Jersey Beat Music Fanzine
 



In Part 3, we ask Peter about his Eighties band Peter Stampfel & The Bottle Caps, which recorded three albums - a self-titled debut in 1986, The People's Republic Of Rock And Roll in 1989, and The Jig Is Up! in 2004. Then we talk about some of the collaborations that have carried him into the 21st Century.



Q: I knew Steve Almaas and Beat Rodeo from the Maxwell's scene in the 80's, and then a stupid thing happened. Steve thought the band couldn't get signed to a bigger label with a rhythm section that included a bald bassist, so he fired Al Greller, and drummer Peter Moser quit in protest. Luckily they quickly wound up as members of the Bottle Caps, and one of my favorite Eighties bands was born. Can you talk about that experience?


Peter: When the rest of the Rounders moved to California, right after we did “Alleged In Their Own Time” in 1975, I started playing with Luke Faust (of Hoboken’s Insect Trust) and a couple of guys and Antonia, because I didn’t want my music life and my home life to be two completely different things. It was like being torn in two all the time. But Antonia totally creeped out the other guys. She couldn’t do music unless she was speeding her tits off, basically. She was picking at her lips incessantly for days at a day, and basically,she’d just creep people out. So that band fell apart. I was drinking a lot, which lasted a couple of weeks, and then I snapped out of it and I started to take lessons. After faking it from childhood, I wanted to actually get good. All the people I wanted to play with had way better chops than I did, and I wanted to be able to keep up. Then I formed a duo with John Parrott, an old friend, and then these two guys volunteered to be our rhythm section, which was just great. But then Parrott dropped out and didn’t want to do it. By now we’re in the late 70’s and I was just like, Fuck it, I’m so sick of trying to have a band and having it fall apart. I gave up, I had just had it, and got really depressed.

So me and Parrott fell apart, depression, and then I went to a show one night and met John Scherman. We decided to do a swap, because he wanted to learn fiddle and I wanted to get better at guitar, so we started hanging out. giving each other lesson. Well, there was this guy, Brian Coleman, he was some downtown producer type, and he wanted to put together an album of alternative musicians doing Stephen Foster songs. I wanted to do “Old Dog Trey,” which I got from a really old, turn of the century songbook. I actually tweaked the melody and improved it a bit, but here was a great song, really powerful and sentimental and yet really heart-wrenching. So Scherman said he was playing with this guy W.T. Overgard, and then we ran into Peter Moser and Al Greller, who were the rhythm section of (Steve Almaas’) Beat Rodeo. So we formed a little group to record that song, but then some other people got into the act and decided they only wanted to use famous people on the record, not people like me. So anyway, we’d started working on some other stuff by that point and decided it was fun, and that was how the Bottle Caps got started.

Scherman was extremely fastidious, he was a real perfectionist, but he had a lot of real arrangement chops. It enabled me to do cover a broader range of music in ways that actually worked. There’s this big book called The Penguin Book Of Music and when the guy writes about me, he says, “well, the Rounders were great but the Bottle Caps were this dreadful aging hippie band.” On the other hand, (NY Times rock critic) Robert Palmer said it was the first truly post-modern folk-rock band, and we won the Best Indie Album of the Year with the New York Music Festival. So there are a couple of different takes on the band.

Q: I love that first Bottle Caps album, it’s probably my favorite of anything you’ve done, and it’s such a shame that it’s out of print. But I’ve read other interviews and you really like the third Bottle Caps album, The Jig Is Up.

Peter: The first one is good but The Jig Is Up is a nice damn album. We decided that instead of renting out a recording studio for a few hours, why not just give some money to Jonathan Best – Jabe, we used to call him – and really make an album. And so we actually spent years at it. My wife and I had our second kid during that period but we were able to complete the project at our own speed, and it’s a good album. It has some really singular stuff, and we had been playing together for several years at that point so we really knew each other, and I just think it’s one of the best things I’ve done.

My big regret about the Bottle Caps is that we did amazing fucking covers live. We did “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” we did “Double Shot Of My Baby’s Love,” “Games People Play,” “Kung Fu Fighting,” the Kinks’ “Animal Farm,” “Be True To Your School.” I love doing covers. I feel a real band does covers. Otherwise the tendency is to crawl up your own ass and disappear, and get structurally atrophied to a degree. But anyway, I really wish we had made a whole album of just our covers. It would have been great.


Jeffrey Lewis and Peter Stampfel

Q: You in your Seventies have made more records than most people make in their career. You seem to have this relentless drive to always pursue new projects, so I wanted to ask you about some of them. How did you meet and start working with Jeffrey Lewis?

Peter: I was at a birthday party for Ed Sanders at the Bowery Poetry Club, and I was playing with some guy, and these kids get up on stage and one of them says they’re going to do a song about the history of punk rock on the Lower East Side. And I thought, these guys are too young to know about that, this is going to be amusing. And I leaned back to be amused, and instead I was immediately blown away. Historically speaking, I couldn’t have come close to doing as good a job as Jeffrey did. My take was always that punk rock started with the Fugs – no knowledge of music, bad attitude, let’s do it even though we don’t know how to do it. But Jeff took it back to Harry Smith and the Holy Modal Rounders, and I hadn’t even considered that being the actual roots of punk. But when Jeff pointed it out, it was obvious that yes indeed, they were. So I went up to him afterwards and did the fanboy gush.

Jeffrey is the best musical collaborator I’ve had in 50 years of doing music. What’s perfect is that I have a pretty good grasp on American music from about 1900 to about 1980, but I get a bit sketchy after that. But Jeffrey, on the other hand, has 1980 to the present down pat. So between us, we really fucking cover the waterfront.

Q: I really love both of the albums you’ve done with him.

Peter: Me too. We’re going to do another one this summer.

Q: I’ve read that there might be a “Have Moicy! 2” coming with new people, is that coming too?

Peter: Oh yeah! It should be out this summer. Again, the idea is the East Coast and West Coast people getting together, and I’ve been trying to put it together for years. I finally managed to do it in January of 2012, in Portland. Jeannie Scofield couldn’t be a part of it at that time because she was pregnant. And I really wanted her awesome harmonies to be part of the record. If there already a couple of harmony parts on a song, she can find a third one. We’re not talking fifths or octaves, she can find a harmony part that suddenly makes the whole thing fucking amazing. She’s a brilliant genius harmonizer and I really wanted her to be part of the package.

So we only had a week to do it. Do you know the story of the McMenamin Brothers? They had just started to allow music in bars back in the Seventies. And the McMenamin Brothers bought an old Polish bar called the White Eagle, and the Rounders became sort of the house band. They parked their school bus outside and ran the electricity out the window and well, over the years, the McMenamins built an empire of bars and clubs in the Pacific Northwest. Basically they had 60 or 70 venues. They bought a Mason’s Widows & Orphans home, public schools, a high end brothel, old movie theaters… all these old buildings and turned them into music venues and breweries. They make wine and beer, they own hotels, they have endless projects and festivals going on. One of these venues is the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. Have you ever seen one of those all wooden dancefloors that kind of wave when you dance on them? I don’t know how many of them there were, but they actually rebuilt the floor in the Crystal Ballroom so the floor goes up and down in this really gentle way when you’re dancing. You don’t stumble and trip, it just adds this awesome springing feeling to your step, like the whole floor is this rocking chair. It’s an awesome stage. It was at the Crystal Ballroom that Little Richard fired Jimi Hendrix for being more eye-candyish than he was. So they said that we could record there in the big ballroom, and they put us up in one of their fine hotels, and the deal was that we’d do a big show at the Crystal Ballroom free of charge at the end. But we only had a week to do it, and we didn’t realize that the place was being used for other purposes at night, so we had to tear down all of our equipment at the end of every day, and we could only use it part of the day on the weekends. And so more time was spent tearing down and setting up the equipment than anything else. No earphones, and we were ten people in this big oval. No playback facilities. We’d just say, okay, that was a good take, let’s do the next one, and hope it sounded okay. And most people were learning the songs as we recorded them, so it was a real seat of the pants experience. So we did the tracks, and Jeannie is listening to them and deciding which ones she wants to add vocals to. She has impeccable taste, so whatever she decides will be perfect. And once she’s finished, the record will be done and we can release it. Jeffrey drew pictures of everyone in the band and that’ll be the cover art. So hopefully by the end of this summer, it’ll be out.

Q: How did you wind up working with Baby Gramps?

Peter: He was one of the Portland people that hung out with the Rounders. I met him during one of the periodic Rounder reunions that happened in Portland around 1997. And we kept in touch and kept saying, we have to make a record some day, and we finally got a chance to do it.

Q: You have a distinctive voice but I can’t even begin to describe the way he sings.

Peter: He’s a cross between Popeye and a Tuvan throat singer.

Q: How about the Worm All-Stars?

Peter: They were going to screen the Holy Modal Rounder documentary in Rotterdam, and they wanted to know if I’d come over and do a set when they screened the movie. Well, fuck yeah, I’ll go to Rotterdam and do a set. And this guy Lucas wanted to know whether I wanted to do it solo or have a backup band, which is like asking whether I’d rather jerk off or fuck. (laughs) So I had a really great time playing with these local musicians. It was a fast and dirty thing, but it was really fun working with those guys, so we decided we should record it. And Lucas had a recording studio and a little label over there. So that was one of those serendipitous things that just worked out, the Euro Stampfel album.

Q: You have lived through so much rock ‘n’ roll history, I’m just going to rattle off some names here and I’d like you to give me the first thing that pops into your head.

Dave Von Ronk/Bob Dylan

Peter: I met Dave in ’59. The ex-boyfriend of the girl I followed to New York whom I became roommates with was an old friend of Van Ronk’s. So we go way back. The Van Ronk story is, Bob Dylan in the early days did all those clowning stuff. He had this Chaplinesque shtick. And after the big article in the newspaper when people started coming to Folk City to see this kid, there were suddenly these rich uptown jet-setty beautiful women at the front table, and there’s scruffy little Bobby Dylan there. He’s scrunch over and put his feet together and do this goofy little dance, and just charmed their asses off by doing this adorable little routine. It was whimsical but not self-demeaning, lovable but not twee or fey.

He was hilarious. He would do all this funny, funny stuff. And this was besides how great he was as a musician. And suddenly there were just hordes and hordes of people coming to see him. So first he stopped wearing his hat onstage, that funny little cap he has on the cover of his first album. And then once he stopped wearing the funny little cap, he stopped doing all the comedy shtick too. I think he just started feeling self-conscious doing it in front of so many people. And it was kind of sad. He could have been one of the great comedy minds of the 20th Century, along with all the other things he did too. And I thought that was a tragic cultural loss to the world. So I was saying that to Von Ronk one day, and he goes to a drawer in his apartment, and he pulls out Dylan’s hat. He had it, when Dylan stopped wearing it, Dave asked if he could have it.

Von Ronk should have been more appreciated than he was, and I should have done music with him. Like everyone else at the time, Dave was so amazing that he gave me and everyone else in the scene at the time a case of the ‘I’m Not Worthy’s.” His wife was our manager. And he had this great self-deprecating sense of humor. He said once, “if you really want to stop the Vietnam War, get me and Stampfel to go over there and sing and everybody on both sides will run off screaming.

Lou Reed

The Rounders opened for the Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party in late ’69 or ’70, and that was the first time I ever actually heard him live. I had already heard all the records. We’d run into each other periodically now and then, and he was always friendly. But the last time I saw him was at a benefit for Tuli Kupferberg. I was doing a couple of songs with my daughter. We were waiting to go on at St. Ann’s and Lou Reed comes in, and I wanted to introduce him to my daughter. I had turned her onto the Velvet Underground, which she loved, and I thought it would be really great for her to meet him. So I walked up to him and said, “Lou, I’d like you to meet my daughter,” and Lou just totally ignores me and walks right past, and walks up to this other guy and says, really loudly, “Hey, good to see ya, how ya doing?” Glad-handing this guy and I didn't even know who he was. It didn’t bother me that he ignored me, but he was rude to my daughter, and rude to my kid is unforgivable. It’s funny, the building he lived in is managed by the same person who manages our building, and it’s a co-op and there’s all these rules. And none of those rules every applied to him. He was Lou Fucking Reed. He was an arrogant dick who wrote a bunch of awesome songs. Jeffrey Lewis said that the only people he has every record by is me and Lou Reed. The last song of his that blew me away was “Cremation” from the Magic & Loss album. There was a Lou Reed thing that Jeff organized at Jalopy, and he organized it so everybody did different songs. I heard a bunch of Lou Reed songs I had never heard before, and I heard a bunch of really great songs, so I became aware that his songwriting hadn’t fallen off to the degree I had thought. I’m almost ashamed to have such a nasty story, but gratuitous rudeness to my daughter is something I can’t forgive.

Peter Stampfel Interview - Part 4: Legacy, and Discography (since age 70!)


back to jerseybeat.com l back to top




JerseyBeat.com is an independently published music fanzine covering punk, alternative, ska, techno and garage music, focusing on New Jersey and the Tri-State area. For the past 25 years, the Jersey Beat music fanzine has been the authority on the latest upcoming bands and a resource for all those interested in rock and roll.


 
 
Loading
Jersey Beat Podcast
 
 


Home | Contact Jersey Beat | Sitemap

©2010 Jersey Beat & Not a Mongo Multimedia

Music Fanzine - Jersey Beat