The Du-Tels, Peter Stampfel’s New Project

"I was
totally devastated by his guitar playing," Stampfel says. "I was really
swept off my feet by his awesome glory. Fuck, what a guitar player, holy shit!
I remember watching his fingerpicking. Only recently did I discover that he
plays with his bare hands. He doesn’t even use fingernails. He doesn’t
have any. He plucks and strums, sort of like a classical or flamenco player
would do, but he’s playing on steel strings. And those hurt!"

Stampfel has
a knack for finding perfect musical partners: people as odd, funny and musicianly
as he is, but in a totally complementary way. For nearly four decades–"38
years in May," he tells me, rattling it off in his creaky, high-pitched,
nutty-professor voice–his partner in the Holy Modal Rounders has been Steve
Weber, a man who was flaky and unreliable in his mid-20s and has only grown
more so. Since 1963 they have played folk music with a mischievous rock ’n’
roll spirit, making up new words as they go along, singing it in wacky voices,
throwing in botched recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance just for the hell
of it.

Lucas is the
stringy-haired downtown guitarist who’s still best known for playing with
Captain Beefheart in the early 80s. (That’s him on Merseytrout: Live
in Liverpool 1980, released last year.) After that night at the Knitting
Factory, he and Stampfel got together to jam, and found they had equally eclectic
tastes, choosing obscure folk songs, 30s novelty pop tunes, weirdly connotative
60s pop songs, tv show themes, originals and Holy Modal Rounders covers.

They called
themselves the Du-Tels, a name Stampfel came up with decades ago–"I’ve
been thinking up bad names since 1960," he says–and soon they were
playing shows in the city. Before the end of 1994, they headed to New Orleans
and recorded an album with Stampfel’s longtime producer, Mark Bingham.
They had intended to record a children’s album, Stampfel says, but Lucas’
songs were just too weird. Gary tries hard to be gloomy–though he’s
not as gloomy as he thinks he is, and when appearing in public he usually hides
his cutely bald pate with a black Bogie hat.

"He wrote
a couple songs that I thought were a little kiddie-clueless," says Stampfel,
62, who has two small kids and, long since clean and sober, holds down a solid
day job as an editor of sci-fi books. "He wrote this one really spooky
song called ‘Sandman.’ The Sandman is supposed to be a nice guy who
comes to you at night and gives you nice dreams, but in this song he comes and
gives you really, really awful dreams." (No, there’s no relation to
Metallica’s "Enter Sandman.")

After seven
years of shopping the album around to all the arty labels in the city, No
Knowledge of Music Required is finally coming out on Shimmy Disc, a label
now owned by the Knitting Factory, who were ironically the first to reject the
album. "It was rejected by the Knit, by Shimmy, by Zorn, by lots of people
that you’d think would go for it," says Lucas. "I don’t
know why. Lots of records come out on those labels that are less melodic and
less commercial. It’s just the benighted state of the record industry."

Lucas, known
for having a rather fragile ego, is adamant that they’re a duo–it’s
not Stampfel’s solo project. "It used to frustrate me when Peter would
just stop playing onstage. I felt like a backup man. But we’re a duo. We’re
coconspirators."

The Du-Tels
are a hyper-realized version of the Holy Modal Rounders–two guys romping
irreverently through songs old and new, doing a kind of parody/tribute to pop
and folk music that allows them to both honor and ridicule it at the same time.
They do Del Shannon’s 1964 hit "Keep Searchin’," with Stampfel
adding lyrics to tease out the hidden subtext of irresistible underage pussy.
Their theme song, which they play at the beginning of every show, is "Bully
of the Town," a folk song that Stampfel and Weber recorded on their second
Rounders album in 1964. It’s about a newcomer to town who searches for
the local bully, then turns so cruel and vindictive that he becomes the new
bully himself:

I’ll make
him take bad acid,
tie him to a chair
I’ll tattoo Barney
on his butt
and cut off all his
hair
And when there’s
nothing left of him
that mortal man can
save
I’ll piss upon
his tombstone
and desecrate
his grave

Like all great
duos, their perfection comes from tension. Lucas is the master musician, Stampfel
is the scatterbrained professor-poet. Lucas plays at double the tempos Stampfel
has ever played before, and the only way he can keep himself from getting bored
on the guitar is to play wild, circuitous improvised parts that seem to hit
every possible note except the ones that were written, and which Stampfel
is expecting. It’s the "exploding note theory" he learned from
Beefheart, a hand-me-down from Coltrane–play every fucking note you possibly
can, ask questions later.

And Stampfel,
bored with the same words all the time, follows his nose all over the place.
No song is ever the same twice, musically or lyrically. Onstage, both musicians–Stampfel
plays a mean fiddle–are constantly casting each other confused, this-isn’t-the-way-we-rehearsed-it-type
glances, racing to keep up with each other. And each blames the other for that,
of course.

"I don’t
mind the density of the notes, but I do mind the speed," Stampfel says.
"I’m always saying, ‘Let’s go slower!’ And I’m
not nuts about the vocals. We have a tendency to out-yell each other. I’m
much happier with the way our vocals work when we’re singing in a less
histrionic fashion."

Lucas responds:
"The truth is, he can keep up. I increase the pressure, when the spirit
moves me. I feel very daredevilish sometimes. But he can keep up, if he sets
his mind to it."

The Du-Tels’
record release show is at the Knitting Factory Main Space this Sun., Feb. 4,
at 8 p.m. No Knowledge Of Music Required comes out on Feb. 13.