From the Vaults Friday: The Fugs, The Fugs First Album (1965)

The Year: 1965
The Album: The Fugs, The Fugs First Album
Who It Influenced: The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, The Fall, Half-Japanese, The Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis

These days, making a lo-fi, punk-spirited, DIY record is almost mundane. But in 1965? There was pretty much no one doing that. No one except the Fugs, that is; who, in their day, debuted with what may've been the first-ever underground rock record.

Half of The Fugs First Album was captured in one three-hour jam session, an acoustic goof-off in which the smart-ass poets behind the project —Tali Kupferberg and Ed Sanders— recast folksongs and traditionals in their own politicized manner, on vocals, rudimentary percussion, and barely-tuned acoustic guitar.

Later, they roped in members of drug-folk weirdos The Holy Modal Rounders to help them flesh out the other tunes; which ironically reappropriated rock'n'roll for their own ends. Rock was still new enough to be considered a public menace, but The Fugs' were quick to critique the genres new orthodoxy; to spin a subversion on the subversion.

The resulting tunes are anti-rock cliché ("Slum Goddess"), anti-locker-room-machismo ("Boobs a Lot"), anti Vietnam conflict ("Carpe Diem"), and anti-American-imperialism ("CIA Man"). They're raw, raucous, funny, and scuzzy; scrappy lo-fi ditties years before the punk world would embrace DIY as a badge of honor.