If I had any principles I'd carp as usual. You almost begin to think any spiritually advanced rockpoet could do this-until Leslie Ritter's Maria-McKee-as-Joan-Baez contralto turns Sanders's "World Wide Green" into a pompous preachment and brings you back to earth. Sanders's care, compassion, and, yes, sensitivity are credible even when he's comparing protesters to Prometheus-the seven-part, 11-minute lifework "Dreams of Sexual Perfection" has William Blake coming in his grave. And it's his singing that turns these 12 unjokey songs from the Fugs' three '80s imports into nothing you've heard before. But pushing 50 in a group that reunited for an antinuke rally, he sings all prettified like the tree-hugging published poet he is. As a young Fug, he affected comic hippie raunch solo, he half-realized a pseudohillbilly twang.
#FUGS 4 ROUNDERS SCORE PORTABLE#
Songs from a Portable Forest Įd Sanders is a Romantic who's outlived his wild days without disowning or betraying them. As for Tuli Kupferberg, who was in his forties when it all began, praise the Lord-he hasn't lost a bit of his youthful sarcasm. His laughs are gentle, word choices rather than jokes with special help from Steve Taylor, latest in the proud line of folkie-Fugs, his lyricism is resilient, reedlike and he preaches with sounder grounding in moral philosophy than Holly Near and Johnny Rotten combined.
Instead of degenerating into a "bitterly bickering bitter-shitter," he's put his youthful idealism front and center. Rarely has an aging hippie lost his sense of humor with more grace than Ed Sanders, who could be wild-ass and even a little nasty on what looked like the brink of cultural triumph but turned careful and considerate once he realized the struggle might never end. But there's a sense in which the halting drone of these sessions, vaguely reminiscent of the early Velvets, is more appropriate to the Fugs' secondhand rock than all the classy folkies they later patched on.
#FUGS 4 ROUNDERS SCORE PLUS#
Previously unreleased (Holy Modal) Rounders oldies (the original "Romping Through the Swamp") plus a mid-'60s best-of on the original rock-poets, with ample room for the musical genius of Tuli Kupferberg-including "Morning, Morning" in a version far lovelier than Spyder Turner's and the peristaltic "Caca Rocka," a/k/a "Pay Toilet Blues." The musicianship will offend the fastidious and loses even me at times.
The music is, well, a mess, but a purposeful mess, and Ed Sanders's poems are dirty jokes at their most divine. The best tune was written by William Blake under the romantic sway of a lesbian troll, but you can tell the other composers are poets too-listen to the similes break down in "Supergirl," or tell me that Jim Morrison knows somebody who "humps like a wildcat" (or anyway, knows enough to laugh about it). Not enough Tuli and a touch too much Ed, but this LP-recorded June 1, 1968, at one of their last shows-is their scush-slurfing testament.
0 kommentar(er)
