Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 41

Record label: Prestige

Produced: Paul Rothschild

Recorded: New York City; December 11, 1963 and January 17, 1964

Released: February 1964

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Peter Stampfel (fiddle, banjo, v); Steve Weber (g, v)

Track listing: Blues In The Bottle; Fiddler A Dram; The Cuckoo; Euphoria; Long John; Hesitation Blues; Hey, Hey Baby; Reuben’s Train; Mister Spaceman; Moving Day; Better Things For You; Same Old Man; Hop High Ladies; Bound To Lose

Running time: 35.13

Current CD: Big Beat CDWIKD 176 adds: Flop Eared Mule; Black Eyed Susie; Sail Away Ladies; Clinch Mountain Backstep; Fishing Blues; Statesboro’ Blues; Jumko Partner; Mole In The Ground; Hot Corn Cold Corn; Down The Old Plank Road; Chevrolet Six; Crowley Waltz; Bully Of The Town; Sugar In The Ground; Soldier’s Joy

Further listening: Everything you need is on the CD above.

Further reading: Follow The Music (Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, 1997); www.holymodalrounders.com

Download: emusic

The Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s attracted the ambitious and talented, the ambitious but talentless, the right-on, the put-upon and the just plain weird. The Holy Modal Rounders were as weird as it got. Stampfel and Weber were talented and accomplished players, who first met up in Greenwich Village in March 1963. In the original sleevenotes, Stampfel attempted to pin down the fruit of their union: ‘Steve calls it rockabilly and I call it progressive old-timey. No-one has ever played music like us before.’

They kicked their music out of shape by playing every theatre, book store, street gathering, festival, coffee house and folk club around the Village prior to recording The Holy Modal Rounders on December 11, 1963, for the Prestige Folklore imprint. The other key folk labels of the day, Elektra and Vanguard, had also approached them; they went with Prestige’s Paul Rothschild because he smoked dope.

Opening with Blues In The Bottle – an obscure 1930 recording later brought to the wider world courtesy of The Lovin’ Spoonful – the album’s tone is set, the Rounders’ personalised lyrics veering close to the edge: ‘I don’t need nobody sniffin’ glue.’ Hesitation Blues features the first recorded use of the word ‘psychedelic’; it’s one of three brilliant Charlie Poole songs on the album, all ’20s period pieces transformed into a kind of lysergic folk. Almost every song comes loaded with drug references and scatological rhymes: the Rounders made up new words for all the material they covered, and sang in unconventionally blended voices; Weber’s like early Dylan on helium and Stampfel’s a nasal twang. Ultimately, The Holy Modal Rounders is tremendous fun.

That the band ever got to make an album is remarkable; that there was a second later that year smacks of complete madness on the part of their record label. But there’s a wit, originality and sense of joy – and a prescient, subversive intent – that sets these two records apart from everything else in their day. Unsurprisingly, they soon teamed up with beat activists The Fugs (on whose first two albums they play), though they’re probably still best known for 1968’s Bird Song, featured in the movie Easy Rider. The band continued into the ’70s with augmented line-ups that included Michael Hurley and playwright Sam Shephard as drummer at different times. But none of their subsequent work approaches the inspired mayhem on offer here.