Absolutely Exquisite: An Interview With Peter Stampfel
The Modal Rounder gets surprisingly holy
All these endearing charms (Photo by Brian Geltner)
At 87, Peter Stampfel’s older than his onetime fellow Greenwich Village scenester Bob Dylan and also a lot busier. Ignited by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, he shuffled between an early incarnation of the Fugs and then the Holy (and Unholy) Modal Rounders until the final reunion Too Much Fun in 1999, he had a front-row seat as folk bled into rock and each developed their alternative sides in the counterculture. The peak of all that would be the 1976 summit Have Moicy!, in which the Rounders traded laughs with Michael Hurley and Jeffrey Fredericks and the Clamtones five decades ago this month. It’s the ideal goofball folk-rock lead-in for the punk rock era.
One of the most elder of elder statesmen, Stampfel’s made a bunch of great albums since, especially 1995’s You Must Remember This and 2013’s Hey Hey It's . . . the Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, one of many high-spirited collabs with antifolk successor Jeffrey Lewis. It takes both the roots-oriented Jalopy and the DIY punks at Don Giovanni to put out his very cultish product, and Yo La Tengo have both covered his “Griselda” and collaborated with Stampfel himself. But the 2020s alone also boast the five-disc Peter Stampfel’s 20th Century in 100 Songs, which he began in 1980, and the double-length Lewis collab Both Ways, which among other things rewrote Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” as Trump’s “True Tax Forms” and covered all 11 minutes of Television’s “Marquee Moon” wholesale. He also takes his liner-note writing very, very seriously, having won a left-field Grammy for his work on (what else?) the 1997 reissue of Anthology of American Folk Music.
Being so prolific would be a mitzvah for anyone up around his age but fighting the voice-evaporating condition dysphonia makes it damn near miraculous. Stampfel’s 2025 album Song Shards, collecting 46 microscopic snippets he calls “soul jingles,” sheds some spiritual light on keep-on-keepin’-on. RIOTRIOT spoke to him about it via phone, alone with the (many) upcoming projects on his plate, and his last rendezvous with Dylan.
