Remember Peter and Antonia Stampfel and the Holy Modal Rounders? Probably not, but if you saw them on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in 1968, they looked like this:
http://youtu.be/vkjJs5gKtFs
A few weeks later,My girlfriend Jon Miller — who danced with Frank Zappa — and I, who was at the time a Tiger Beat/Monkee Spec reporter and editor of Mod Teen Magazine, with a night job doing comedy at the Store on Sunset Strip, and music gigs with my band at Spectrum 2000 and other Sunset Strip venues, got a call from Antonia; could we come pick them up? They were too out of it to drive, and needed to get to their studio gig pronto, over at Elektra.
So we drove our Yank Tank Ford Galaxy 500, called “The DruidMobile”, over to their West Hollywood apartment and scooped up Peter and Antonia and drove them over to Elektra for their final album with Elektra, “Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders“, which satisfied the terms of the contract.
The Rounders never recovered, but Peter, happily, did. They hated Elektra and wanted badly out of the contract, and Moray Eels was their way of saying “goodbye” to Elektra. They were right, it was a lousy label.
A year earlier, they had tried a bit of Lsyergic acid, and this “Acid-Folk” album is one visible result of that world-shifting experience:
http://youtu.be/pDSziYQ2tDY
But Back in The Day, around 1964, only four years earlier, I did alternate sets with them in Greenwich Village at the Playhouse; I also remember playing Gerde’s, the Living Room, Cafe Wha, The Basement and other folk venues — more rarely I did sets at the Gaslight with Hugh Romney and “Peter, Paul and Mounds”, which is what we called the lovely, talented and courageous Mary Travers, who passed gracefully in September of 2009 — we played anywhere we could, even at the Cafe Rienzi, which I managed briefly, if they’d have let us. Back then, in 1964, Peter sounded and looked like this:
and this:
In the eighties, Peter made a living as an editor at, as I remember, Simon & Shuster, my publishers…
Here’s what he’s doing these days:
Not bad, eh? His contribution to the world of music will only be appreciated much later. He’s a bloody genius and remains unbroken by the world’s heaping mountain of economic seductions and slaveries. Want to find out more about this strange and remarkable highly talented and inventive Personnage from Outer Space? These days, you can!
Here’s one more shot — the 50th reunion at Gerde’s Folk City in the East Village, thus closing the circle, from Greenwich Village 1964 to Greenwich Village deep into the 21st century. Keep the faith, bud!
Say, have you ever noticed that unionized — meaning a shop that has union members working in it — and unionized — meaning something such as a salt, that is not ionized — are spelled the same?