“We just did all this for a joke”: the bizarre origins of The Fugs
Since when has having no musical ability ever stopped some musicians from making music? The foundation of punk rested on the fact that hardly anyone making music actually knew how to play an instrument. Instead, they were guided by feeling; bands like Sex Pistols and The Clash let their emotion do more than their technical ability ever could, and what resulted was something truly magnificent.
This attitude still resonates with many modern musicians. Sure, they want to know how to play their instruments, but they’re more interested in being in a band and working things out as they go. So many great songs are written based on feeling rather than technical ability; therefore, people are happy going into the creative process with less experience than necessary.
This approach to music was initially made famous following the punk movement. Punk ignited something in people worldwide who decided they wanted to make music as some form of release instead of looking at it as something technical. People put together a few chords and then started partying, playing music and recording whatever was remotely listenable.
A lot of great music came from this period. While it may not be what a future protégé puts on to learn, it represents a raw energy vital to many people. There are a lot of great bands now making experimental punk blended with plenty of other sounds that wouldn’t have been inspired to do so if not for this raw and chaotic period in music.
What’s interesting about The Fugs is that they had a similar approach to music, but it came a couple of decades earlier. Granted, there was a period in the 1960s when everybody wanted to be in a band, which was triggered following The Beatle’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and the subsequent British Invasion.
“The floodgates opened until the summer of ’65 when the Americans took the charts back with the folk-rock of The Byrds and Bob Dylan,” said E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt. “It transformed America. On February 8th, there were no bands in America; on February 9th, we had Ed Sullivan, and on February 10th, everybody had a band in their garage. It was literally overnight.”
Technical ability was a lot more important these days, even if a massive influx of people wanted to make music. However, The Fugs never seemed to be interested in this. In 1964, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were talking at a former Kosher meat store in New York, and they decided to start a band despite not having much musical ability at all. They were well versed in poetry, wanted to write lyrics, and enjoyed playing in a band and partying, but they didn’t expect to ever become anything big off the back of their music.
Now, as their music still has a place in the hearts of many listeners, Sanders admits that he wishes they had put more effort into things. He said they would have never taken such a relaxed approach had he known people would still be listening decades later.
“We had absolutely no sense or belief that there would be any interest in this stuff 30 years later,” he said. “It didn’t occur to us at all. Otherwise, we might have paid more careful attention to the recording techniques—the placement of microphones, the quality of the tape recorder and so forth—especially with the live material. On one level, we just did all this for a joke. We decided to have some fun, party, and write some songs.”
He concluded, “We were poets, and we certainly knew how to write words, but none of us went to Juilliard, and when we made the first record, we didn’t even know how to face microphones.”
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