Enter the Fugs, Greenwich Village folk-rock preacher-lovers who have sprung full grown and screaming from Allen Ginsberg's beard. Champions of moral disarmament, they sing out for the people who, according to Ginsberg's liner notes on their second album, "make love with their eyes open, maybe smoke pot & maybe take LSD & look inside their heads to find the Self-God Walt Whitman prophesied for America."

That's one side--the good guys in polka dots and paisley. "Who's on the other side?" asks Ginsberg rhetorically. "People who think we arebad." The lines are drawn. "Total assault on the Culture," orders Ed Sanders, the Fugs lead singer, as he strikes out with ballads of contemporary protest points of view, and general dissatisfaction.

In the face of such Burroughsian challenges the other side typically seeks refuge behind the grey, authoritarian prose of the law. In Massachusetts, whoever sells to a person under 18 anything which is "obscene, indecent or impure, harmful to minors, or manifestly tends to corrupt the morals of youth" faces imprisonment for five years and a $5000 fine, Chapter 272, Section 28, of the Massachusetts General Laws Annotated proclaims.

In Cambridge, the other side is repelling the Fugs assault without recourse to law. Last month, the parents of a minor filed a formal criminal complaint against Briggs and Briggs for sellingThe Fugs, a record which, claimed the parents, was indeed "harmful to minors" under the provisions of Section 28. In a subsequent meeting with Cambridge Judge Lawrence T. Feloney, spokesmen for Briggs and Briggs agreed not to sell The Fugs or The Village Fugs, their first album. The judge dismissed the case without determining the legal status of the records.

The other side just couldn't cope with the Fugs' "Whitmanic orgy yawp." The Fugs contains a number of songs ("Frenzy," "Skin Flowers," "Group Grope," and "Doin' All Right") which are uninhibited, if awkward, paeans to sex love. Sample lyrics:

When your breast comes out of heaven

I rejoice till morning.

Or:

I'm not ever going to Vietnam

I prefer to stay right here and screw your mom.

Sung to the tune of Chuck Berry's "School Days," "Dirty Old Man" is a riotous parody, a reductio ad absurdum of the other side's stereotype of the Fug-like hippie, the bearded beatnik with "thrill pills for all you chickies, funny cigarettes for you boys."

Hanging out by the school yard gate,

Looking up every dress I can...

Communist literature in my hands,

Pees in all the bushes I can --