The Holy Modal Rounders
The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders

In the United States of the late sixties, rock music was swept by a peculiar phenomenon: the love for the bizarre and for wild experimentation upon the fabric of tradition. This category of musicians alien to commercial logic is often associated with the label of “freaks,” as if they were circus freaks that “normalized” society views with a mix of irony and compassion for their "different" condition.

In reality, the cultural world should repay with interest bands like Zappa’s Mothers of Inventions, the Fugs of gurus Sanders/Kupferbeger, the United States of America led by the lunatic Joseph Byrd, people whose music was defined by a major newspaper of the time as "a collection of garbage." Yet, in some way, these groups have received the recognition and place they deserve in the realm of the musical development that interests us. The fertile imagination that led them, unlike so many other static rock characters who still play the same things today, to dismantle the musical machine to discover the mechanism’s functioning only to rebuild it in unusual yet extraordinarily effective forms, will remain one of the characteristics that distinguish man from ape.

This celebration, however, forgot along the way one of the groups that participated, in the same manner as those mentioned, in the sublimation of the freak spirit: the Holy Modal Rounders. Originally a duo of folksingers among the most bizarre around. Peter Stampfel on guitar and Steve Weber on banjo and fiddle overturned one of the most traditional genres of rural America with their voices teetering between operetta and cartoon, appearing too strange and irreverent for the average listener. Yet I recommend listening to the first two records simply titled Vol 1&2 (encapsulated in a single compact disc) and then fireworks (among them: "Give the fiddler a dream", "Bound to lose", "Junco Partner") will fill your room debunking the myth that folk is tedious. The turning point for the duo Stampfel/Weber was given by the acid trip that led to the realization in 1967 of "Indian War Hoop" with a real band in which the future writer Sam Shepard stands out on percussion. The two embraced the amphetamine high resulting in delving into the utmost psychedelic chaos with a succession of bizarre sonic experiences of the vagabonds Jimmy and Crash, the alter egos of the duo Stampfel/Weber. Heard today it may be somewhat amusing (and perhaps that was the intention) but for the time Stampfel’s dissonances are pure genius and Indian is none other than the fantastic prelude to the boom of the record some years later, this "The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders" which already from the title is a whole program (The moray eels devour the Holy Modal Rounders).

The album opens with a "Bird Song" which remains a cult in the freak imagination for having set to music the evolutions of Captain America and Billy astride their choppers on the asphalt tape of “Easy Rider,” and with a bit of effort it might even seem like a fairly normal song, but the rest is pure freakitude culminating in the three minutes of "Werewolf", the cold lamenting mantra to the moon of a drunken werewolf, or the skewed doggy-style blues of "My Mind Capsized. It's just a semi-serious moment of introspective monstrosity because rock crashing tracks like "Half a Mind" really make you want to grab a pot or a washboard to join the fray along with the rest of the band on a thirtieth street curb until the cops arrive. And remember this once and for all: music is like Giorgio Gaber’s song freedom... it’s participation!

And an album like this cannot but conclude with the parody "The Pledge" of the American anthem sung by a salvation army besieged by the ugliest sons of bitches that ever roamed the metropolitan streets.

Unclassifiable but fundamental for all those who believe that music is the most powerful means to fly.