7. The FugsThe Fugs
The Fugs were a hippie band from the 1960s that I can get behind purely because they were not all ‘peace and love.’ They were weirdos who wrote strange lyrics and a lot of these lyrics would be weird even now. I thought some of their songs were hilarious actually purely because they went against what was expected so much. I thought the musicianship was great on that record and the classic songs for me are ‘Kill for Peace’, ‘Frenzy,’ ‘Skin Flowers’. It’s a fucking awesome record.
I think as well as it being funny, it’s well-conceived: it’s everything that Frank Zappa tried to do and couldn’t. It was much funnier than Frank Zappa. It’s the kind of hippie ideology that I can get behind. To me, it makes more sense to be hippie like The Stooges, or hippie like The Fugs, or hippie like Captain Beefheart, not this peace and love bullshit which isn’t real. None of that is real. These guys are real, and they’re funny. They have an eighth-grade sense of humour and they’re not politically correct at all. Plus, they’re smart guys. Their songs are very well-conceived, the ideas are hilarious, and I think the people who don’t like that stuff aren’t using their ears. I love that stuff. I’ve been listening to that probably since, I don’t know, ’84?
All of the bands we’re talking about have, for sure, no question, influenced the Melvins but The Fugs are the ones. We have a lot of their sense of humour in in us, their style and approach.
