An anti-folk-hero-cum-comic- book artist joins forces with a septuagenarian violin-playing psych-folk veteran. If you manage to get your tongue around that twister, you’re probably wondering what the punchline is – but there isn’t one.
Jeffrey Lewis, the aforementioned anti- folk musician, struck up an unlikely friendship with psych-folk aficionado Peter Stampfel more than a decade ago, and they have been making music together intermittently ever since.
Of course, the prolific Lewis has long been known for his unusual forays into music-making, even though the New Yorker came to music later than most.
“It was never an ambition that I had,” he says, speaking from his Manhattan home. “I was just purely involved in making comic books and doing illustration stuff – that was my lifelong interest and my goal. Making songs and being in a band and going on tour was just something that happened relatively later in life.”
Nevertheless, Lewis’s astute creative nature led to frequent releases, usually self-released but occasionally with a push from a bigger independent label such as Rough Trade. His last release, with one of his constantly-rotating backing bands, The Jrams, was recorded, mixed and mastered in one day for the princely sum of $460.
“I love working that way because to me, the most important things are the songs,” he says. “If the songs really mean something to me and I feel like I can capture them in a recording, and I feel I’ve performed them in a way that I wasn’t forgetting the lyrics, or I didn’t hit too many wrong guitar chords, then that’s good enough for me.”
The Lewis method
Lewis’s method of working on the fly has paid dividends thus far. He is far from a household name and probably won’t be invited to the VMAs anytime soon, but he has built up a significant fanbase over the past 18 years that allows him to tour worldwide. Just this morning he has been to the Chinese consulate to collect visas for his band’s forthcoming Asian tour before they connect with Stampfel for their upcoming Irish dates.
He talks enthusiastically about the older musician as a “force of nature”. “In some ways, you can’t really go wrong with him on stage,” he enthuses. “He’s just endlessly entertaining and dynamic as a performer; just an incredible, weird, creative character. It’s always a thrill to work with him.”
Rich tapestry
Lewis has hewn a rich tapestry of collaborations in his past, but is especially complimentary of Stampfel, whose “boundless energy and enthusiasm” is infectious to be around. “He’s never down on things for not being as good as they used to be, the way a lot of 1960s people stereotypically are,” he chuckles.
“He’s always looking for something new and great; it’s like he’s in a constant state of Beatlemania. I think that any time that anyone spends around him is just a lesson. Even people who meet him for five minutes walk away with a different perspective on life and how to live it.”
Growing up in Manhattan, Lewis was aware of Stampfel's old bands The Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders, the latter a psych-folk duo that operated on New York's Lower East Side in the early 1960s. Stampfel also had music included on the soundtrack to the film Easy Rider.
“I was always very into 1960s music and always trying to find weird psychedelic bands and folk bands,” Lewis explains. “In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, used vinyl was incredibly cheap. You could always walk into a record store and find something interesting for a few dollars, because everyone was getting rid of their records. So I got a head start on learning about all this 1960s stuff. I got [The Holy Modal Rounders’] first record, and it ended up becoming one of my favourite albums of all time.”
The pair met in 2004 and hit it off with their mutual love of comic books. “I was just a fan, but when I found out that he was into comic books and I could chat to him about that, too, that was really cool,” he says. “I was working on an album around early 2005, and I thought it’d be a good excuse to get to hang out with him more if I could have him play on a couple of songs on my record.”
The two musicians began collaborating and playing gigs together more regularly, eventually leading to a tour in 2011 and the formation of The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, which went on to release two albums (2011's Come On Board and 2013's Hey Hey It's . . . The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band). Sharing a kinship with New York made the collaborative process a lot easier; it meant that they were on the same page both geographically and creatively.
“It’s sort of like Peter and I are like two old holdouts from the earlier decades of Manhattan bohemianism who just sort of happen to still be around here,” he says, laughing. “In terms of the creative angle, he’s very steeped in old folk music – even though he’s very knowledgeable about a huge array of music, and very musically curious and voracious and has a tremendous amount of knowledge about all sorts of genres of music, he’s got one foot in this kind of old-timey, bluegrass world, more than I do.
Different influences
“Part of my identity is more in indie rock, in terms of being influenced by Sonic Youth, or Yo La Tengo and stuff like that. So the folk music that we make together is good expression of that crossover, where we meet in the middle in terms of those different influences.”
The duo will play from each other's songbooks as well as their collaborative albums on their tour; YouTube footage of them playing Lewis's song Cult Boyfriend pays testament to Stampfel's energy and is well worth looking up. Indeed, the word "cult" has often been suffixed to Lewis's name over the years: he is the perennial "cult musician", and let's face it, working with a 76-year-old former member of a little-known psych-folk band from the 1960s is not exactly going to help his cause. Although he plans to release a new album of his own on Rough Trade in October, he remains unperturbed by such a label.
“I do sometimes feel that it’s odd that I could have achieved as much as I feel I’ve been able to achieve, yet still be so much more unknown than a lot of other artists that people don’t seem to like as much, somehow,” he muses. “But you know, I feel like I’ve gotten so much further and so far beyond any of my expectations that it seems ridiculous to complain about not having more.
“If I show up somewhere and there’s 30 people there that really wanna hear me play, that does not feel like a disappointment. It still feels utterly incredible that I can go anywhere in the world and somehow the albums and the comic books have wormed their way into all those places. And being able to share that feeling with someone like Peter makes it even better.”
The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band play Hangar in Dublin on September 17th as well as dates in Derry, Donegal, Clare and at the Clonakilty Guitar Festival on September 20th. See thejeffreylewissite.com for details
