Threat of Court Action Gets Fugs Out of Cambridge Record Stores

Two record albums by The Fugs, a rock-and-roll group whose songs contain explicit references to sex and drugs, have disappeared from the shelves of Harvard Square record stores after one store was threatened with criminal charges.

Following a complaint last month, apparently from the parents of a minor who purchased the LP album, The Fugs, at Briggs and Briggs Music, Inc., Cambridge police asked record stores in the Square to stop selling Fugs albums.

The parents of the youth sought to have the state name Briggs and Briggs, its proprietor and a female sales clerk in a formal criminal complaint, but Cambridge Court Judge Lawrence F. Feloney denied the complaint Wednesday after Briggs and Briggs agreed not to sell the record in the future.

Charges were sought under a Massachusetts law which makes it illegal to sell obscene material to persons under 18 and provides a maximum punishment of five years in prison and a fine of $5000.

Should Briggs and Briggs again sell the record, a complaint might be issued, John P. Fadden, attorney for the record store, said Wednesday.

Following the police request not to sell the Fugs records, the Coop also agreed to take the records off sale, a spokesman for the store said. The next day, the Coop spokesman said, the records were recalled by DuMont Record Distributing Corporation.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Fugs and The Fugs First Album were unavailable in Harvard Square. Managers in the Coop and Minuteman Radio, Inc., said the records would be on sale if and when copies could be obtained from the distributor.

The Fugs, who experiment in theatre as well as song, received guarded praise in an article by drama critic Elizabeth Hardwick in the Dec. 13 New York Review of Books.

"It is not free sex, but free speech they celebrate: dirty words, dirty feet, laughter," she wrote.