“The Rounders were actually invented by my ex–old lady Antonia,” Peter Stampfel said. “She talked about her ex-boyfriend Steve Weber, who was a serious speed freak. He’d been living in the street for a year, year and a half, walking around barefoot and stepping in dog shit and glass, as the story goes.” Stampfel was expecting a scary old guy, but Weber was only nineteen and looked like an idealized Li’l Abner. Hey, Stampfel thought, it looks like my long-lost brother. Better still, Weber played a steel-stringed guitar, not the type of “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” nylon-stringed guitars that Stampfel loathed. The plan of action was obvious: Take a bunch of amphetamine and play some music! After a few hours of crazed jamming, Peter said, “I gotta go to work. Do you want to come play with me?” The audience at the Gaslight was instantly knocked out by their act, so the speeding folkies basically kept playing for three days straight, bouncing from place to place. At the end of their musical bender, they glimpsed themselves in a mirror while performing in Café Rafio. Holy fuck, Stampfel thought, that’s the most weird-ass shit I’ve ever seen. The two were sporting what could be called an old-timey style: jeans, vests, pony-skin shoes, and long hair (a look that was later adopted by the hippies). This uniform was favored by traditional musicians, who worshiped Folkways Records’ Anthology of American Folk Music.

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

When the Holy Modal Rounders got together, after first playing together at the Gaslight, the traditionalists maintained a strict purity—for example, they would not perform songs written after the Great Depression. Around 1963, Peter Stampfel wondered, What would happen if you could take all the Anthology people at the age they were then—you know, young—and introduce them to what was going on in the 1960s—you know, rock ’n’ roll? This was a lot more interesting than following the dictum “Don’t do anything past 1939.” More practically, this meant that whenever Stampfel couldn’t understand the original words from an old, crackling 78 rpm record, he had some creative license. “So the fact that my alterations were actually an improvement was still another reason to not be a cookie-cutter copy.” The Rounders’ self-titled debut was recorded on November 21, 1963, the day before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and its song “Random Canyon” contained the first use of the word psychedelic on record. “Take me back to Random Canyon, where the gryphon’s always riffin’ and the unicorn is horny in the spring,” Stampfel sang in his high-pitched warble, “and the psychedelic sage keeps the cattle in a rage, and the changing range is getting pretty strange.” Stampfel said he wanted to be the groundbreaker, so he very consciously inserted the word psychedelic into his song. The Rounders were irreverent to their core, which ruffled some folkie feathers, and their first album was largely ignored by their target audience—save for folk bible Sing Out! magazine, which dismissed the group as not being serious enough.

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore