A Fugs Discography

In this simple discography of The Fugs, Ed Sanders, and Tuli Kupferberg, I attempt to list each recording (LP, Single, CD, tape or cassette) that I have been able to trace, though omitting downloads and online content. Reissues are usually noted with the original publication, but I list separately reissued discs where there is variation of title or of content. There may well be inconsistencies in the coverage. With the ESP recordings in particular, there are numerous variations in the packaging and labelling of the album which I shall not attempt to enumerate here.

The Fugs themselves were formed in New York City in 1964 by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Later that year they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of The Holy Modal Rounders. Sanders says the Fugs started out with an air of anything-goes possibility—what a show could be and how the band would progress were entirely up for grabs.

We started out in Greenwich Village, on the Lower East Side, and we were in the middle of a lot of music: the jazz clubs, the civil-rights songs, the folk movement, rock’n’roll. Everyone had guitars in their apartments, and we’d put beat poetry to music. It was a time when you could rent a store front, rent a smoke machine, have someone dancing in a bathtub full of grapes, play some songs, and you could charge admission.—SANDERS

1965

Blake set to music—Ed Sanders and The Fugs

The chronological sequence of musical settings of a poet provides an interesting measure of the reputation of that poet and the reception history of their oeuvre. Musicians, too, are influenced by literary fashion. The first known setting of Blake’s poetry (a setting of “The Chimney Sweeper”, in The Illustrated Book of Songs for Children) appeared in 1863 which, hardly coincidentally, was the year of publication of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake. There were a few more Blake songs in the 1870s, mostly single settings from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, perhaps 80 or so for the rest of the nineteenth century, and then a flood of compositions from 1900 onwards that still shows no sign of stopping.

The nineteenth century established the various forms Blakean music would take: children’s songs, drawing-room ballads, art songs (the equivalent of the German Lied), and choral works. These classical forms persisted into the twentieth century, and to a lesser extent persist today. When it came to Blake, even a popular songwriter like Alec Wilder, who had worked with Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Tony Bennett, felt able only to compose songs for children. Not until William Bolcom completed his wildly eclectic setting of the complete Songs of Innocence and of Experience (in 1984 though not recorded until 2004) do we get, for example, “The Little Vagabond” as Broadway show-tune, or a bluegrass “Shepherd”.

More about cricket and Blake

And what should they know of England who only England know?—KIPLING

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?—JAMES

By the 1770s the game of cricket had reached a high level of development. It had recognized, accepted rules or—this being the eighteenth century—laws. It was played by teams sufficiently well known to attract large and enthusiastic crowds, and to arouse passionate local loyalties. In 1765 a crowd of 12,000 was reported to have attended a match of Dartford against Surrey at the Artillery Ground in Chiswell Street. The number of players was usually the same—eleven a side—though matches were sometimes played that involved fewer or more than that number. Bowling was underarm, and before the 1760s the ball came skimming at the batsman with only minimal bounce. Batting was no easy matter on the primitive, rough pitches that were the norm.

The bat was curved like a hockey stick, and it was only during the great days of the Hambledon club, in Hampshire, in the 1770s and 1780s that bowlers developed the knack of making the ball kick up at the batsman. This, as well as the addition of the third stump to the two widely spaced ones previously used, made it necessary to switch to the “straight” bat, more easily used with precision. The expression was later to become something like a metaphor for cricketing virtue.

William Blake and fake news

William Blake has declared Jerusalem to be the capital of England and dismissed all other suggestions as fake news.

Gerald Eades Bentley, Jr (23 August 1930—31 August 2017)

I first met Jerry Bentley in 1992 or 1993. I had drafted a paper on William Muir and the Blake Press at Edmonton and sent it off to Blake Quarterly. The journal wrote back to say that G.E. Bentley, Jr had also sent them a paper on Muir and could we sort out two complementary papers for publication. We met up in Oxford where Jerry and Beth had rooms at Merton College and agreed a split. Jerry would provide a transcript and commentary on Muir’s correspondence with the bookseller Bernard Quaritch. And I would provide a biography of Muir with his letters to Kerrison Preston.

Actually it was Beth I met first. Jerry had been delayed somewhere so Beth got me to help with the laundry.  I wonder now if, say, years earlier it had been Sir Geoffrey Keynes at the door, would Beth have sought his assistance in folding sheets? Probably yes.

Jerry was the first distinguished literary scholar I had ever met. Our two papers appeared in Blake Quarterly in Summer 1993, and his had a note

Mr. Keri Davies has generously allowed me to see his essay on Muir, coincidentally written at the same time as my own, and to improve mine on the basis of his.

Naively, I thought this was the generous courtesy one would receive from Blake scholars as a matter of course. Alas!

William Blake and Cricket

When reading Blake’s earliest surviving writings, I find myself tantalised by the roads not taken: the precocious Augustan poet of the Poetical Sketches; or the broad comedy of the manuscript known, from its opening paragraph, as “An Island in the Moon”.

In the Moon, is a certain Island near by a mighty continent, which small island seems to have some affinity to England. & what is more extraordinary the people are so much alike & their language so much the same that you would think you was among your friends.

“An Island in the Moon” is a 17 page fragment written in pen and ink in Blake’s hand, and now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. It notably contains the earliest extant drafts of “Nurse’s Song”, “Holy Thursday”, and “The Little Boy Lost”, which were to make their first published appearance in his Songs of Innocence (1789).

Blake set to music—T. L. Hately

Donald Fitch, writing in 1990, suggested that

[t]he earliest person to suggest a Blake text for music was apparently … the Unitarian minister James Martineau, who, in about 1874 proposed the text “Can I see another’s woe” for use as a hymn; two years later Doyne Courtenay Bell made the first art-song setting of this text (xxi).

For many years this latter work

Doyne Courtney Bell, 1831-1888.—On Another’s Sorrow; song for voice and piano.—London: R. Mills & Sons, 1876.—4 p. (Fitch no 96)

remained the earliest known setting. But it now appears that the first published musical setting for any work by Blake (though slightly adjusted as to wording) is “Chimney Sweeper’s Song” (from Innocence), on pages 128-129 of The Illustrated Book of Songs for Children (London, etc., 1863). The composer is Thomas Legerwood Hately, not named on the title-page, but who, as noted in the preface, “has kindly provided a number of new airs, and revised the whole” (vi).