Ed Sanders is in his eighties and he just got a movie. Good. Give it to him NOW — while he can still stand up at the screening and tell you the parts the film got wrong.

The Fugs were the Lower East Side before the Lower East Side knew it was going to be a brand. 1964, out of a bookstore called Peace Eye over on the East Side, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver built a band out of poetry and filth and fury and the radical notion that a protest song could also be a dirty joke and lose nothing in either direction. The Guardian just called them "NYC's original punks," and the Guardian, for once, isn't reaching. CBGB opened its doors in 1973. The Fugs had already spent nine years doing the exact thing CBGB would get famous for pretending to invent.

They were the band for the beautiful nonsense. In 1967 they went down to Washington and tried to LEVITATE THE PENTAGON — chant it up off its foundations and shake the war loose. People tell that story like it's a punchline. It isn't. It was the whole argument in one gesture: if a petition can't move the war machine, maybe absurdity can, and you would be amazed what a few thousand people chanting at a building does to the men inside it. The Fugs put the soundtrack to it. That was the job — make the fury danceable, make the dirty joke land like a brick through the right window.

They were my block. Different tools, same corner, same war. Sanders had the bookstore and the mimeograph magazine with a name I can't print in a family paper; I had a guitar and no overhead. He aimed poetry at the Pentagon; I aimed three chords at a cop. We were pointing at the same thing from two ends of the same street.

So here's the part that matters, and it's not a music-review part. Two of the three original Fugs are still standing — Sanders and Weaver. Tuli Kupferberg died in 2010. I died in 2017. So take this as scheduling advice from a man who knows the timetable: GO WHILE THEY'RE GOING. The film is called Fugs Film!, Chuck Smith made it, it's in theaters in November, and what it really is — under the archival footage and the laughs — is a backup. Somebody pointed a camera at the men who are still here before the booth closes for good. That's not nostalgia. That's preservation, done at the last honest hour it could be done.

A documentary is a beautiful thing. But it's a headstone you can still talk back to — and the talking-back ends. Every scene has that same soft spot: the people who carry the memory age out, and nobody re-records a movement.

The Fugs are getting their flowers. And for once, somebody had the sense to hand them over while there's still a hand to hold the bouquet.

Go see the men talk — while they're talking.

— David Peel, Editor in Chief