The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose.

"With voices like a sackful of rusty hinges, ramshackle playing a broken string away from careening madness, and a repertoire filled with itchy-balled ballads like 'Fucking Sailors in Chinatown,' the Holy Modal Rounders came on the Greenwich Village acoustic scene of the 60s like horndogs humping the folk movement's leg," writes Jim Ridley, reviewing The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose. "Forty years later, they stand as perhaps the truest heirs to the Harry Smith Anthology's wild and woolly Americana - a point Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul C Lovelace's affectionate doc makes with a minimum of fuss and lots of bawdy hilarity."

Updated through 12/7.

"The late folksinger Dave Van Ronk testifies that 'the unwashed' never comprehended the Rounders' joyful subversion of the often deadly earnestness of their MacDougal Street milieu, but the climactic end of the partnership that created 40 wiggy years of musical frenzy casts a poignant glow on this cult troupe's odyssey," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Update, 12/6: "They opened for Pink Floyd. The Rounders' single on the Easy Rider soundtrack - 'Bird Song' - will forever be synonymous with Jack Nicholson waving his arms on the back of a motorcycle. They were the first band to use the word 'psychedelic' in a song." For the Reeler, Mat Newman talks with one Rounder, Stampfel, and one filmmaker, Lovelace.

Updates, 12/7: "As much the chronicle of an era as of a band, The Holy Modal Rounders... Bound to Lose casts an affectionate eye on the kind of hedonism no one is meant to survive," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Though the movie builds loosely toward a 40th-anniversary reunion concert in Portland, Ore, its real subject is the rocky reconnection of the founders after almost 20 years."

"The film makes a convincing case for the Rounders as standard-bearers for a warts-and-all style of acoustic string bending and harmonizing that has quietly crept into the mainstream since the group was greeted with shrugs and puzzled looks in the deadly serious Greenwich Village folk scene 45 years ago," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "At a recent reading from his excellent biography of Gram Parsons (a more celebrated renegade of musical Americana), Twenty Thousand Roads, the author David Meyer compared being in a band with being married to each band member, only to an exponential degree. Messrs Stampfel and Weber's musical coupling is a union whose level of strife and dysfunction has exponentially increased into the double digits.... On screen in The Holy Modal Rounders... Bound to Lose, Messrs Stampfel and Weber resemble Goofus and Gallant, the comic strip personification of how to behave and not to behave from Highlights for Children magazine, as much as they personify the radical architects of the American folk revival that they are."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2007 1:24 PM