The Holy Modal Rounders
Wild, drug-addled fiddle tunes and surrealist folk that sounds like a 1920s jug band having a psychedelic breakdown. Irreverent, manic, and deeply weird.
Wild, drug-addled fiddle tunes and surrealist folk that sounds like a 1920s jug band having a psychedelic breakdown. Irreverent, manic, and deeply weird.
The Holy Modal Rounders sound like the American folk revival if it had been kidnapped by pranksters and fed nothing but high-grade hallucinogens. It is a clattering, joyful, and frequently dissonant collision of traditional Appalachian sounds and Lower East Side bohemianism. The fiddle playing is frantic, the vocals are often delivered in a nasal, uninhibited squawk, and the arrangements feel like they might fly off the rails at any second.
What truly sets them apart is their refusal to treat folk music as a museum piece. While their contemporaries were trying to preserve the 'purity' of the genre, Stampfel and Weber were busy injecting it with surrealist humor, drug slang, and a proto-punk attitude. They are the missing link between the Harry Smith Anthology and the freak-folk movement of the 2000s, proving that the 'old, weird America' was always weirder than we remembered.
Newcomers should start with their self-titled 1964 debut for the purest distillation of their acoustic madness, or 'The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders' for a dive into their more experimental, full-band psychedelic period.
The Holy Modal Rounders was an American folk music group, originally a duo (members Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber) who formed in 1963 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Although they achieved only limited commercial and critical success in the 1960s and 1970s, they earned a dedicated cult following and have been retrospectively praised for their reworking of early 20th century folk music as well as their innovation in several genres, including freak folk and psychedelic folk. With a career spanning 40 years, the Holy Modal Rounders were influential both in the New York scene where they began and to subsequent generations of underground musicians. As the Holy Modal Rounders, Stampfel and Weber began playing in and around the Greenwich Village scene, at the heart of the ongoing American folk music revival. Their sense of humor, irreverent attitude, and novel update of old-time music brought support from fellow musicians but was controversial amongst some folk traditionalists. In 1964, the Rounders released their self-titled debut, which included the first use of the word "psychedelic" in popular music. After their first two studio albums, the duo briefly joined the newly formed underground rock band the Fugs in 1965 and helped record the band's influential debut album. Following their exit from the Fugs, the duo released two albums that experimented with psychedelic folk before they expanded their lineup to a full rock band by the end of 1968. The Holy Modal Rounders' expanded lineup included playwright Sam Shepard as a drummer and many short-lived members before it stabilized in 1971 with keyboardist Richard Tyler, multi-instrumentalist Robin Remaily, bassist Dave Reisch, drummer Roger North, and saxophonist Ted Deane. Beginning in 1975, this backing group would also play with Jeffrey Frederick as the Clamtones. In 1972, Weber and the band relocated to Portland, Oregon, while Stampfel stayed behind in New York. Although Stampfel would describe Weber as his "long lost brother", they often had a hostile relationship and the two would only reunite sporadically during the next twenty years. After Weber returned to the East Coast in the mid-1990s, the duo began a series of concert reunions starting in 1996 before breaking up for the last time in 2003.
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