus (collectors, you gotta love 'em) the mono version of the Reprise debut Tenderness Junction. Three CDs, $56 shipped, available only at www.rhinohandmade.com--definitely not for everyone, especially since they're unauthorized by the band, which Sanders says hasn't gotten a royalty statement from Warners in 35 years. But just as definitely worth knowing. However obscure the Fugs' corner of rock history may seem, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg are bigger than that. We're lucky they passed through.
There are poets and there are poets, and don't ask me the difference. But Sanders's Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985 won an American Book Award in 1988, and he's published four collections since. A tireless, lifelong radical environmentalist, he also started a biweekly newspaper in Woodstock in 1995. This is no departure--his publishing ventures go back to the pre-Fugs Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, his journalistic career to 1971's The Family, an unequivocally disapproving investigation of the Manson murders that will soon be back in print where it belongs. So at 62, he has more going on than any but a few aging rock stars, active icons included.
Now 78, Kupferberg is a less obvious case, because he chose a less achievement-oriented life path. Like his departed contemporaries Neal Cassady and Harry Smith (who brought the band to Folkways), he's a pure bohemian, so well-versed in that proud tradition that he embraces the word itself. His Fugs connection is the highest-status credential of an oeuvre that includes the found-poetry comedy album No Deposit, No Return (out on CD and still funny after 35 years), countless topical lyrics set to one of the thousands of melodies he carries around in his head, two volumes of celebrity baby photos, and, most recently, Teach Yourself Fucking, a collection of crude cartoons and collages, mostly political, featuring, every 15 pages or so, "The Old Fucks at Home," in which two geezers one assumes to be Tuli and his mate (known around here as forceful former Voice production manager Sylvia Topp) watch TV and kibitz. "Flirt globally," "Fuck locally," goes one exchange. Another: "I'm going to be discovered after I die," "I hope it ain't too long after . . . you'll stink like hell."
The conventional wisdom is that the Fugs cleaned up too much on Reprise. This is debatable. Certainly the problem isn't the accomplished playing--it's material written after their first burst, when they were ejaculating poetic smut faster than hydropathes at a circle jerk. Few of the later songs have the scabrous rightness of "Kill for Peace" or "Doin' All Right" (with the famous line about screwing your mom), neither ever re-recorded. But most of the ace material on the Folkways debut was substantially improved on the farewell live Golden Filth. And while the ESP LP (now called The Fugs Second Album) is somewhat more consistent than the Reprise debut Tenderness Junction, it includes items no one mentions anymore ("Frenzy," "Skin Flowers") as well as the 11-minute fantasia "Virgin Forest," which isn't redeemed by its sex parts. I prefer Tenderness Junction's "Aphrodite Mass (In Five Sections)," easily the most dubious of the many tracks--pullulating "The Garden Is Open," brutal "War Song," doomed "Dover Beach"--on which musicianship comes to the aid of the part of Sanders that wasn't content describing group gropes. It's his NYU classics major side, his prizewinning side; not even Patti Smith made such convincing rock and roll from the likes of Blake, Arnold, Olson, and Berrigan. But for 20 tracks in 33 minutes, Sanders's poetic nature runs amok on It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest, one of the most eccentric albums ever financed by a major corporation. Right, I love the way "River of Shit" ("Wide Wide River" in the booklet) is surrounded by "Burial Waltz" and "Life Is Strange," both slightly superior versions of exactly what you'd fear. But the laughs are too rare.
Which brings us to long-departed avatar Weaver, the drummer-songwriter-monologist of whose current whereabouts Kupferberg has said: "Ken Weaver was born again and hasn't learned to talk yet." Truth is, as a reputed CIA translator with his name on a well-loved compendium of Texas vernacular ("slick as two eels fuckin' in a bucket of snot") as well as "Wide Wide River," "Slum Goddess," and "I Couldn't Get High," Weaver, like Kupferberg, probably remains a very funny man. Back when New Yorkers could catch the Fugs free at a different demo every month, he was an anything-for-a-laugh guy with no discernible poetic side--the one you could imagine actually trying to put his bad thing in a lesbian dwarf. But the rhetoric was Sanders's. For of course, beyond poetry and revolution, the Fugs were always (a) brazenly sexual and (b) unapologetically hilarious. Only Frank Zappa did anything comparable--and for Zappa, a very anal fellow, sex was interesting to the precise extent that it was also demeaning. The Fugs loved the stuff, enough to embarrass Richie Unterberger in his generally excellent notes to the Rhino set: "the humor can seem juvenile several decades down the road, when such language in popular culture isn't as shocking as it once was." But the Fugs never relied on so-called four-letter words. Instead, as becomes fully apparent on the monologues of the live Golden Filth, they were rich in incident and circumlocuted like crazy--like poets. "She's lying down in viscid, skooshy strands of cherry Jell-O, buttocks popping in arpeggios of lust. . . . She is as horny as a heathen. Her dildo is made out of a petrified tapir snout. Around her neck is an amulet made from onyx-colored tit wax."
Actually, Sanders does apologize for the '60s Fugs' testosterone content, but to me their comedy drips--nay, pullulates--with agape, tenderness, and sensual awareness. If it's long on high school jokes, well, most of the audience was under 25. And whatever the biographical details, about which I always used to wonder when our paths crossed back then, I note that Ed and Tuli have each stayed with one strong woman since the band began. I note also that their political passions remain uncompromised. Sanders, who wrote his first major poem on prison toilet paper after attempting to board a nuclear submarine in 1961, still commits acts of civil disobedience, and Teach Yourself Fucking is full of attacks on the war machine and The New York Times. They're recording a "final" album, too. Maybe their depth of commitment, as well as their genius, is why their '60s music, for all of its evident missteps and shortcomings, sounds even more compelling now than it did when they were a cultural force. I wish I could say as much of technically accomplished contemporaries like the Byrds and the Band. But I can't. I just checked.
