Who the Fug? Yeah, that's the guy.

Some of you (probably most of you) are too young to recognize the name, but The Fugs were a seminal influence on music in the mid to late '60s. Sort of a Mothers of Invention without the musicality; a Velvet Underground without the polish. Protopunk, maybe ur-punk. The name derives from Norman Mailer's corruption of the word fuck in The Naked and the Dead.

Only when I read Kupferberg's NYT obit http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html
did I realize the band, whose heyday was 1965-69, had actually been reunited for the past quarter-century, recording new tracks as recently as this year, even as illness confined Kupferberg to his apartment. That's dedication.

They were not good musicians (they were basically antiwar, pro-sex poets and potheads having fun). But an amazing amount of their music has stuck in my memory: I Couldn't Get High, Kill for Peace, Slum Goddess (of the Lower East Side), and the anthemic Wide, Wide River (River of Shit).

Here's a tiny sampling:

Doin' All Right:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUCjORJhQZQ&feature=related
Nothing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HmJX11_AQE&feature=related

It's not exactly stuff for the ages, though the group also put the words of William Blake and Matthew Arnold to music. Along with contemporaries like Ginsberg, Mailer, Garcia and Hendrix, The Fugs captured a cultural moment. And they shared the fun they had doing so with the rest of us. Thanks, Tuli.