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The Holy Modal Rounders
Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders

(Elektra, 1969; reissued remaster on Water, 2002)

Cult folk freaks capture the of the summer of love in decay.

The Holy Modal Rounders

The Holy Modal Rounders were all but defunct when newly appointed Elektra producer Barry Friedman convinced them to record an album for the label in 1968. By now, the original Greenwich Village folk duo of vocalist/fiddle player Peter Stampfel and guitarist Steve Weber had evolved into a rambling, notoriously drug-raddled five-piece whose number included the playwright Sam Shepard. Weber's reluctance to rehearse any new material meant Stampfel was busying himself instead with a rock group, The Moray Eels of the title.

Having persuaded them to regroup in a Californian studio Friedman was confronted by a band with a brace of new songs (bar one Michael Hurley cover, Werewolf), no rehearsals and a drug consumption that was as prodigious as their musical palette was broad: acoustic folk, lysergic rock, blues, country, ragtime, speed and weed. The results were predictably chaotic but also remarkable both for the number of great songs that did make it through the mire and as a snapshot of the bleaker end of the '60s. The STP Song (a "mutilated version" of his song August 1967, according to Stampfel in the highly entertaining liner notes) was a case in point. A three-day trip on the titular hallucinogen yielded only the last line: "Yummy, yummy, yummy, sucking off a mummy / Hippies call it STP". The rest was written after Stampfel came down and the song was renamed by Barry Friedmann in the final mix (along with several other songs, to Stampfel's evident chagrin). Stampfel's sped-up, acid-warped vocal parodies hippie junkies and cosmic pushers and like he says "Sure as hell captures the period better than that goddamn song about going to San Francisco being sure to wear flowers in your hair". A summertime love-in it is not. On the other hand, Weber's lazy, folky, One Will Do For Now and gutsy acid rocker Half A Mind sound as groovy as any of their Elektra contemporaries.

Stampfel is particularly disparaging of the opener, Bird Song, which his girlfriend Antonia had written as If You Want To Be A Bird but again was renamed by Friedman (who perhaps tellingly would emerge from these sessions having changed his name to Frazier Mohawk). A disjointed country waltz with a simple message - you gotta get high to fly - it was one of the few tracks on the album to get any radio play (Friedman/Mohawk's insistence that all the songs run together into two single-groove, DJ-challenging suites didn't help). Peter Fonda heard it and enshrined the song on the Easy Rider soundtrack. "Geez, I hate this cut," Says Stampfel of what would become his most successful song. Peace and love indeed.

Jenny Bulley

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 24/02/2010

Further Listening

The Fugs – The Fugs First Album (ESP, 1966)

The Holy Modal Rounders - Vols 1&2 (Fantasy, 1999)

Michael Hurley - Have Moicy (Rounder, 1976)

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The Holy Modal Rounders

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