Stylus has asked some of our favorite writers to talk about their favorite songs each week. Today, we present Phil Dellio’ favorite three songs of the moment.

Phil Dellio teaches 7th grade and lives in Ontario. He also maintains his own website here and is the co-author of I Wanna Be Sedated: Pop Music in the Seventies, you should buy it. Without further ado:

The FUGS
Carpe Diem
Frenzy
Dirty Old Man
[The Fugs Second Album]

The school board I work for is always telling me that teachers are supposed to be “lifelong learners”, so I’m always trying to acquire new knowledge. This summer the most useful bit of wisdom I came across was from an old Fugs song, “Carpe Diem”: “You can’t outfuck the angel of death.” I’m going to try to remember that. I sense that I’ve been spending my life up to this point trying to outfuck anything that moves, and it’s just not working.

For the longest time, the little bit I knew about the Fugs came from the entry for them in Lillian Roxon’s old The Rock Encyclopedia, which I used to pore over obsessively when I discovered a copy in my middle-school library 30 years ago. Lillian’s first sentence: “Who could start to describe the Fugs?” That was more than enough to get me hooked, but I was never able to fill in that blank, as the only albums of theirs I’d ever see were prohibitively-priced wall copies at used stores. Thanks to somebody out there, however, I was recently able to download semi-recent reissues of The Fugs First Album (1965) and The Fugs (1966). I don’t think the Fugs would have minded—if they were around today, they’d probably even be celebrating the joys of frenzied group file-sharing rather than Bohemian orgies.

“Carpe Diem,” which turns up on both albums in different versions, is one side of the Fugs, the nihilistic folkies who undoubtedly knew the Smithsonian and Harry Smith (name-dropped on album #1’s “Nothing”) catalogues front to back. “Carpe Diem” reminds me of one of those scary Carter Family deathwatch songs like “There’s No Hiding Place Down Here,” another variation on the truism that we’re all doomed in the end. The earlier version is drony and hypnotic, the second go-around prettier and more elegiac, notwithstanding its introduction of the “outfuck” lyric quoted earlier. Hearing a pop musician sing “fuck” in 1966 would be noteworthy in almost any context; hearing it sung sweetly and mournfully is thrilling.

On “Frenzy” and “Dirty Old Man,” Lenny Bruce and Mad magazine take over. What surprises me most about these songs (and “Slum Goddess,” “Group Grope,” and a few others) is not the words, which, as great they often are, are pretty much what I anticipated, but how good the Fugs were at flailing their way through rudimentary garage rock at a time when everyone was still making it up on the spot. You get the feeling they loved corny three-chord rock and roll (and especially loved that it was miraculously within their grasp to play it), unlike their obvious parallel, the Mothers of Invention, where you’re sometimes not sure where the residual teenage affection ends and the condescending esthete takes over. “Frenzy” provides exactly what its title promises, a hyperdriven two-minute invitation to the band’s new army of groupies to join them after the show for “baskets of love.” Ed Sanders was nearing 30 when the Fugs first got together, while co-founder Tuli Kupferberg was 42(!); on “Frenzy” they sound like kids let loose in a candy store, overwhelmed by the possibilities. I mean, I’m sure there’s some distance and irony in there somewhere, but those baskets of love carry the day. “Dirty Old Man” whizzes by in a kind of drill-sergeant call-and-response, and I suspect anyone who remembers Arte Johnson’s old park-bench lecher from “Laugh-In” (“Do you believe in the hereafter? Then you know what I’m here after….”) will love it as much as I do. It’s probably redundant at this point to speculate on who they’re *really* singing about.

[visit The Fugs’ website here, buy Fugs related material here]