Slowly but surely, the Holy Modal Rounders back catalog is being reissued. The latest to be dragged squinting and blinking into the light of day is 1978’s Last Round. Even more than the original Rounders’ first two acoustic discs reissued by Rounder in 1999, this record is a true period piece, with all the good and bad that implies.
The Rounders started out as Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber in the early 1960s, doing a reverently irreverent, psychedelic take on old string-band music and country blues. They picked up additional members during the Sixties and made a few more albums with the Fugs and various other musicians and counterculture personas, their output hindered by their drug intake and Weber’s hatred of rehearsal. The one song of theirs that nearly everybody who survived the Sixties remembers is “If You Want to Be a Bird” from the soundtrack to Easy Rider.
Substance abuse and its attendant problems, along with the natural entropic tendency of the universe eventually splintered the group, some to the West Coast with Weber, some to the East with Stampfel. In 1972 the Oregon faction minus Weber got together with Stampfel and New England folkie Michael Hurley to produce the classic hippie folk record Have Moicy.
Then in 1978 Stampfel and Weber and their entourages wound up in New York at the same time for a couple of weeks, or so Stampfel tells it in his updated liner notes to Last Round. This amalgamation of 10 or 12 musicians rehearsed for a week and recorded for a week, and this disc was the result.
It’s a slightly uneven affair, but that almost goes without saying with the Rounders. This version of the group includes some electric guitar, Robin Remaily’s delightful piano, mandolin and slide guitar playing (in addition to his wryly lewd vocals), some loose drumming, and Ted Deane’s soulful saxophone. It’s the Big Band version of the Rounders, including some members of the West Coast contingent, who went by the name Unholy Modal Rounders when they played with Weber and The Clamtones when they played with Jeffrey Frederick.
There’s a jug band take on the band’s flagship song “Euphoria,” and a remake of “August 1967,” a humorous but harrowing account of the dark side of the Summer of Love, sung to the tune of “Fishing Blues.” This was originally a track on what’s referred to as the Rounders’ “Elektra album,” titled The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders, put out in 1968 or thereabouts.
There’s also a remake of “If You Want to Be a Bird” that doesn’t really work as well as the original. Or my memory of the original, anyway. This one’s a bit too tricked up with wind instruments, and Stampfel enunciates the words like a drunk trying to speak too clearly, which probably isn’t far from the truth. Somehow this arrangement just cries out for tuba, although Dave Reich’s bass playing very closely mimics that instrument. As unsatisfying as this version of the song is, it was a stroke of sheer genius to do it in medley with “Wild Blue Yonder.”
Speaking of genius, that perfectly describes Remaily. His songs on Last Round have the most staying power (“Euphoria” notwithstanding), especially “Pink Underwear,” which is the very embodiment of an R. Crumb comic strip, and “The Cold Roll,” an updating of the old-time jazz standard “jelly roll” motif. Both are funny and fairly graphic songs about sex.
The only two traditional folk-type songs — “Sweet William” and Henry Clay Work’s “Year of Jubilo” — are a welcome throwback to the Rounders of old. Weber is a darn good acoustic blues picker, Stampfel plucks a delicate banjo line, Remaily adds deft touches on slide guitar and piano, and the vocals are spot-on, in their weird and off-kilter way. For diversity there’s the hippie haiku of “Oriental Lady,” the Cajun-tinged “Romping Through the Swamp,” and existential angst in “God, What am I Doing Here?” penned by the spiritual earth-mother of the Rounders’ camp, Antonia.
Some of the songs are just plain silly, like Stampfel’s “Poison Sugar,” Ted Deane’s “TV Song,” a slice of Seventies pop culture, and the album closer, “Snappin’ Pussy,” a salacious ditty that shares its melody with John McCutcheon’s “I Like Peanut Butter.”
Last Round is 100-proof confirmation that there was something going on in American music in the late Seventies besides disco, punk and arena rock. The Rounders have always gone their own way, and occasionally the rest of the world catches up to them, then leaves them behind yet again, pickin’ and grinnin’ and havin’ fun. If like me you have always wished you had known about the Rounders back when records like this were originally issued on vinyl, now’s your Year of Jubilo.
(Adelphi, 2000)
