"we like grass / we like ass"

So sang The Village Fugs in 1965.

Well, it's 2003 and somehow there's a new Fugs record. Lester Bangs once said of this band, "[if they were] much more primitive...they'd have loincloths and bones in their noses". How could the intervention of nearly four decades have molded such notorious musical atavists? The mind boggles.

One of the most literally and figuratively seminal of all rock acts, presaging both the '60s folk-rock and '80s cassette-trading 'bedroom band' movements, The Fugs made hay back when hippies were actually hip, releasing LPs with titles like Golden Filth and It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest on labels ranging from ESP to Reprise. Crooning spunk-encrusted tunes as "Group Grope" and "Coca-Cola Douche," you could depend on The Fugs to be aggressively anti-war and virulently pro-free-love as well as to alternate constantly between withering sarcasm and painful earnestness. Here was a combo just as likely to announce their desire to "fuck your sister" as to put the verse of William Blake to shaky guitar figures.

The Fugs Final CD [Part 1] for better or worse, finds these same jolly elements in place: The Fugs still want you to seize the day, they still hate violence and corruption and, from all indicators, they still want to fuck your sister.

While the vocal stylings of founding Fugs Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg are virtually unchanged (Sanders still sounds like a particularly "cool" university professor trying to spirit co-eds away into the mountains of Hippie Hamelin, Kupferberg still croaks like a dissipated, excommunicated cantor) the quality of the production and instrumental accompaniment on Final sound at least contemporary if not exactly slick. Legendary NYC percussionist Coby Batty keeps a rich, solid pulse throughout the record, grooving in a way that former Fugs drummers couldn't have dreamed of, particularlyon the droll Manson-era mistaken identity doo-wop song "Miriam".

If the Fugs sound has been noticeably altered by time, their outlook hasn't changed much. Kupferberg remains one of the great parodists in modern media, retooling Dion and The Belmonts "Teenager In Love" into the salacious yet pathos-soaked "Septuagenarian In Love" and a well-loved children's sing-along into the muted class rage of "I've Been Working For The Landlord" ("all my live-long life") . Tuli also celebrates existence in the face of extinction in the anthemic, catchy "Try To Be Joyful" and contemplates death with serene reflection in the beautiful album-closer "Luke Was a Phyisician and a Saint" (singing "but Luke is dead").

With Kupferberg supplying most of the humor and gravitas, it's left mainly to Sanders to push the politics and social commentary, which he does to good effect on the wry "Burn Bridges Burn" and the angry, despairing "Perpitude," which decries the abuse heaped on Tom Paine, Socrates, Joan of Arc and John Lennon as examples of how governments throughout history have habitually made examples of great citizens who happen to disagree with them, concluding that "everyone, even a savior and a hero, is a criminal to someone."

Elsewhere, the band continues its tradition of putting poetry to music, as on the self-explanatory "A Poem By Charles Bukowski," based on an unpublished piece left behind by the late L.A. scribe. The words manage to sum up The Fugs unique cultural position as Bukowski observes (and The Fugs themselves sing) that while it is common for young left-wingers to drift rightward as they age, "when a young radical ends up as an old radical /the critics /and the conservatives /treat him as if he escaped from a mental /institution." The Fugs Final CD [Part 1] provides ample evidence that as one of the few truly radical underground bands to survive the 1960s with their principals intact, The Fugs proudly wear their presumed straitjacket like a coat of arms.

And thank God for that.