The Fugs – It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest

If The Fugs were to have their very own "Sgt Pepper" or "We're Only in It for the Money" then this is it... which isn't saying much. I just like these guys... always have. Maybe it was the zeitgeist back in the late 60s... I don't know ...but I have soft spot in my heart (and in my head) for these chaps. Be that as it may, this Four Men with Beards release sounds fine although the pressing is not without fault. There is the occasional crackle (especially in the run out) but otherwise, well, to the best of my recollection, this thing has never sounded all that great. My main issue is with the cover art. It has a faint yellow tint through the somewhat faded artwork. Could have been better, especially since it is a favoured relic of my misspent youth. My original copy is long gone due to many stoned-out Saturday night soirees.

The first Fugs album I ever heard was Virgin Fugs which is a completely ramshackle affair but back then (around 1978) sounded to me like the most unruly and anarchic folk-punk rock. Virgin Fugs was outtakes from earlier studio sessions which their label (ESP-Disk at the time) decided to issue without consulting the band (and without paying them either). But - as The Fugs would always say - they HAD signed the worst recording contract since Leadbelly - and at least they could joke about it.

A bit later I saw a copy of It Crawled Into My Hand Honest second-hand so I pounced on it. The band, as represented on this record, are much better produced.... Crystal Liaison is almost commercial psychedelia in the mould of The Turtles say.... and if I didn't get some of the literary references then it didn't really matter as this is the type of album you can get into over a period of decades.

The important track is probably When The Mode Of the Music Changes. The title is a quote from Plato's Republic ("when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake") and the song was covered in due course by that most political of all highly politicised bands, Czechoslovakia's Plastic People Of the Universe.

Apart from that - Ed Sanders does his country-protest stuff, in which style which he continued to record over the next few years.
Quite a lot of the album consists of small jokes, quips and brief novelty ditties. It's a unique album really and probably the Fugs last great work.

The best material The Fugs ever came up with is undoubtedly on the first 3 albums they recorded for ESP. So - even if that label ripped them off - at least they got to put it ou there. It's hard to think of another record label that would have let them get away with it.

A wonderfully irreverent slice of the counterculture 'Beat-to-Hippie' movement happening in New York City in the mid to late '60s. "It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest" is an amusing series of musical observations presented in thinly veiled euphemisms and the sex and drug-culture reference points of the time. The band took their name from Mailer's acclaimed wartime novel 'The Naked And The Dead', in which the publishers suggested he use "Fug" in place of "Fuck". This is a reissue of the album which followed "The Fugs First Album" [an uncensored reissue of "The Village Fugs..."], "The Fugs" and "Tenderness Junction". A release of outtakes from the 1st album exists as "Virgin Fugs".

The band was founded by Ed Sanders, author and publisher of Lower East Side's 'Peace Eye Bookstore' (launched with accompaniment by "The Holy Modal Rounders", Warhol art and "Fuck You - A Magazine Of The Arts"), along with Brooklyn College graduate and social activist Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg, on vocals, notably had an epiphany after an unsuccessful jump from the Manhattan Bridge - an event adapted in Ginsberg's 'Howl'. The Kuperberg-written fourth track on side two "When the Mode Of Music Changes" echoes some of the influences of Plato's 'The Republic' - also found on "The Deviants" seminal 1967 UK album "Ptooff!" - whilst the complexities of Haiku poetry are applied to teenage pregnancy in "National Haiku Contest". The band's drummer, Ken Weaver, became a translator of Russian for the CIA and later wrote the 'Texas Crude' guide to slang with Robert Crumb, who's cartoon art and 'Mr Natural' adorned much '60's work - such as the excellent Big Brother/Joplin "Cheap Thrills" album. After a number of line-up changes it was these three, Sanders, Kupferberg & Weaver, who remained at the core of "The Fugs". An album by the band, on Atlantic, was rejected by Jerry Wexler after completion (tracks later released on CD as a partial compilation with "The Fugs" as "The Fugs Second Album"). Mo Ostin at Reprise, where Zappa was an acceptable flavor, welcomed them and, after a spring tour in '68 with "Pete Green's Fleetwood Mac" and "Ten Years After", the band released "Tenderness..." followed by "It Crawled..." in a highly productive year.

With Ken Pine and Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar on guitars and Charles Larkey on bass this album's 19 tracks reflect much of the band's work in the Greenwich Village scene, from Bleecker Street to The Players Theater, where Hendrix once jammed in the basement. For those exploring criss-cross references to the likes of Belafonte, Pélieu, Verlaine, Beach, Burroughs, Lebel, Hendrix, Zappa and the inhabitants of 'The Village' network, this is a fine vinyl reissue archive of political surrealism, costumed satire and memories from those days when 'the mood of music' changed a teenage outlook and 'the authorities' became 'concerned'...