You're a welcome guest anytime, Jerry!

Looks as if Luke Faust is only joining in for the final performance of the tour - in Spain!

Over on the HMR forum have_moicy, Peter has posted an article about the forthcoming tour written by Garth Cartwright in the Sunday Times for 9 January 2011. As the article is hidden behind a paywall, I hope nobody minds if I add a cut-and-paste copy here.

Matthew

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The fabulous folky freaks
Peter Stampfel is the original beatnik. Be glad, man: that younger singer Jeffrey Lewis is bringing him to Britain
By Garth Cartwright
Published: 9 January 2011, The Sunday Times


Holy father and son: Jeffrey Lewis and Peter Stampfel

The musician widely regarded as the Last Beatnik Standing fiddles with a banjo while holding forth on American-music history. Peter Stampfel, 72,suggests the banjo's fusion of African slave culture and new-world technology made minstrel shows the 19th century's rock'n'roll. This rambling, fascinating meditation is his answer to my question about the nouveau-banjo band Mumford & Sons' success in the States. The celebrated "antifolk"쳌 singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis, 35, grins as Stampfel expounds, disciple to this odd American master.

Stampfel and Lewis are actually more father and son than master and disciple. While not genetically related, they share strong musical roots.Having recently completed recording together the lovingly eccentric Come on Board LP, they are preparing to tour Britain. (The album will only be available, for now, at their shows.) While Lewis has a considerable following and strong media presence here, Stampfel, who rarely leaves New York, remains under the radar. Lewis hopes the album and tour will bring the veteran greater recognition.

"Even if Peter was just some guy I'd met yesterday on the street, I'd still want to make music with him,"쳌 Lewis says. "He's just such a great character.But Peter's this major figure in American music and one who keeps making music for the pure love of it. He has never gone looking for fame and fortune. He does it for love, to make people happy. He's so inspiring."쳌

Stampfel discovered folk music while at college in 1956. Shifting to New York in 1960, he joined the city's burgeoning folk-revival scene. "I saw Bob Dylan wandering around the Village when he first arrived in town, wearing motorcycle boots and cap and carrying a guitar, and I thought he was just some New Jersey punk trying to get laid,"쳌 Stampfel recalls with a loud laugh. "Then, when I got to hear him sing a week or two later, I realised the guy had real chops. I adored traditional folk music and rock'n'roll, yet believed never the twain shall meet. Suddenly, here's this guy with rock'n'roll phrasing, yet his knowledge of traditional music was total. I realised instantaneously that those two forms were capable of being put together."쳌

Stampfel formed the Holy Modal Rounders in 1962 with Steve Weber. He describes their sound as "taking traditional American music and jamming it through a hallucinatory window of marijuana and speed. Up to that time, everyone was trying to be authentic. I thought it more fun to bend and twist the music"쳌. An immediate underground sensation, the Rounders were the first musicians ever to sing of "psychedelic"쳌 experiences. The term "freak-folk"has been conjured to describe what happened when hippies played old-time music, and the Holy Modal Rounders' albums continue to inspire young musicians.

"Peter's the real deal,"쳌 Lewis says. "He's been making great music for decades and led the most significant freak-folk band. Devendra Banhart,Joanna Newsom, all these new American folk acts owe a lot to the Holy Modal Rounders."쳌 Stampfel relays myriad reasons for the Rounders failing to achieve Grateful Dead-style stardom, before placing the blame firmly on himself. "I took shitloads of speed between 1963 and 1977. And being a speedfreak messes with your ability to maintain a high-level career."쳌 In 1968, the Rounders' drummer was an aspiring playwright called Sam Shepard and a song he recorded with them was used on the Easy Rider soundtrack. International fame now awaited the band, but, again, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. "By then, we had a bad reputation as drug-crazed maniacs,"쳌 Stampfel says. "We couldn't get a recording contract, and when we did finally get one, we were asked to play at the label's Christmas party. Well, we took a lot of speed, played really badly and Weber went crazy and started threatening label staff."쳌

Stampfel admits that with New York rents then being extremely cheap, he never worried about making money, having fun with music being more his priority. That many of his folk-revival contemporaries became wealthy does not stop him remembering them with affection: both Buffy Sainte-Marie and Richie Havens were, he says, wonderful people who radiated self-confidence without coming across as overbearing. Karen Dalton, the doomed folk singer whose recently reissued recordings have won her a cult following, was a close friend.

"We were both speedfreaks and would have real fun playing together, but when it came time to do a gig, Karen often was totally wiped out and unable to get out of bed. Karen was difficult. She had a glorious talent, but it became obvious she would never make it. She was part goddess, part broken doll."쳌

Stampfel never "made it"쳌 either, but, unlike Dalton, he cleaned up, got a day job for a science-fiction publisher and thrived, playing regularly around New York and issuing a series of critically acclaimed albums.Stampfel met Lewis in 2005 after the young man sang his own 12-minute opus The History of Punk Rock on the Lower East Side at a party. The song acknowledges the Holy Modal Rounders as part of the city's underground-music tradition, and Stampfel introduced himself immediately afterwards. An instant friendship was born.

"Peter has such tremendous enthusiasm,"쳌 Lewis says. "Originally, I thought we should cut a 45 to sell on tour, but Peter came out with so many great songs that it became apparent we were working on an album."쳌 Lewis then emphasises what a treat British audiences are in for when Stampfel takes the stage.

"Touring's a young man's game, so I hope people appreciate the opportunity to see him. Taking Peter on tour is a good way of me getting to see a lot of Peter Stampfel concerts."

The Peter Stampfel-Jeffrey Lewis tour starts on January 18 [2011]

© Garth Cartwright, The Sunday Times