According to The New York Times, the band took its name from William S. Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, detailing a race of giant insects bent on world domination.
Reviewing their 1970 album Hoboken Saturday Night, Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies: "The blues scholars in the group have been listening to a lot of Arabic and Eastern European music lately, but this doesn't stop Elvin Jones from sounding just like Elvin Jones.
"[4] Fellow critic Tom Hull wrote of the music in 2005, "Even today it is sui generis, and only partly a creature of its time.
They mixed the horns with banjo and steel guitar, took lyrics from Thomas Pynchon and one member's six-year-old son, and featured a singer, Nancy Jeffries, whose in-your-face style anticipated the Waitresses' Patty Donahue.
"[5] Robert Palmer later became a well-respected and widely published rock critic and blues/jazz historian and served as the popular music editor of The New York Times in the 1980s.