The Holy Modal Rounders have been making musical mischief and mayhem for just about 40 years now. In lieu of the comprehensive box set that I think they deserve, the good folks at Rounder (who named their label after the band) have honored the Rounders by declaring them "Essential." In celebration of the label's 30th anniversary, they've created a 30-album Heritage series by the most important Rounder acts.
This is one of 'em, and it's a doozy. Twenty tracks, researched and remastered, with liner notes and old pictures and whatnot. Of course, it only covers the Rounders' recordings on Rounder, but let's not bite the hand ...
The Rounders started out as Stampfel and Weber, Pete and Steve, in the very early Sixties, tweaking the serious folkies with twisted, psychedelic versions of a whole bunch of songs out of Harry Smith's songbook, Tin
Pan Alley and their own warped minds. They somehow survived the serious debaucheries of that decade and started recording for their namesake label in the Seventies. Along the way, they backed The Fugs and played with a whole raft of folks, including playwright Sam Shepard. Dave Reich started playing bass with them around the turn of the decade, and he's still at it. The three of them put out Too Much Fun in 2000, and its best tracks are here: "Happy Rolling Cowboy," "Bonaparte's Retreat," "Bad Boy" and "Year of Jubilo." Check out my review of that album for the whole skinny.
A few kindred spirits have figured in much of the Rounders' oeuvre, including the late Jeffery Frederick (or Fredericks, or Frederich, it's spelled a lot of ways), and Robin Remailly (who's still alive and kicking in spite of what I said in my review of Too Much Fun), and Michael Hurley, and Luke Faust. Their first release on Rounder was Alleged in Their Own Time, and it's represented here by some choice cuts: "Low Down Dog," "Random Canyon" and "Nova," the latter two full of Stampfel's brand of puns and wordplay, the traditional "She's More to be Pitied" and "Synergy," something of an answer to what's probably the group's best known song, "Euphoria."
The critically praised Have Moicy! from 1976 had just about everybody in the Rounders family on it except Weber. It's hard to pick just a few tracks off that one, but these are representative: Hurley's bluesy "Sweet Lucy," Frederick's shuffling "Robbin' Banks," and Hurley's "Slurf Song," an ode to eating that gives this album its title.
Frederick and "Snocks" Hurley are some of the most creative folk songwriters of the past half-century, and some choice tracks off their solo efforts are here: Hurley's gospel blast "I'm Getting Ready to Go" from Snockgrass and "You Got to Find Me" from Long Journey; and Frederick's "Lazy Bones" and "Rotten Lettuce" from his classic Spiders in the Moonlight. The latter is a hilarious swinging ditty about a man whose girlfriend is about to be executed for murder, typical Frederick fare.
You want oddities? How about the disco/hip hop, Rounders-meet-They Might Be Giants weirdness of "Impossible Groove," or the Jimmy Buffet-style "Everything Must Go" from Stampfel's band The Bottlecaps, circa 1986. Or the garage calypso of "Coldest Woman," from the 1979 Stampfel-Weber project Going Nowhere Fast.
Both "Goodbye to Booze" from Nowhere Fast and "More to be Pitied," the last two tracks, feel tacked-on, an afterthought. Otherwise, the album flows along in typical Rounders-style fits and starts that make sense.
You should own this album, or better yet, all the pieces that went to make it, although I'm not sure they're all available on CD at this writing. Just buy everything by the Holy Modal Rounders you can get your hands on, and listen to them every day. If you don't "get it," listen to it again until you do. If you already "get it," good. Have fun. That's what it's all about.
