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The Fugs
The Fugs are a band formed in New York City in late 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders.
The band was named by Kupferberg, from a euphemism for "fuck" used in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead.
The band's original core members, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver, were joined at various times in the 1960s by a number of others, some of whom were noted session musicians or members of other bands. These included Weber and Stampfel, bassist John Anderson, guitarist Vinny Leary, guitarist Peter Kearney, keyboardist Lee Crabtree, guitarist Jon Kalb, guitarist Stefan Grossman, singer/guitarist Jake Jacobs, guitarist Eric Gale, bassist Chuck Rainey, keyboardist Robert Banks, bassist Charles Larkey, guitarist Ken Pine, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, and drummer Bill Wolf. For most of the last twenty-five years, The Fugs have been composed of primary singer/songwriters Sanders and Kupferberg, composer, song writer, guitarist, and long-time Allen Ginsberg-collaborator Steve Taylor, singer/songwriter and percussionist Coby Batty, and Scott Petito, a musician and music producer.
A satirical and self-satirizing rock band with a political slant, they have performed at various war protests - against the Vietnam War and since the 1980s at events around other US-involved wars. The band's often frank and almost always humorous lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics have caused a hostile reaction in some quarters.
Their participation in a protest against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, during which they purportedly attempted to encircle and levitate the Pentagon, is chronicled in Norman Mailer's novel, Armies of the Night.
The Fugs have remained committed to literature and poetry with a socio-political thrust and often mine the history of European and American literature as inspiration for song lyrics. One of their better-known songs is an adaptation of Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach. Others were renditions of William Blake's poems: Ah! Sun-flower and How Sweet I Roam'd.
After pursuing individual projects over the years, in 1984 Sanders and Kupferberg decided to reform the band and stage a series of Fugs reunion concerts. On Wednesday, August 15, 1988 at the Byrdcliff Barn in Woodstock, New York, the Fugs performed one of their first real reunion concerts. This incarnation of the Fugs included, at various times, guitarist and singer Steve Taylor who was also Allen Ginsberg's teaching assistant at the Naropa Institute, drummer and singer Coby Batty, bassist Mark Kramer, guitarist Vinny Leary (who had contributed to the first two original Fugs albums), and bassist/keyboardist Scott Petito. The re-formed Fugs performed concerts at numerous locations in the U.S. and Europe over the next several years.
In 1994 the band intended to perform a series of concerts in Woodstock, New York, (where Sanders had lived for many years) to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which had actually occurred near the town of Bethel, some 50 miles away. They learned that a group of promoters were planning to stage Woodstock '94 that August near Saugerties, about 8 miles from Woodstock, and that this festival would be much more tightly controlled and commercialized than the original. Consequently The Fugs decided to stage their own August 1994 concerts as "The Real Woodstock Festival", in an atmosphere more in keeping with the spirit of the 1969 festival. The basic Fugs roster of Sanders, Kupferberg, Taylor, Batty, and Petito performed in this series of concerts with additional vocal support from Amy Fradon and Leslie Ritter and also with appearances by Allen Ginsberg and Country Joe McDonald.
In 2008 their song "CIA Man" is featured in the movie Burn After Reading by the Coen brothers.
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