Primer On Ferlins And Fugs In Life Encountered

Just learned how to make webcam go again. Now need theme for post. This requires I get into my box of old toys and vinyl record albums .

Allen Ginsberg and I listened to Fugs the same year --he, far more famously than I. The year was 1966.

I liked that year. I looked like this:

I was a student. Minimum wage was $1.45 an hour. I had my first play performed. I had scads of friends.

Allen Ginsberg looked like this:

Allen Ginsberg was a great poet. You could work an hour or so and make enough money to buy his book at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. City Lights Bookstore is owned by Mr. Ferlinghetti --he is a great poet too. Mr. Ferlinghetti had a press on the premises on which he published many other great poets. He has scads of friends. He is 95 years old now.

I don't know if he was friends with the other Ferlin, who sang ballads and rockabilly and recited folk poetry. Ferlin Husky passed away four years ago at age 86, but in 1966 I lived in a rural ranching town and my two favorite Ferlins were in their primes. However, the Fugs to which Mr. Ginsberg referred in Airplane Dreams were a musical group that incorporated great poetry into their songs. They looked like this:

I bought this album at Thrifty Drug Store in 1966. It is their third or fourth album and is called "The Fugs First Album", Its songs are listed on the back:

They weren't a very melodious group but their songs often contained lyrics from Wm. Blake and Algernon Chas. Swinburne, both very great poets. This bring us to the word, fug. "Fug" was often used by American writers as a marginally acceptable homonym for another coitional slang word that was not permitted by censors.

In 1966, I had read many stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --a great writer of historical, medical, detective and science fiction. He sometimes described the atmospheric result of Sherlock Holmes's nicotinic meditations as a "thick fug of tobacco smoke in our sitting room" which Dr. Watson treated by throwing open the windows at 221 B Baker St.

The British word would recur to me later, after I left the little rural ranching town to seek my fortune. I had scads of friends and they would invite me to parties in the big city. In the late '60s, these parties usually took the form of a dense fug of smoke with arms and legs sticking out of it. I would bring my favorite record album in with me and hand it to some of the arms. Soon I would hear it going on the stereo and voices in the fug would react to The Fugs. "Oh wow," they would say. "Oh wow."