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”.