Callithumped, Jugged & Punked: Part 3

What are we to make of the crayon palimpsest of Bohemian subcultures, each one scrawling its boast over the lyrics of a previous generation, creating colorful forms that, while new, remain indebted to older eccentricities? The true iconoclast is something rare. Instead, it’s all too common for the avant garde to pillage its predecessors, sometimes with a sly wink and satirical flourish. In this way, what once was obscure is revealed in a new form or even popularized. Rock & Roll is struck from old Blues. Punk attitude owes much to the irreverence and DIY approach of old jug bands and forgotten roots music.

Is that the train that they speak of
The one I heard in my younger days
All great bluesmen have rode her
I'm jumping up gonna ride that train.

This from “Version City” by The Clash; here and there are nods to tradition, admissions of musical mummery, and signs of transitional forms. Following the punk genealogy set forth by Jeffrey Lewis, we find two precursors of punk that seem unlikely at first blush: The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs.

"The Rounders were the first really bent traditional band. And the first traditionally-based band that was not trying to sound like an old record," Pete Stampfel explained to Folk Roots in 1995. Together with Steve Weber. Stampfel formed the nucleus of a collection of bands real, imagined and loosely associated: MacGrundy’s Old Timey Wool Thumpers, The Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancey Street, The Temporal Worth High Steppers, The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers and The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band among many others. The two met in 1963 and started gigging. Their first album, The Holy Modal Rounders, came out in 1964 and boasts the first use of the word “psychedelic” in pop music lyrics. In a natural twist of fate, the two played with The Fugs briefly in 1965.

The Holy Modal Rounders offer an interesting glimpse of musical mutation as an agent, or perhaps symptom, of sub cultural change. Their first two albums were comprised of covers of old standards, most, if not all, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which boasted a cover by occultist Robert Fludd and selections from the dawn of electronic recording. Smith was a most peculiar man and a famous Thelemite who, though not a member of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis, was nevertheless consecrated as a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in 1986. In addition to being an occultist and ethnomusicologist, he was also a painter and renowned experimental film-maker. Perhaps cognizant of his own role as musical catalyst, when he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony he said,” "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."

Pete Stampfel and Pete Weber, the original duo at the core of The Holy Modal Rounders, were no strangers to musical eccentricity. It might be safe to suggest that they were a vital part of the chain of transmission from Harry Smith in changing America through music.


In October 1962 whilst in New York, Stampfel played with Tiny Tim and Phil Ochs at a Greenwich Village Club called The Third Side. Stampfel and Weber met in New York in March 1963 and they started to gig as a duo at places like The Cafe Flamenco and The Playhouse Theatre under a series of bizarre names like the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers

In the period that followed Stampfel formed The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band and then, in late 1974, The Unholy Modal Rounders, who together with Michael Hurley and friends recorded the Have Moicy album, which was one of their better efforts and superior to Last Round, which was actually recorded in 1976.

There is a sort of anarchic heathen energy in the music of the Holy Modal Rounders. Even as their music is firmly rooted in the wildness found in the Smith anthology and elsewhere, their sound also pointed the way forward to the punk rebellion, squeezing juice from the older radical sounds that inspired them and allowing it to ferment. In creating a bridge from the American folk sound to the raucous rebellion and irony in which punk was steeped, they changed the stream of musical history. Their contemporaries, The Fugs, carried the torch forward into realms of freakish vulgarity, perversion and Yippie absurdity, and their legacy will be explored in Part 4 of this series

Requiem

It was unavoidable. Mobs of old guys are shaking their calloused fists and ranting about the goddamned good ol’ days when punk rock punched a hole in the sky and the ever-patient satellite of VALIS blasted us with its pinkly delicious message of cosmic love and cultural transgression. It was 1974. It was 1980. It was timeless. We were young and we would never die. There was rioting, fucking in the streets, non-musicians releasing amazing albums (which were still spun by specially trained bees out of vinyl with gatefold sleeves that shamed the Renaissance masters, goddammit!) and the unavoidable orgasmic bliss of shaking things up. This immediatist breach, to hear some rant, was the last time that real people made music that was so strange and baffling that Biz assimilation was just impossible. Out there, in the Wasteland where the tire-fires never stopped and the ruins of civilization so-called stood like sarsen stones above the 24/7 freakout, we did the St. Vitus dance and slammed our sweaty bodies together until the low brown clouds glowed with morning light or nuclear terminus. Somewhere in the dim cathode twilight we could still hear the existentialist mumblings of Peter Ivers before he was unceremoniously snuffed-out like a microcosmic cover-version of the heat-death of the universe. We gathered in squalid nightclubs, deranged, full of life, burning brighter and brighter until the inevitable fall, unsustainable but not giving a shit because we were outside of time. It was surely the culmination of an act of magick, decades in the making, weird old Harry Smith plucking the Monochord with a shellac plectrum, shaking feathered sticks and unearthing dinosaur-bones of mad, mad music from the bedrock, from beneath the floor, down there rattling like haints. Who’s down there? The devil! Arne Sarknussem! The Living Heads of Mu! Now we walk through this land of ghosts where well-coiffed fascists wield the razor of public relations, wondering how we lost the secret and when that weapon was turned against us, retooled, moneyed, omnipresent. It’s Crystal Night again. The Buzzcocks were right, seeing far into the hazy expanse of a 4th, 5th and 6th Reich hosted by kinder, gentler Nazis where the occluded spawn of morons would take refuge from genocide and corruption in superficial media-death. Now it seems like a lost dream, as if the Finnegans never woke and would never wake again. When these stories are told, younger eyes roll. There is nothing in their experience like this. The evidence still spins, vital, liberating. The Monochord still vibrates and if you find that foolish, quiet center inside of yourself, it will, sure-as-shit, fill with the old madness of a world gone by. There are techniques to defy mass-mesmerization, free spaces to be seized, inside and out. One day there will be music that, while strangely familiar, will move us in new ways, casting out ancient demons of control and once more setting us on that long, well-traveled road. Drink up, dear souls, for tomorrow may be the day. Like epopts, we will die before death and see with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears. And the corruption that we shuffle off will fall like black snow, like ashes from the mouth of a harbinger.

Shhhh! Listen now…

Callithumped, Jugged and Punked, Part Two

Whence came punk rock? In his grand tome Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus argues convincingly (or at least appealingly) that its philosophical roots can be found in the great heretical social revolts of the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the Movement of the Free Spirit, citing Situationist Raoul Vaneigem’s astounding study of the same name. “Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you've ever heard,” Marcus gushes. His secret history of subversion is an imaginative, tasty literary gumbo flavored not only by centuries-old heresies but also by early 20th century radical art movements including Dadaism, the Lettrist International, and the aforementioned Situationist International. Along with charting a kind of punk spirituality, he sheds light on the often overlooked fact that much of early punk, while frequently shocking and outrageous, was also intellectually stimulating and creatively groundbreaking at a time when rock & roll was largely mired in a Beatles-inspired symphonic tar-pit.

Jeffrey Lewis’s brilliant History of Punk on the Lower East Side posits that punk was hatched from Magician Harry Smith’s roots record collection, inspiring hilariously crass jug band revivalists The Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders, just for starters. Between the minds of Marcus and Lewis a curious synergy takes place, one that recasts history as a creative and sometimes speculative endeavor which posits a chain of transmission for punk gnosis. Surely, between them, a kinship of spirit emerges from seemingly diverse cultural sources culminating in a style of music that was so effectively subversive that it remains conspicuously absent from most 1970s revival radio stations. Traveling back in time from this decade, the signposts of a perennial explosion of social inversion appears not only in music but also in spirituality and social movements of yore like the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers.

If we stick to the history of recorded music, there is no shortage of exemplary anarchic spirit like that found in the chorus of Blind Willie Johnson’s Old Testament growl “Tear This Building Down” (recorded in Dallas, Texas on December 3, 1927) which seems as proto-punk in its way as any MC-5 song, its lyrics as nihilistic as anything howled by an inspired Ranter. Even when humorously re-imagined by pop genius T-Bone Burnett, the lyrical edge of the refrain still slashes across its peppy pop arrangement like a razor:

“If I had my way
Well, if I had a, a wicked world
If I had a, ah Lord, tear this building down.”

Johnson's refrain echoes down the decades, inspiring new generations of raw, self-taught musicians to take up the hammer with wit and gusto.