Listening to the opening track of Ed Sanders' recently reissued solo album, Sanders Truckstop (Collectors' Choice Music), I couldn't help thinking about time's passage. A satirically mawkish country narrative in the manner of Hank Williams' "Luke the Drifter" cuts or Red Sovine, "Jimmy Joe, the Hippybilly Boy" tells the story of an Ozark Mountains hippie who loses his life after rescuing two car passengers from a raging big blue river. (His long hair gets entangled in the rear-view mirror.) These days, the very word "hippie" has become so degraded that the idea of a comic pastiche saluting the freak flag doesn't have the same charge that it did back in 1970. More's the pity.
But before we look too closely at Sanders debut solo album and its follow-up -- 1972's Beer Cans on the Moon — we should probably backtrack to the man's career as a once and future Fug. The most underground of underground group, the Fugs were a poets' band; both Sanders and fellow songwriter Tuli Kupferberg were fixtures in the New York beat scene and their first releases as the Fugs appeared on a label primarily known for avant-jazz releases. Though they eventually graduated to a major label, Reprise, they still remained known as a cult group, primarily because of their anarchically satirical political songs and their explicitly sexual lyrics.
In terms of subject matter, the Fugs' closest peers were the Mothers of Invention, but where big Mother Frank Zappa generally approached his sexual themes with a dollop of puritanical distaste, the Fugs were more openly hedonistic. Too, while Zappa once famously proclaimed that his lyrics were primarily in the service of his music - a means of getting us musical illiterates to pay attention to his bizarre compositional creativity - Sanders and Kupferberg's first loyalty remained to the spoken word.
You can see this creative dynamic at play in Truckstop, Sanders' first album after his group's big break-up. A mocking country album, the disc - despite the presence of musical smarties like David Bromberg and Bill Keith - feels musically half-realized. You hear it in a track like "The Maple Court Trajedy," (sic) with its laborious tempo changes or the indifferently played "Heartbreak Crash Pad." Both sound like they could've benefited from another week of studio play.
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