The Fugs First Album

"I rented a former Kosher meat store on East 10th Street, with groovy tile walls and chicken-singeing equipment, which I transformed into a vegetarian literary zone called the Peace Eye Bookstore. I left the words 'Strictly Kosher' on the front window. Next door above the Lifschutz wholesale egg market lived Tuli Kupferberg, a beat hero who was featured in anthologies such as The Beat Scene, and who published several fine magazines, Birth and Yeah, which he sold on the streets of the East Village. ... Although it's difficult to recreate the precise panoply of reasons Tuli and I founded the Fugs in late 1964, when the word 'folk-rock' had not yet been invented, nevertheless I recall saying to Tuli after a poetry reading, 'Let's form a band. We'll chant poetry and write some songs. And we'll do a lot of partying.' Tuli eagerly agreed. Our first task was to think of a name. We felt we couldn't get away with a blatantly erotic name and something like 'The Yodeling Anarcho-Socialists' seemed inexact and limiting. It was Tuli who came up with 'The Fugs,' from the fornicatory euphemism Norman Mailer had utilized in his novel, The Naked and the Dead" (CD notes by Ed Sanders).

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