Holy Modal Rounders – The Holy Modal Rounders 1 & 2

The guitarist strums a simple instrumental figure; he’s soon joined by the fiddler sawing an age-old melody. The duo then assay an uneasy vocal harmony, one voice pinched and reedy, the other (rendered “normal” only by comparison) lower, more controlled, but marked by distinctive rough edges. The performance is jagged and untamed, not amateurish but definitely unpolished — of the folk, if you will. At times, during the instrumental passages, the song threatens to collapse altogether. And then you notice the lyrics — “Rooster chews tobacco/And the hen uses snuff” — mining the passages of the commonplace for hints of the surreal.

“Blues In The Bottle” it’s called, and it functions as an apposite lead track for The Holy Modal Rounders 1 & 2, comprising the band’s 1964 debut and its follow-up. Linked loosely with the early-’60s folk revival, the Rounders, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, were nevertheless more comfortable testing the movement’s fringes, defining a warped sensibility that functioned as a corrective and critique of the scene’s embalming sense of solemnity and reverence. The duo embraced folk as a living music — decidedly loose, often silly if not truly demented, providing a brief respite from the simply ordinary. As Robert Christgau aptly noted, “It’s truer to the Holy Modal ideal to risk near incompetence than to approximate mere folk music.”

Not surprisingly, the Rounders’ self-titled first release was greeted as a left-field oddity, destined for cult status if not obscurity. Despite mining a familiar catalog of folk readymades — “The Cuckoo”, “Hesitation Blues”, “Better Things For You” — the Rounders’ commitment to the music’s woolly margins rendered them secretly subversive. “Mr. Spaceman” rewrites “Mr. Bass Man” as a goof on the space race, “Euphoria” sings the praises of the chemically-induced Edenic high (go figure), and “Bound To Lose” closes the debut with the existential musings of a riverboat gambler. The payoff — well, they got $3,000 from the Lovin’ Spoonful for their rewrite of “Blues In The Bottle”.

Undaunted, the duo returned to the studio a mere six months later. Long complaining that Prestige botched the original sequencing of the resulting The Holy Modal Rounders/2 (songs arranged by key, fiddle tunes grouped together), Stampfel was given free reign over the reissue. Consequently, the running order on 2 has been completely revamped, including a somewhat perverse flip-flopping of the lead and closing tracks. But damned if Stampfel wasn’t right; in its new configuration, 2 is every bit the equal of its predecessor. What it lacks in conceptual verve and raison d’etre, it more than makes up for in melodic variety and vocal confidence.

In some sense, the Rounders are Harry Smith’s true inheritors. Their music treats the murder ballads, silly ditties, reels and other ephemera of the Anthology as a roadmap to a shadowland, leaving our heroes free to explore long-forgotten moldy corridors and dirt paths, heedless of place and time. Stampfel trundles down Uncle Dave Macon’s “Old Plank Road” vowing “I’ll never, never, never get drunk no more” over a barely suppressed chuckle, only to sneak a toke two cuts later on Bill Monroe’s “Hot Corn, Cold Corn”. Meanwhile, a nearly incoherent Weber stumbles from the “Crowley Waltz” into a revival meeting at a chicken coop. And though critics invoke the term Proustian at their own peril, there’s something about the duo’s everything-old-is-new aesthetic that recalls times perdu.

Admittedly, over the course of 29 tracks, even enthusiasts may find the Rounders’ gonzo agenda and commitment to concept over competence to be daunting. But program either album, and you’ll be reminded of the crazy uncle whose visits were limited to Christmases and weddings; though he irritated (frightened, to be honest) your parents, his stories fascinated, hinting at a secret, untapped universe just beyond the veil of everyday life. Of course, he eventually drifted off into an alcohol-induced stupor, but while it lasted it really was too much fun.