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/wat
Fascinating, in-depth 1996 interview with
Perfect Sound Forever:
http://www.furious.com/per
Peter’s MySpace page. Includes available CDs/LPs and how to obtain them as well as streaming songs:
http://www.myspace.com/pet
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