Lower east side story

New York’s taboo-busting Fugs went from being the world’s first underground group to America’s most wanted by the FBI. Kris Needs traces the eventful story behind their new boxed set.

Early 1965: The Charlatans were about to galvanise California’s acid rock revolution at the Red Dog Saloon, Jimi Hendrix was still playing R&B standards on the chitlin’ circuit and the UK was still riding the beat and R&B booms unleashed by The Beatles and Stones. With the Velvet Underground yet to appear, New York was known for the folk movement which had spawned Bob Dylan in the West Village but, across town on the Lower East Side, a ramshackle gaggle of degenerate beat poets and artists had banded together to celebrate unfettered sexual liberation and recreational drug use while lobbing lyrical Molotov cocktails at a government plunging its country further into the Vietnam War.

Led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, the Fugs have been credited with starting everything from underground counter-culture to punk rock. ‘(The Fugs) invented the Underground,’ wrote Miles in a 1968 International Times, while Lester Bangs called them, ‘The first truly underground band in America.’ They predated DIY protopunks like the Stooges, the MC5’s ‘fucking in the streets’ manifesto and shock-rockers like the Mothers Of Invention and Alice Cooper.

Ten years before CBGBs thrust New York back into the spotlight the Fugs were pioneering punk-style disruption under their Zap! Zap! …

by Kris Needs
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