The Fugs - Be Free - The Fugs Final CD (Part 2)

It's hard to say what seems more remarkable - that the Fugs have somehow survived well into the 21st century, or that they've finally threatened to throw in the towel in the year 2010, 46 years after a handful of poets, beats, and activists became America's first great underground rock band.

"Be Free!" is subtitled "Final CD, Pt. 2", and given Tuli Kupferberg's death in 2010, this is the group's final recorded gesture. The Fugs that recorded this album between 2005 and 2009 are a different kettle of fish from the gleefully rude troublemakers who emerged in the '60s, but if guitarist Steve Taylor, bassist Scott Petito, and percussionist Coby Batty make this music sound almost professional (something they periodically managed in their heyday, truth be told), Kupferberg and Ed Sanders thankfully seem to have scarcely changed a bit. Sanders is a man who knows how to celebrate joy and isn't afraid to deliver his songs with the brio they deserve, and his celebrations of laughter ("The Laughing Song"), purposeful sloth ("Goofitude"), and throwing off the burden of white collar culture (a song adapted from Herman Melville's Bartelby the Scrivener) ring clear and true, as does a witty but forceful attack on the CIA. Taylor's "Hungry Blues" isn't as ambitiously poetic as the other tunes here, but it's impassioned and all too timely. And if Kupferberg mostly sounds like a cranky old man on Be Free, he's a hilarious, inspired, and eloquent cranky old man, and the playful snark of "This Is a Hit Song" and "I Am an Artist for Art's Sake" is vital, beautiful stuff. But Kupferberg saves his best moments for the album's closing track, "Greenwich Village of My Dreams," a reverie in which many of the great bohemian heroes of the 20th century come together in a string of fantastic moments both real and imagined; it's also a tribute to the time and place that brought the Fugs together in the first place, and it's an ideal way to bring this group's story to a close.

Tracklist:

1 Bee Free
2 Backward Jewish Soldiers
3 My Darling Magnolia Tree
4 Goofitude
5 This Is A Hit Song
6 The Laughing Song
7 Hungry Blues
8 Loose Peach Gown
9 Bartleby The Scrivener
10 Imgrat
11 The CIA Made Me Sing Off-Key
12 The British Journalist
13 I Am An Artist For Art´s Sake
14 Greenwich Village Of My Dreams

The Fugs - Be Free - The Fugs Final CD (Part 2)
(320 kbps, cover art included)