A few interesting items....

The buzz around Peter's appearance at The Hideout on Saturday, September 18 is growing exponentially. Peter will be doing radio interviews on WLUW and WNUR at noon central on Saturday, September 11 and Sunday, September 12 respectively. Look for stories and articles about Peter running the week prior to the show in Time Out, The Reader, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, in Jim DeRogatis' blog, and, I'm sure in many other places.

Doors are at 8:30pm, The Cairo Gang plays at 9:00pm, and Peter will hit at 10:00pm. It's going to be off the rails. Plus he'll be selling copies of his (and The Holy Modal Rounders) very hard-to-find CDs, including the amazing Dook Of The Beatniks.

Earlier in the day, at 2:00pm on September 18, Peter will play a 20-minute mini-set at one of the very best art galleries in the city, Corbett vs Dempsey. Corbett vs. Dempsey is located on the third floor of the Dusty Groove Building, above Dusty Groove America, 1120 North Ashland Avenue, just south of Division Street, in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood.

Stay tuned.....

Take Me Away - Rochester, NY April 17, 2010

Peter Stampfel on Chicago Radio

With the show now less than a month away, things are beginning to happen.

Peter will do two Chicago-area radio interviews on September 11 and 12.

On Saturday, September 11 at 12:00pm central time, he'll interview with Tom Jackson on WLUW-FM.
...
On Sunday, September 12, also at noon central time, he'll talk with Al Finley at WNUR-FM.

I believe both of these stations stream so just go to their respective websites and listen.

I'll post here about any more Peter-related press in the coming weeks.

Chicago's own Plastic Crimewave created this beautiful and amazing poster.

Now if this doesn't get you out to the show on September 18 at The Hideout, I don't know what will.

The Cairo Gang To Open For Peter Stampfel on September 18 at The Hideout

August 9, 2010

Greetings:

Now that the corporate marketing mania of Lollapalooza is over, I’d like to draw your attention to the decidedly anti-corporate Peter Stampfel show coming to The Hideout on September 18. Peter does not gig outside of New York City too often. This is his first Chicago club show in 16 years and, with The Cairo Gang opening up, it’s an event not to be missed. Famed Chicago musician and artist Plastic Crimewave is creating a limited edition poster for the show.

Saturday, September 18, 2010
The Hideout
1354 W Wabansia
Chicago, IL
773-227-4433
www.hideoutchicago.com
Doors: 8:30pm
Tickets: $10.00

Advance tickets available through Ticketweb here:
http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=2514135


Peter Stampfel -- playing banjo, fiddle and guitar and singing with more enthusiasm than a kid on Christmas morning -- just about single-handedly founded what is now known as “Freak Folk” when he joined up with guitarist Steve Weber and formed The Holy Modal Rounders back in the very early 1960s. The Rounders stood traditional music on its head with a booze and amphetamine-fueled abandon. Stampfel loved the old music and hated how sterile it had become. According to Peter, he wondered what Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole would have sounded like had they been alive in the early 1960s. Their answer was in their first two records recorded for Prestige, Holy Modal Rounders and Holy Modal Rounders 2, original pressings of which are now highly prized by serious record buffs.

Stampfel and Weber also appeared on the first few albums by New York's legendary street band The Fugs (whose co-founder Tuli Kupferberg passed away last month), with Stampfel’s track, The New Amphetamine Shriek, a standout on the classic LP, Virgin Fugs.

Back in April, I asked Peter, who continues to perform and record prolifically, why he hasn’t played Chicago in so long. His reply was “nobody’s gotten me a gig.” So, having never booked a gig before, I decided to take the task upon myself. Luckily, the great folks at The Hideout were very helpful and happy to bring him in. It would please me immensely (as I’m taking no money for my efforts) to welcome Peter to a full house at The Hideout.

With that in mind, please consider advancing the gig anyway you can, and please by all means consider coming out to the show. I’ll be very happy to coordinate interviews and supply you with high-resolution jpeg images.

Thanks very much for anything you can do to help make the show a success.

First Chicago show in 16 years

Peter Stampfel - founder of The Holy Modal Rounders; original member of The Fugs -- makes his first Chicago-area appearance in 16 years. Don't miss it. Only $10.00 too.


PETER STAMPFEL

...Next to Bob Dylan, Peter Stampfel is the nearest thing to a genius folkiedom has thrown up. His enthusiasm is unquenchable. I've never heard anyone – anyone – sing with the sheer enthusiasm for singing that Stampfel puts out. He knows his Harry Smith backwards and forwards. But unlike most folksingers, he prefers backwards.
--Robert Christgau, The Village Voice

Peter Stampfel's singing and timing are superb. His raucousness has to be heard to be believed. His unfailingly enthusiastic vocals are a delight.
--The New York Times


“Back in the early 1960s, I knew music was going to explode and change everything,” says banjoist, fiddler, guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Peter Stampfel. “And then The Beatles happened. I was right. Except I thought it was going to be us.” As one-half of the Holy Modal Rounders in the early 1960s, Peter Stampfel was among the first to impart the emerging psychedelic ethos of the day to traditional old-time string band music and blues. His direction was cast in part after seeing Bob Dylan in 1961 mix traditional music with rock ‘n’ roll phrasing.

Stampfel’s musical amalgam has proven infectious and influential – during the past 40+ years, he has played with everyone from Bob Dylan to playwright Sam Shepard to Mississippi John Hurt to Yo La Tengo to design visionary Buckminster Fuller. According to The Boston Globe, “Stampfel simultaneously embraces and explodes tradition. He is silly, sincere, and full of life.”

Peter Stampfel was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1938. He dropped out of the University of Wisconsin after two years, supporting himself by playing music. Not long after moving to New York, he, along with guitarist Steve Weber, formed The Holy Modal Rounders, releasing two albums on the famed Prestige label, records that married traditional old-time music with a pot, booze and amphetamine-fueled abandon. In the duo’s warped version of the classic Hesitation Blues, Stampfel became the first person to use the word “psychedelic” in song. According to Stampfel, “We thought: ‘What if Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole were living now, in the early 1960s. What would their music sound like?’ As far as we could tell, this was it.”

In 1965 Stampfel and Weber teamed up with poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferburg to form The Fugs, an equally far-out, rocked-out group. With songs like New Amphetamine Shriek, Slum Goddess, and Coca Cola Douche, radio play, let alone any sort of mass popularity, were unlikely, to say the least.

Mainstream outlier though Stampfel was, the Lovin’ Spoonful nevertheless tapped him to pen the liner notes of the group’s debut album in 1965; in addition, the Spoonful included a Rounders’ song, Blues In The Bottle, on their best-selling record.

The Holy Modal Rounders had two brushes with the mainstream in the late 1960s. In 1968 the band performed You’ve Got The Right String, Baby, But The Wrong Yo-Yo on the Laugh-In television program (where they were not permitted to finish their song). The group’s biggest claim to fame came in 1969, when The Holy Modal Rounders earned the distinction of being the most obscure (and some would say bizarre) group to contribute to the Easy Rider movie soundtrack with the song, If You Want To Be A Bird.

During the 1970s, The Holy Modal Rounders released a number of LPs on a variety of labels, including Boston-based Rounder Records (the label named after the band). The highlight of the releases is the famed 1976 LP, Have Moicy, credited to The Unholy Modal Rounders. The sessions teamed Stampfel up with Michael Hurley and Jeffrey Fredericks & The Clamtones and landed on The New York Times’ Top 20 albums of the year.

Over the years, Stampfel has led a number of bands and recorded an impressive collection of solo albums. His most recent release is 2010’s Dook Of The Beatniks. John Morthland, in his review of the record in Sonicboomers.com, wrote, “It’s folk and rock, ridiculous and sublime, holy and profane, art that’s artless; it’s quintessentially American and from another planet. It’s Stampfel at probably his most consistent overall, and often at his best.”

There have been a few Holy Modal Rounders reunions over the years, among the most notable of which was at New York’s Bottom Line club in 1996. In his review of that show New York Times writer Neil Strauss wrote, “Mr. Stampfel is a counterculture Jerry Lewis, a mad professor of song with an entire century of pop and folk music locked up inside his jittery mind.”

More recently Peter has performed with a range of artists, including Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas and John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. A recent film documentary of the Holy Modal Rounders, Bound to Lose, is currently on DVD. Peter's influence still reigns strong in the new freak-folk movement spearheaded by Devendra Banhart.

Stampfel is a true creative and crazed genius who doesn’t often perform outside of his native New York City; the effect of his performances lingers like an especially revelatory LSD experience. Performing songs from the Holy Modal Rounders and Fugs songbooks as well as his more recent material, his shows are nothing short of mind-altering. The Chicago Tribune said, “Peter Stampfel is a goofball genius -- imagine Buddy Holly with a fondness for joy buzzers crossed with Randy Newman -- with an idiomatic grasp of nearly every strain of 20th Century popular music.” Nobody else in music today, or likely anytime in the future, will ever fit that particular description again.



Bio written by: Marc Lipkin with Nick Crews


For interview and high-resolution jpeg image, contact Marc Lipkin, 773-828-9137, mflipkin at gmail dot com

LINKS:

Holy Modal Rounders Laugh-In Appearance, 1968:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkjJs5gKtFs

Fascinating, in-depth 1996 interview with
Perfect Sound Forever:
http://www.furious.com/perfect/stampfel.html

Peter’s MySpace page. Includes available CDs/LPs and how to obtain them as well as streaming songs:
http://www.myspace.com/peterstampfelmusic