Unleashing Holy Hell With the Rounders
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During their heyday in the mid-1960s, the Holy Modal Rounders recast American folk music with an absurdity that matched their times. Though ignored when it was released in November 1963 (coincidentally the day after President Kennedy was assassinated), the Rounders’ first album, followed by their subsequent records and live shows in various incarnations, celebrated the malleability of the folk idiom and multi-instrumentalist Peter Stampfel’s prolific songwriting with a combination of sincerity and irreverence that remains unmatched.
“The Holy Modal Rounders … Bound to Lose,” a new documentary about the band, which is currently in its fifth decade of recording and performing, makes its debut at Anthology Film Archives this weekend. The film makes a convincing case for the Rounders as standard-bearers for a warts-and-all style of acoustic string bending and harmonizing that has quietly crept into the mainstream since the group was greeted with shrugs and puzzled looks in the deadly serious Greenwich Village folk scene 45 years ago.
Expert testimony abounds in “Bound to Lose,” which was directed by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul C. Lovelace. By both celebrating and exploding folk tradition, the Rounders brought the music to “a whole new level of authenticity,” says Peter Tork, guitarist for the unashamedly inauthentic Monkees. Similarly, Robert Christgau, the self-anointed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” quotes himself on the subject of Mr. Stampfel’s songwriting supremacy, declaring Mr. Stampfel the only genius besides Bob Dylan to emerge from New York’s acoustic scene. “The hell with Joan Baez,” Mr. Christgau says. “P.U.!” “Bound to Lose” documents the Rounders’ uncharted course, from collaboration with fellow groundbreaking musical miscreants the Fugs, to near fame via inclusion on the soundtrack and resulting album from the film “Easy Rider,” to lengthy periods of inactivity due to the volatile nature of Mr. Stampfel and cofounder Steve Weber’s collaborative and personal relationship. “We were on ‘Laugh-In’?” asks onetime Rounders drummer, the playwright and actor Sam Shepard, upon seeing a clip of the band, featuring himself on drums, as it proved itself too anarchic even for a comedy program that courted chaos. Indeed, “Easy Rider” director Dennis Hopper admits that he initially became interested in the group because of their drummer, not because of their songs. “It was Sam Shepard’s band was what I was told,” Mr. Hopper says.
But the Holy Modal Rounders was not Sam Shepard’s band, it was and remains Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber’s band, and “Bound to Lose” is at its best when it diagrams Messrs. Stampfel and Weber’s collaborative pathology. A lifelong loose cannon grown rusty with age, Mr. Weber is described by the folk artist Dave Van Ronck as “the only human being I ever saw who, as a remedy for a toothache, took LSD.” Mr. Weber appears to have spent his life — and to some degree spent himself — exercising self-medicating joie de vivre at a gorilla-suit level of subtlety. “I’m a hedonist, you know?” he tells the camera on a daytime pilgrimage to a Bucks County, Pa., bar. “Just another day in the life of a musician. Sometimes drunk before noon, sometimes not.” Though Mr. Weber’s appetite for excess has been attenuated by time, Mr. Stampfel voluntarily put his darker appetites behind him, married, and fathered two daughters. The fact that those years coincided with his self-imposed separation from Mr. Weber (who, in contrast with Mr. Stampfel, is shown in the film living at home with his mother) is likely not coincidental.
At a recent reading from his excellent biography of Gram Parsons (a more celebrated renegade of musical Americana), “Twenty Thousand Roads,” the author David Meyer compared being in a band with being married to each band member, only to an exponential degree. Messrs. Stampfel and Weber’s musical coupling is a union whose level of strife and dysfunction has exponentially increased into the double digits. Reunited for the 40th anniversary show that climaxes “Bound to Lose,” the two men bicker and fume like unhappy spouses. Irresponsible, forgetful, and confrontational, Mr. Weber is like the worst aspects of the Dionysian impulse personified. Pragmatic, exuberant, and focused, Mr. Stampfel alternates between patiently dealing with Mr. Weber’s unreliability on- and off-stage to goading his musical spouse with digs about his ego and his drinking. “At least I’m not hitting you over the head,” he offers as consolation after Mr. Weber chafes at a scolding.
On screen in “The Holy Modal Rounders … Bound to Lose,” Messrs. Stampfel and Weber resemble Goofus and Gallant, the comic strip personification of how to behave and not to behave from “Highlights for Children” magazine, as much as they personify the radical architects of the American folk revival that they are.
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