Two years later, Sanders seemed to have taken Truckstop's lessons to heart. Beer Cans on the Moon displays a broader musical pallet and ups the political content, though aside from a dominatrix priestess (who wouldn't be out of place on one of Zappa's early solo albums, come to think of it) and a robot with the hots for Dolly Parton, the sexual content is minimal. Though starting out on two distressingly earnest notes - "Rock & Roll People" and "Nonviolent Direct Action" both sound more like the work of a pamphleteer than a songwriter, while the "rock & roll is here to stay" quote at the end of the first track is just embarrassing - the album quickly kicks into a stronger satiric groove. If songs about Henry Kissinger and the Watergate investigation go on too long (once you start pasting paeans to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson onto your sonic screed, you've definitely lost your focus), they both open strong, especially the jazzy Eastern-influenced "The Shredding Machine.'

The songs on Moon that sound the most thought-out turn out (per the album title) to be environmentally themed ones: "Pity the Bird," which envisions an oil-spattered blackbird in San Clemente and the country-flavored title track, which imagines a commune of Earthlings despoiling outer space and even includes a reference to Tree Frog Beer. For a two-pronged finale, Sanders looks toward an optimistic anarchist future with "Universal Rent Strike Rag" (sounds like something Phil Ochs might've concocted) and struggles to visualize a day when there's a "Six-Pack of Happiness" for everyone. Wonder if it's Tree Frog Happiness?

If both tracks are wittier than the ones which opened Moon, though, they still sound trapped in their time in a way that the best Fugs albums aren't. "When the last computer has computed its last and the flags of fantasy fly," our man imagines in his ragging vision of utopian splendor, hearkening to the days when computers were still primarily aligned with the military industrial complex. These days, of course, Sanders edits his own online magazine entitled Woodstock Journal, a future I'd wager he sure didn't visualize back in 1972.