The Frogs, "I’ve Got Drugs (Out of the Mist)" (The End of All Music)

The Frogs' It's Only Right and Natural is an original artifact from the American underground. Initially released in 1989 on Homestead Records, the album unleashed the homosexual id in the bluntest manner to a ramshackle, spindly folk-rock backing. The shamelessly lascivious lyrics were so disarming because they hit you in such a stripped-down context, in a musical form typically associated with earnest, leftist sentiments, heterosexual sentimentality, and love-one-another-right now universality—not the sleaziest aspects of queer culture.

Adding further layers of strangeness: The Frogs weren't from San Francisco or New York, but from muthafucking Milwaukee—and they were straight. Brothers Dennis and Jimmy Flemion had no self-censorship instincts; they simply thrust their faux sexual urges and fantasies in your shocked mug, accompanied by florid acoustic guitars and arch, perfectly enunciated troubadour vocals... that would sometimes lurch into dirty-old-man-on-the-verge-of-orgasm stutters.

Imagine the WTF? factor of hearing this in dying embers of the Reagan era. I was there, man, and it sure caused a sensation among fanzine writers and readers, college-radio DJs, filmmaker Harmony Korine, and musicians such as Beck, Billy Corgan, Eddie Vedder, Mudhoney, and Kurt Cobain.

For decades, fans and curious folks have been clamoring for a reissue of this elusive classic, and finally The End of All Music has done the necessary deed by putting out a vinyl edition of It's Only Right and Natural on August 16. It's been remastered in stereo, the way it was originally meant to be heard. (Maybe they'll do their 1996 follow-up, the equally hilarious My Daughter the Broad and 2000's Racially Yours, too?)

"I’ve Got Drugs (Out of the Mist)" is a debauched folk beauty that sounds like it could've come off an ESP-Disk LP by the Fugs, Godz, or Holy Modal Rounders. "A fuckin' priest with a yeast infection!" is totally something that Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, or Peter Stampfel would yelp while Allen Ginsberg sagely nodded in assent in the studio. When Jimmy (or is it Dennis?) warbles, "I've done drugs that would blow your mind, tonight," you can hear Tenacious D being born.

The Frogs lead you down the road of excess with an acoustic guitar strummed delicately and beautifully while an electric guitar effect like that in the Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" sizzles in the background. The song's at once foolish and endearing, and it's an ideal intro to the rest of It's Only Right and Natural's cavalcade of carnal and cranial misadventures.