Consumer Guide Album

The Fugs: Songs from a Portable Forest [Gazell, 1990]
Ed Sanders is a Romantic who's outlived his wild days without disowning or betraying them. As a young Fug, he affected comic hippie raunch; solo, he half-realized a pseudohillbilly twang. But pushing 50 in a group that reunited for an antinuke rally, he sings all prettified like the tree-hugging published poet he is. And it's his singing that turns these 12 unjokey songs from the Fugs' three '80s imports into nothing you've heard before. 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. 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. A-