Peter Stampfel, Good Taste Is Timeless (BlueNavigator.net)


They’re calling what the young folks with roots in old timey music are playing “freak folk,” a genre invented 40 years ago by once and future Holy Modal Rounders maestro Peter Stampfel. When Stampfel sings “Spring of ’65” on Good Taste Is Timeless, it’s likely that his newer listeners won’t recognize that it’s about the 19th Century. Stampfel recently recorded a CD’s worth of songs by his longtime creative partner Antonia, whose joyous embrace of the underworld experience on songs such as “Fucking Sailors in Chinatown” and “Nightwalking” is trumped only by the innocence of her rich imagination on “Places Where You Never See the Snow” and the magnificent elegy, “Going to See the King.” Stampfel sings and plays this music like a love song to the era he and Antonia illuminated with the electricity of their audacious souls. Available as part of Blue Navigator issue No. 9 at BlueNavigator.net.