“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.””
The Fugs, formed in New York City during the early 1960’s, were infamous for their comedic, profane, sexually inflected, pro-drug compositions. They were also intensely anti-war and social revolutionaries at heart. All of this, of course, severely limited airplay for their material, which made it all that much more appealing to the counter-culture at the time.
Their breakout album, if that term could ever apply to this band, was “Tenderness Junction,” which included tracks covering every aspect of the above-mentioned creative threads. Titles like Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon Oct. 21, 1967, and Wet Dream, to name a few, perfectly illustrate their free-thinking approach.
However, and maybe not surprising for a group founded by three poets (Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver and Tuli Kupferberg), the album also includes some sublime and deeply emotional songs. Chief among them is “Dover Beach” which sets music to Lines 29–37 of Matthew Arnold’s poem of that same name.
A more beautiful, restrained and evocative song I have never heard.
-Walter Henritze-
Cover to The Fugs 1967 Tenderness Junction