The Holy Modal Rounders - Biography
By J Poet
The Holy Modal Rounders were the first folk rock band, although they were defiantly acoustic for the first years of their existence. They cut three classic albums early on in their erratic career - The Holy Modal Rounders (1964, Prestige), The Holy Modal Rounders 2 (1964, Prestige), and Have Moicy (1971, Metromedia), and while they didn’t sell especially well, they have remained in print and their influence on folk, folk rock and psychedelic music can’t be understated. They were a major inspiration to The Lovin’ Spoonful, helped found The Fugs, and put out one of the few albums of acoustic psychedelia, Indian War Hoop (1967, ESP). They had a brief moment of mainstream notoriety when Peter Fonda used their “Bird Song” in his film Easy Rider, and put it on the Easy Rider soundtrack (1969, Dunhill). Since the 70s, various incarnations of the Rounders, with and without Stampfel and/or Weber have recorded and toured, but they most lack the inspired eclecticism and sonic weirdness of the duo’s early days.
Peter Stampfel, the most stable of the Rounders, was born in Milwaukee and although he grew up loving the first generation of rock’n’rollers, he fell under the spell of American folk music at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1956. He loved Pete Seeger, The New Lost City Ramblers (who made him aware of old time music), as well as bluegrass artists like Bill Monroe. He moved to New York City in 1959 and picked up violin because his banjo playing wasn’t that good and everybody was looking for fiddlers. His girlfriend Antonia (and the composer of “Bird Song”) suggested a duo with Steve Weber, a notorious drug abuser and brilliant country/folk guitar player from Pennsylvania. The first time they played together they knew they had something special. Like Stampfel, Weber had grown up with rock, and together they decided to play what Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell and Riley Puckett would have played if they were rock and rollers.
The Rounders were both famous and infamous in the Greenwich Village folk scene. Their music had no fixed tempo, Stampfel’s vocals were so screechy that many found him unlistenable and Weber’s lyrics on their original tunes were incomprehensible. Still, the rock’n’roll style and flair they brought to folk music was in evidence on their first two albums The Holy Modal Rounders (1964, Prestige) and The Holy Modal Rounders 2 (1964, Prestige) and while it sounded odd in 1964, by 1966 The Lovin’ Spoonful, Byrds and Dylan had adapted the style to create folk rock.
In 64, Ed Saunders asked the Rounders to be part of The Fugs and they contributed to the first Fugs gigs and their Folkways album The Village Fugs - Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction (1965, Folkways, 1993, Fantasy). Then the Beatles ushered in a new era in pop music and the counterculture exploded. The Rounders tried to change with the times and produced two uneven but strangely compelling records of unfathomable semi-acoustic psychedelia Indian War Hoop (1967, ESP) and The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders (1969, Elektra).
Stampfel and Weber slowly evolved into a more conventional band – The Unholy Modal Rounders - and with a bunch of like-minded, drug addled maniacs cut Have Moicy (1971, Metromedia), a great hippie folk rock album. Rounder Records (who named their company in honor of the Holy Modal Rounders) signed the band, but internal dissention and too many controlled substances made it hard to get anything together. Alleged in Their Own Time (1975, Rounder) is a low-key effort lacking the band’s former fire and insanity. Stampfel left to form Peter Stampfel and the Bottlecaps but returned to cut Last Round (1978, Adelphi) another folk rock outing with Weber, Remaily, Tyler and some new recruits. It combined older tunes with a couple of solid new originals. Stampfel and Weber have reunited briefly over the years for acoustic reunion albums including Going Nowhere Fast (1981, Rounder) credited to Stampfel and Weber and Too Much Fun (1999, Rounder). Both are quirky but can’t possibly have the impact that their first two albums did so many years ago. Fantasy reissued their first two albums as The Holy Modal Rounders 1 & 2 in 1999. Holy Modal Rounders and Friends, I Make a Wish for a Potato (2001, Rounder) collects their best tracks from the latter day Rounders. In 2006 a definitve documentary The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose was released, detailing and chronicling the turbulent and tumbling relationship betweeb Weber and Stampfel, as well as being a compelling document on one of the finest folk duos to ever grace the music scene.