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

I don't understand how these aren't at the top of the best albums of all time charts.

How the most enlightened rock gurus/scribes haven't adored/praised them, at most relegating them to lackluster side notes included for the sake of record.

Yet we are talking about people who took a genre, folk, into the alchemical laboratory of the absurd, and records infused with a sense of freedom that leaves you breathless. All of this while being completely unpretentious, because if you listen carefully, you can always hear laughter in the background.

Starting in the early sixties as a wildly eccentric folk duo and later joining the ranks of the Fugs, the most spectacular experience of radicalism within America at that time, during the era of the summer of love they began producing music that was terrible, disjointed, and incredibly exciting.

Think of it as a sort of jovial and wild drunkard's chant backed by always skewed sounds, now wild, now of incongruous and remarkable sweetness.

I've always thought of them as gypsies of the imagination (because only gypsies can carry such mad passion into sounds) and as keepers of ultimate wisdom (since the wisdom that rests on laughter has always seemed to me the only desirable one).

I discovered them thanks to Syd Barrett, or rather thanks to a scribe (I don't remember who) who found certain frayed splendors in the mad diamond's solo work. They weren't wrong, as some atmospheres could indeed be compared. Only the fabulous Englishman was then in the grip of the great sleep while these were absolutely awake.

Anyway, coming to this record…

So, in theory, it should be folk, but…

But it begins with a piano that’s half music box and half saloon, a voice half ungraceful and half indescribable, and those words: “if you want to be a bird why don't you try to have a little flight?”...

It continues with a whisper over an off-key harpsichord effect screeched by toy tambourines…

Then Bugs Bunny somehow ending up on a trip among the fastest guns in the west... which, when listening, makes the mind wander to certain Bonze crazy antics and the lands of never too much loved English eccentricity…

Then the ballad of the werewolves, where a fabulous lack of grace annihilates with grace all the grace in the world…

Then an instrumental one-third circus, one-third I can't find the words, one-third I can't find the words ever more…

Then one of those things that makes you wonder how it holds together and which invisible strings ensure it doesn't scatter into streams of madness or a thousand silver balls like the mercury from a broken thermometer…

Then an absurd rockabilly tortured by fearsome percussion and a violin that not even Paganini in the best/worst paradises/hells…

Then… then stop for mercy's sake…

Because the rest are terribly ungainly folk blues, classical guitar interludes for roughnecks, the Beatles ended up in a blender…

I know, it made absolutely no sense to you, but that's good since it's the same effect the record has...

Ah the title, something like "the moray eels eat the Holy Modal Rounders"...

Trallallá...