CD Reviews

Ed Sanders

Sanders' Truckstop | Collector's Choice

By JEFF TAMARKIN | March 5, 2008

2.0 Stars

The Fugs were just about wrapping things up in 1969 — after four years of shambolic, Beat-inspired, pre-psychedelic, rabble-rousing folk rock — when co-founder Ed Sanders decided to become a hick. This being the era of The BeverlyHillbillies and “Okie from Muskogee” and all, a Greenwich Village hippie poet could claim superiority by lampooning country music, and by using pedal steels, banjos, and a Gomer Pyle accent, Sanders must have thought he was being real clever-like. But grafting this faux proto-Americana to songs about the Plaster Casters and Nixon Defense Secretary Melvin Laird on Sanders’ Truckstop not only went over the heads of the love-it-or-leave-it crowd, it also failed to resonate with the intellects who’d fancied the Fugs. Four years later, Sanders returned to rock (still retaining something of a twang) for his second solo album (also reissued by Collector’s Choice), more of a parody of Country Joe McDonald than of country music. The territory — political satire and social commentary — was more familiar, and Sanders’s new tunes were well-intentioned and sharper than the previous batch, but Beer Cans on the Moon still met with a deserved shrug.

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