The Holy Modal Rounders

For more than three decades, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber have explored the
boundaries and subsets of the blues, early country and folk, and sniffed out strains of pop
melodicism and structural elegance that run through all these genres. Holy Modal
Rounders' scattershot approach -- their lineup is ever-mutating, and they perform under a
whimsical variety of names -- belies the core Rounders musical sensitivity and en... More >

Peter Stampfel is the intense seeker, Steve Weber the mellow layabout. Where Stampfel is all comic focus, whether comic ha-ha or comic-as-opposed-to-tragic, Weber is someone who can just not give a f*ck while remaining both charming and musical. Their magic isn't eternal youth--they're as much old codgers as John Hurt and Clarence Ashley in 1963. It's their argument that play is the fundamental life-principle. Among the exhibits: the Henry Clay Work emancipation hullabaloo "Kingdom Coming" rewritten to lay more insults on the massa, the scatted dog-yip solo and verse about Simulac-boosting junkie moms that bedecks the psychedeliprop "Euphoria," a sea chantey that climaxes "Don't you rock me daddy-o," a celebration of Buddha's fondness for caffeine and twisted '50s chord progressions, and a girl-group obscurity in which a sweetly love-struck teenager goes gaga over a "Bad Boy": "He'll sell your heart on St. Mark's Place/In glassine envelopes/He'll cut it with a pig's heart/And burn the chumps and dopes." (Grade - A)