Holy Modal Rounders [extended]

• Good Taste Is Timeless [Metromedia, 1971] B+
• Alleged in Their Own Time [Rounder, 1975] B
• Have Moicy! [Rounder, 1976] A+
• Last Round [Adelphi, 1979] B+
• Going Nowhere Fast [Rounder, 1981] A-
• Peter Stampfel and the Bottlecaps [Rounder, 1986] A-
• The People's Republic of Rock n' Roll [Homestead, 1989] B+
• You Must Remember This [Gert Town, 1995] A
• Too Much Fun [Rounder, 1999] A
• I Make a Wish for a Potato [Rounder, 2001] A
• The Jig Is Up [Blue Navigator, 2004] A-
• Bird Song: Live 1971 [Water, 2004] *
• Dook of the Beatniks [Piety Street Files & Archaic, 2010] A-

See Also:

• The Holy Modal Rounders and Friends
• Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Fredericks & the Clamtones
• Peter Stampfel
• Peter Stampfel and the Bottle Caps
• Stampfel & Weber

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Alleged in Their Own Time [Rounder, 1975]
I love the Rounders chronicle and the theory of Western civ and the pornographic reminiscence but I wish there were times and credits in the liner notes too because I don't feel like putting a watch on what I estimate as fifty-plus minutes of random canon and also because I wonder whether Steve Weber and maybe Luke Faust and Robin Remailly are putting out and in addition I prefer Dave Van Ronk's "Random Canyon" to Peter Stampfel's and would just as soon Peter recut "Nova" and "Synergy" as well but he probably designed the album to sound like a field recording which I'm sure is just what the Folks-with-a-capital-F at the Rounder collective wanted since this isn't traditional enough for them and maybe it's also too traditional for me but I doubt it. B

Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Fredericks & the Clamtones: Have Moicy! [Rounder, 1976]
A dynamic trio. Hurley's sleepy LPs for Raccoon flaunted their homemade triviality, while the work of Peter Stampfel (and Steve Weber and the other Rounders) for Prestige and Metromedia and Rounder managed to make music out of chalk scraping a blackboard, or a needle scraping an old 78--quite a feat, but not one I ever wanted to witness daily. This time, however, both forces combine with Fredericks for thirteen homemade, chalky, fit-for-78 songs that renew the concept of American folk music as a bizarre apotheosis of the post-hippie estate. No losers, though--just loadsa laffs, a few tears, some death, some shit, a hamburger, spaghetti, world travel, crime, etc. A+

Last Round [Adelphi, 1979]
In which Peter Stampfel and friends--including veteran Rounders Steve Weber and Robin Remailly, many Clamtones, and Antonia, composer of "That Belly I Idolize" and "God, What Am I Doing Here" (with "Fucking Sailors in Chinatown" yet to come)--prove that the counterculture still exists. Strange drug experiences are detailed, ooze is embraced, girls without underwear consume hoagies and juice. In short, Head Comix live. B+

Stampfel & Weber: Going Nowhere Fast [Rounder, 1981]
Seventeen years after the original Holy Modal Rounders first recorded for Prestige, the same two voices and three stringed instruments actually sound better. Well, Weber doesn't--check out "Junker's Blues." But I've never heard anyone--anyone--sing with the sheer enthusiasm for singing that Stampfel puts out here, and where he once channeled his passion for song into folk material, now he'll take on anything from Shakespeare, with Antonia collaborating, to Phil Phillips's newly atonal "Sea of Love." A-

Peter Stampfel and the Bottle Caps: Peter Stampfel and the Bottlecaps [Rounder, 1986]
At his best, Stampfel does a kind of slack-wire act, striking his own crazy folkie balance between soul and satire and his own crazy rock and roll balance between hell-bent enthusiasm and musicianly effect. H ere he plays it closer to solid ground, falling less often but relying a hair-and-a-half too much on satire and effect. Which doesn't hold down the mind-expanding covers, including a protectionist drinking song and an obscure Lloyd Price ditty featuring a spoken coda in which a smitten, pimply-sounding Stampfel explains the orbit of the moon to his date ("Hey, you wanna talk about something else?"). Nor harm his own "Surfer Angel," which crushes "Wipe Out" and "Endless Sleep" down into a surf death song, a subgenre I'm surprised no one got to in the '60s, or the actively uncompassionate "Lonely Junkie." Inspirational Verse: "My bowels are in stasis/My atrophied ass/Is heavy and leaded/And loaded with gas." A-

Peter Stampfel and the Bottle Caps: The People's Republic of Rock n' Roll [Homestead, 1989]
The title and no doubt the intermittently "commercial" sound are about band democracy, or maybe dictatorship of the proletariat--Stampfel gives up three lead vocals and five songs and gets the most uneven record of a career that's never confused consistency with virtue. The division is almost too neat--only one Stampfel loser, and also only one non-Stampfel winner, the John-Lee-Hooker ad absurdum "Mindless Boogie," which together with Stampfel's democratically romantic "Bridge and Tunnel Girls" may actually earn the college-novelty rotation he's always deserved. Which I hope doesn't prevent all concerned from learning their lesson. B+

Peter Stampfel: You Must Remember This [Gert Town, 1995]
Stampfel has never known the meaning of the word respect, which is OK because he's never known the meaning of the word disrespect either. And if this made him a misfit among folkies, that was OK too--he was a misfit everywhere else. For his entire three-decade "career," the last half of which has had a distinctly not-for-profit aura, his own lyrics have celebrated the normality of his misfit life while his intense, eccentric, comic, loud, sincere vocal interpretations imparted to the widest range of pop songs ever negotiated by a single performer the beauty and wonder he originally discerned in Charlie Poole, Charlie Patton, and other icons of authenticity. Stampfel's enthusiasm is so unquenchable you figure he's got to be making fun of such understandably forgotten copyrights as "Haunted Heart" and "Cry of the Wild Goose," and for sure he's not above it. But he is above belittling a song--any fun he may fashion from one is just another facet of its mystery. Stampfel the inveterate fakebook collector says he loves the chords of the impossible favorites he resuscitates here, and I believe him. I also believe he's such a sucker for music that once he falls for a progression he wants to tie the knot for life. A

Too Much Fun [Rounder, 1999]
Peter Stampfel is the intense seeker, Steve Weber the mellow layabout. Where Stampfel is all comic focus, whether comic ha-ha or comic-as-opposed-to-tragic, Weber is someone who can just not give a fuck while remaining both charming and musical. Their magic isn't eternal youth--they're as much old codgers as John Hurt and Clarence Ashley in 1963. It's their argument that play is the fundamental life-principle. Among the exhibits: the Henry Clay Work emancipation hullabaloo "Kingdom Coming" rewritten to lay more insults on the massa, the scatted dog-yip solo and verse about Simulac-boosting junkie moms that bedecks the psychedeliprop "Euphoria," a sea chantey that climaxes "Don't you rock me daddy-o," a celebration of Buddha's fondness for caffeine and twisted '50s chord progressions, and a girl-group obscurity in which a sweetly love-struck teenager goes gaga over a "Bad Boy": "He'll sell your heart on St. Mark's Place/In glassine envelopes/He'll cut it with a pig's heart/And burn the chumps and dopes." A

The Holy Modal Rounders and Friends: I Make a Wish for a Potato [Rounder, 2001]
This 20-song megacomp steals three songs from 1976's impregnable Have Moicy! and four from 1999's vulnerable Too Much Fun. But I'm too big a fan to blame it for cramming two secret coded messages into one package proving that, as the Bard once put it, age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite variety. The variety part came with an indelible classic cut on no money and less forethought by whoever dropped in, the age and custom part with a career album cut in their dotage and rural Quebec or vice versa. "Friends" include the ageless Michael Hurley and the late Jeffrey Frederick, fully credited cocreators of Have Moicy! who chime in here from their own stubbornly inconsistent solo albums, and Steve Weber, the not unholy rounder who's been Peter Stampfel's opposite number for 40 years. But Stampfel's spirit dominates, as it should. It's he who discovered that Henry Clay Work's 1862 "Kingdom Coming" was the first true pop song. And it's he who put one of 20 otherwise awful-I-bet songs called "Nova" on the Rounders' spotty-I-know 1975 Alleged in Their Own Time: "Time is on my side/Slime is on my tide/I ride my time slide all the time/I'm a lazy [ellipsis in original]." A

Peter Stampfel and the Bottle Caps: The Jig Is Up [Blue Navigator, 2004]
Two wondrous songs: "You Stupid Jerk," as in "You are the kind of guy who hates support groups/But you're the kind of guy who needs support groups/That is so typical of those who need support groups/You cliché-monger stupid jerk," and "Squid Jiggin' Ground," a Hank Snow oldie set against a countermelody of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" about the jolly time to be had stabbing squid to death and then they squirt you. Estimable also-rans include "the first song ever about a repo man" (it's traditional), the misanthropic "Song of Man" (it's not), an unsentimental adieu to William McKinley, and Stephen Foster's rarely heard "Old Dog Trey," to which Stampfel provides a follow-up. There are also some lousy songs by various of the artiste's wasted '60s posse, perhaps to demonstrate (or celebrate) the limits of what his notes dub "Psychedelic Drug Wisdom." Recorded 1989-1999, sung with Stampfel's signature lust for life, and released by conniving alt-folk mogul Michael Hurley, whom Stampfel bribes with a cover of "Werewolf." A-

Bird Song: Live 1971 [Water, 2004]
Different songs, good drummer ("Boobs a Lot/Willie & the Hand Jive," "Smokey Joe's Cafe"). *

Peter Stampfel: Dook of the Beatniks [Piety Street Files & Archaic, 2010]
Having caught half these songs on the fly at gigs, I was so eager for the 1999 recordings to reach the marketplace that I volunteered to help Stampfel clean up his liner notes. Run through the excitable yelp that's mellowed and roughened only slightly in the ex-rounder's hi-NRG dotage, the lyrics get better still when you're able to dial back and make sure that that's what he just said. Two big sloppy marital love songs flank two outbursts of wordplay to kick-start the proceedings at a high that trails off for nine relatively mortal tracks. But the last four songs are zoom zoom zoom zoom, climaxing with a New Year's Eve rewrite of Little Richard's "Keep a Knockin'" and a morning-after rewrite of what those notes call "the wackest and most amazing gospel song" Stampfel's ever heard. Its sole remaining original line: "Holy terror's gonna blow you up for Jesus." A-

See Also

• Some Holy Modal Rounders: Stampfel & Weber [1996-07-23]