Artist: The Fugs
Label: Fantasy
Genre: Alternative Rock
Release: May 1994   My Rating: 0
Duration:
Summary: I believe Lester Bangs once compared this album to a bunch of Neanderthals sitting around a fire beating on logs and baying at the moon. That's pretty accurate. Anyone looking for musical or production sophistication should look elsewhere. But if your looking for that primeval yalp that created music, and probably initiated procreation itself, you'll find it here.
As a teenager I owned all the Fugs' LPs on ESP. "The Fugs Second Album" is more polished. It should be since actual musicians were playing on it. Ed, Tuli, and Ken are writers, not musicians (unless you want to call Tuli's erectorine a musical instrument). "Virgin Fugs" was my all-time favorite ESP album by the Fugs. It's musically as crude as the "First Album", but the lyrics were more blantantly obscene and simply hilarious! I hope some bold recording company will re-release it someday.
I remember being amazed when Warner Brothers/Reprise signed the Fugs in the late sixties. I couldn't believe a major label had signed the band. Imagine something like this happening now- impossible! The Reprise Fugs albums were enjoyable, but they lacked the creative intensity and sheer chutzpah of the ESP albums. The Fugs tried like hell to sound as polished as your ordinary rock band back in those days. But it was like spraying gold paint on a pile of manure. The gold paint may look pretty, but it's what's underneath that's closer to the true essence. The Fugs were renegade satirists who did their best work on a small, independent label, ESP. They were never destined for "The Ed Sullivan Show".