Peter Stampfel & The Ether Frolic Mob "The Sound of America" (4*)

As the latest in a long line of interestingly-monikered outfits from MacGrundy’s Old-Timey Wool Thumpers in 1960 down on New York’s Lower East Side, through the Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancy Street into various incarnations of the Holy and Unholy Modal Rounders, The Ether Frolic Mob (originally Velocity Ramblers) date from around 2004, with a shifting lineup, since everyone, as Stampfel points out in the liner notes, has day jobs and/or other bands.

In a similarly lengthy line of descent Ether Frolics apparently date back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and originally referred to the recreational use of the anaesthetic gas by  well-to-do revellers and medical students, developing into entertainments where a troupe of performers fuelled their activities with the gas and invited members of the audience to join in the revelry. Such events continued into the Jazz Age, and one notes the presence of ether among the additives that fuelled Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They were, in Stampfel’s description, Sort of an old-timey acid test.

And although the twenty-first century The Ether Frolic Mob, don’t indulge, that old-timey acid test is probably the right label to apply to this particular variant on the genre that has come to be known as Freak Folk. Stampfel describes the entity known as The Ether Frolic Mob as the culmination of over a half-century of thinking about my ideal of a musical group, even though the thinking, itself, will never culminate, a collection of people across a range of age groups he enjoys playing and hanging with, all of whom contribute vocally and bring a wide variety of angles and attitudes into the mix.

The Sound of America comprises a selection of eighteen tracks out of at least twenty-five cut over two days  at the Jalopy theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the summer of 2011. From the opener, Great Day, a track originally recorded by Bing Crosby and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in the early thirties, with slight modifications by Stampfel to the unlikely closer (I Will Survive, the seventies disco track reworked so it’s of a piece with everything in between) we’ve got a collection that sits right in Old Weird/Freak Folk territory, with a prime example being the traditional Jawbone, which they hadn’t planned on recording, but someone went into it, everybody joined in and it took a second take to nail it. Old Weird/Freak Folk works like that. Drunken Banjo Waltz started its existence as an instrumental, needed a title, and once that arrived the words didn’t take that much longer.

The four volumes of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music are a prime source for OWFF, and a prime link to what Greil Marcus has termed the Old Weird America, so it’s no surprise to see some of the contents turn up hereabouts, including Train on the Island, which gets a bit of padding with verses borrowed from elsewhere and a couple made up by Stampfel. Charlie Patton’s Shake It Break it doesn’t turn up in the Anthology, but it does here, a good timey slice of raunchy ruckus, and Wild Wagoner, the second selection from the Anthology, gets a slower treatment than the original because Stampfel can’t play fiddle that fast and, anyway, he prefers ‘em done slower so you can appreciate the melody. Last Chance started off  as a Hobart Smith instrumental, though Stampfel decided it needed some words, and duly provided same.

Playwright, actor and director Sam Shepard at one stage played drums for the Holy Modal Rounders and contributed the tune for Back Again (a co-rewrite that started as an instrumental from an old recording with banjo-playing son Walker, words by Stampfel). The son’s no slouch on the banjo, and at the age of seventeen with just seven months experience under his belt, according to Stampfel, could do stuff on it I couldn’t, after going at it for about fifty years, and singing like an old Southern mountain guy from a hundred years ago. That’s Stampfel doing the vocal here, though, sounding like something from the nineteenth century though there’s a contemporary edge to the lyrics with references to falling off the wagon and such. LIstening to the tune there’s a fair bit in common with the one Robin Williamson appropriated for the Incredible String Band’s Log Cabin Home in the Sky...

Things are in much more authentic old time territory for Golden Slippers, straight out of the blackface minstrel era, and then we come to the genuinely odd Shombolar, originally recorded by Sheriff and the Ravels in December 1958, and, according to Stampfel the Rosetta Stone connecting African music, Caribbean music, and doo-wop.

There’s a fair dash of old time jug band about Gonna Make Me and the good time music continues through Hey-O, Memphis Shakedown and New Fortune Fortune, a couple of prime examples of cuica-driven Old Weird Freak Folk. Comes Around embraces the principle that a melody cannot be too simple, or too stupid, or too stupidly simple and Deep in the Heart of Texas might seem to fit the same bill, but features new words from John Morthland.

The Harry Smith Anthology provides Blind Uncle Gaspard’s La Dansuese and Stampfel’s intention to record a song for every year of the twentieth century provides I Will Survive, which might seem like a surprising choice or 1979  but has, in Stampfel’s own words Really nice chords, and it’s fun to sing.

Old Weird/Freak Folk (OWFF) is Stampfel’s term for what’s on offer here, and the contents may or may not actually fit under generic classifications, though Stampfel’s descriptors of the stye add a bit of clarification to what you can expect from his current projects.

OWFF tends to be multi-generational and generationally inclusive, as opposed to that just-for-the-young or just-for-the-hip exclusivity common to other genres and the instrumental breaks lean towards soloing amidst ensemble improvisation (tail-gating in traditional New Orleans jazz) as opposed to the Everybody-take-turns-and-show-off solo aesthetic you tend to find in bluegrass and jazz with, in Stampfel’s words an ever-increasing possibility of neat weird shit happening.

Your mileage will, of course, vary, depending on your tolerance of one man’s neat weird shit. Approach with caution, but definitely worth investigating if those descriptors sound like the sort of thing that floats your boat. Definitely works for me...

Chris Ligon "Look At The Birdy" (4*)

Here’s one that takes off the wall into a whole new dimension, folks, and reminds me there are whole slabs of contemporary music that I’ve been aware of for years but still need to investigate.

I was pointed towards this album by a post on Sal Nunziato’s Burning Wood blog. Sal was talking about seeing the latest lineup of NRBQ, an outfit I remember reading about forty-something years ago when they’d abbreviated the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet to the four initials.

But you can’t, as I’ve frequently remarked, catch up on everything, and while I managed to lay my hands on their 1996 live (Tokyo) I’ve managed to negotiate my way through four decades aware of an outfit that has built up a considerable reputation as a live act and an extensive discography (twenty-plus titles at iTunes) and were the unofficial house band in seasons 10, 11 & 12 of The Simpsons without doing too much in the way of further investigation.

Guitarist Scott Ligon is one of the more recent additions to the ever-changing NRBQ line up, and this compilation of songs by his brother Chris was put together by long-term NRBQer Terry Adams, presumably selected from the eight other albums on his website. At fifteen dollars a throw plus shipping that back catalogue might attract some attention from those who have plenty of storage space on the CD shelves and happen to be flush with funds, but for the rest of us Look At The Birdy will have to do.

At least for the time being.

I’m not in the business of appropriating content wholesale from other sites, but in this case I’m inclined to quote Mr Nunziato’s assessment of Birdy as one of the most bizarre little records I have ever heard, causing Sal to sit mouth agape, in a frozen stupor for 33 minutes straight. I didn’t quite go that far, and I’m not sure I agree that Baby Books Bossa and Dr. Peanut (ahem) make the Bonzo Dog Band sound like The Archies, though the comment almost guaranteed I’d be making further investigations.

I’m a huge Bonzos fan, and sighting a comment like that was bound to pique my interest, compris?

But I have to agree that the album’s opener, Buglight, suggests Mr Ligon is operating right out there where the buses don’t run, or, if they do, the service is on the very occasional side of intermittent. How else do you categorise a track that describes the girlfriend’s erotic sensations, stimulated by the electrical zapping of insects? (When my girl sees a bug pop and drop dead / She likes to hop in bed and hug tight). Really?

Florida, following straight after that, is straight ahead pop with a twist, a jaunty little paean to the American Sunshine State complete with a chugga chugga woo woo woo woo chorus, and there’s an exercise in nostalgia on Oh What A Day, complete with cheesy synthesised trumpet and lustful yearnings very firmly in Say what? territory.

The instrumental Baby Books Bossa reminded me of the Holy Modal Rounders rather than the Bonzos headed towards Archies territory, and A Thousand Pumpkins purports to be a contemporary ballad about an attempted assassination of Abraham Lincoln that ends up taking out large quantities of vegetables. The highly experimental (there isn’t really any other tag you can apply to this warped exercise in something indeterminate) I Don't Date churns on, all fractured riff and minimal lyrical content apart from repetitions of the track title, while Look At The Birdy appears to be about a bloke taking baby photos in a shopping mall though one suspects there’s a subtext in operation.

Almond Grove is, in its own way in this environment, a fairly straightforward expression of a love that’s fated to never be, and in Dr. Peanut a girl’s slightly tipsy old chiropractor turns up on her doorstep wanting to take her out to a Japanese restaurant where they got ka-roke-ee...

There’s no way of knowing whether the same dude turns up in Bottom Buck, seeking a girl determined (bet your bottom buck) to find her. One hopes he’s not holding his breath. In Frankenstein Just Got Up a couple who moves into an apartment that the landlord promised would be quiet, only to find out their upstairs neighbour is Frankenstein and he’s forever stomping around (I wish he'd bend his knees), a situation where the only solution involves an axe.

There’s an instrumental interlude (Danny O'Day) before Randy In The Morning plugs a breakfast DJ (or maybe something entirely different, it’s that kind of album) and Girl Of Virginia comes across as relatively straightforward (again, appearances may be deceptive) and The La La Song is exactly that, with forty-nine seconds of jaunty La las. Poetry Slam has emerging poets performing under the threat of a hammer blow to the head, Halfwit has  an almost ear-wormy chorus (it’s not alone in that category) as does Fun, which brings things to a close in territory that’s not a million lyrical miles from Randy Newman’s Old Kentucky Home.

With eighteen tracks clocking in at a tad over thirty-three minutes you might question whether the $16.99 is justified, but if you’re intrigued by people who march to the beat of a different drum it’s about the right dosage.

Bowenites reading this review might be grateful Hughesy’s not polluting the airwaves these days, since Buglight, Florida, the ear-wormy Bottom Buck and Frankenstein Just Got Up would’ve seen fairly regular airplay on the old High Class Music.