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185 Peter Stampfel As half of the original Holy Modal Rounders, with Steve Weber, fiddler and banjo player Peter Stampfel showed a remarkable grasp of American old-time music and popular songs. The pair kept the music ever alive by having an uproarious time of it, plying mischievous twists in their delivery and providing new lyrics and new songs in the spirit of that noble strain of weirdness so prevalent in the tradition. They made two records for Prestige in 1963–64 and then joined the Fugs for that group’s first Folkways album in 1965. In their brief second phase, with playwright Sam Shepard as drummer, in 1967 they made their only album for ESP, Indian War Whoop, their most far-out record (the relaunched label later issued the unreleased Live in 65). They regrouped again at the end of the decade, before the augmented band moved to Oregon in the 1970s without Stampfel, who stayed in New York but worked with the Rounders occasionally. In 1980 he took a full-time job, which he has held ever since: as submissions editor for the science fiction publisher DAW Books, founded by his wife’s father. He has remained active as a musician, forming various bands, playing with guitarist Gary Lucas, and lately concocting the loosely tethered Ether Frolic Mob, with John Cohen (of the New Lost City Ramblers), Annabel Lee, and sometimes Sam Shepard. How would you differentiate what the Holy Modal Rounders were up to from the New Lost City Ramblers and other folk revivalists? Didn’t you also draw on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music [1952] records? I heard bluegrass in ’56 when I started college. I first heard the Ramblers in ’58. I recognized what they were doing as what happened before bluegrass, and that suddenly seemed a lot more interesting than bluegrass. When I heard the Harry Smith anthology, I felt it was on me to keep all those—I assumed—totally dead people and the amazing tradition alive. Thousands of other people my age had precisely the same idea—like I needn’t have bothered, it was well in hand.Ifirst heard the anthology when I came to New York in ’59. I went to the Café East, north of McSorley’s, 186 esp-disk’ as lived and witnessed and somebody put volume 3 on the turntable. I, like, shit a brick. And the booklet that came with it was as cool as the music was, which was phenomenal. Anyway, what made the Rounders different from the Ramblers is in 1963 I had the epiphany that what if you could bring the Smith anthology guys to the present, and they would still be the same age they were in the 1920s, and then what if you exposed them to rock and roll circa 1963? So, the idea of what those guys would do gi ven the possibilities of rock and roll certainly seemed way more interesting than “let’s do it like 1936 perfectly.” Were there any other cultural elements that contributed to the Rounders’ style? Surrealism, the Marx Brothers? Well, I try to steal from as many people as I possibly can. The Marx Brothers, definitely. And listening to the 1965 record, my voice while introducing a song is like I’m doing Dave Van Ronk doing W. C. Fields. We got it from the ancestors , like Dionysus, or Hermes—he invented the flat pick, the plectrum. And Krazy Kat. And Pogo. And Spike Jones. Like all the guys in the anthology. Th er e was a mother lode of ancestors to follow in the footsteps of. Were you at all friendly with Harry Smith? He was the producer for the Fugs. But I met him once before that. It was like, Look, Harry Smith is over there. I was expecting this godlike human; he looked like a dr unken Bowery bum basically. Long hair that hadn’t been washed in God knows, and glasses with tape in the middle. I’m ashamed to say how offputting I found his appearance, ashamed and embarrassed, but I wish I would have had some conversation with him. He had this whole system of recording. I didn’t realize how into recording he was. I planned to write a series of songs that depicted the life of Harry Smith, which would be called the “Harry Smith Anthology.” I did a lot of research, and I wrote one song, which is simply about his...

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