‘Have Moicy!’: Jeffrey Lewis’ favourite overlooked masterpiece
It’s still a source of debate as to whether anti-folk is a pitch-perfect label or a dreary contrarian genre tag. Born from the late 1980s reaction against some of the movement’s more earnest singer-songwriters, the original zenith of folk revivalism Greenwich Village became clustered with punk-inspired misfits wishing to unleash their stripped-down acoustic attacks and sarcastic lyrical tales following comedian Lach’s example.
Punk made its mark on a slew of movements, however, through New York’s mutant disco swirl of funk and dub, and the seeds CBGB would be sown in the avant-garde end of the 1960s far removed from San Fransico’s summer of love—The Fugs, The Velvet Underground or The Godz laying the groundwork along with honest veneration with Bob Dylan’s early work. One such authority on the antifolk movement is Jeffrey Lewis. Notable for his musicology lesson-come song ‘Antifolk Complete History of Punk Rock’, Lewis illustrates his authority on the topic with an appropriate irreverent passion.
Known for his academic insights into pop culture and comic book artwork, Lewis – along with Regina Spektor and The Moudly Peaches – carved a big presence in the antifolk wave that entered the 2000s following his official debut, The Last Time I Did Acid, I Went Insane, with Rough Trade Records. Following two more official albums around a slew of other releases, folk and punk would find no starker bedfellows than 2007’s 12 Crass Songs, Lewis offering antifolk renditions of the original Essex anarcho-punks’ call to direct action.
Speaking to NME as part of a feature exploring music’s celebrated cult albums, Lewis presented 1976’s Have Moicy! that inspired his work and the wider antifolk wave. Saying, “Supposedly recorded in a total of three days, it’s a collaboration album between two psychedelic folk weirdo-geniuses, Michael Hurley and Peter (Holy Modal Rounders) Stampfel – and additional oddball Jeffrey Frederick – which seems to be an obvious route to greatness – if you put together three really good songwriters, each one only needs to come up with about four brilliant songs before you’ve got a whole album’s worth of great material.”
As animated with cartoon energy as its hand-drawn surrealist cover, Have Moicy! both wallows in an authentic and affectionate country plane while soaking up some of Frank Zappa or Zoogz Rift’s confounding acerbicism.
As well Hurley’s dabblings in weird comic art, he, Stampfel, Frederick, The Unholy Modal Rounders and The Clamtones all corraled and goaded each other to conjure up the most inside-out hoedown of the decade. Skewed ditties on drugs, death, sex, and scatology all sought to keep the folk scene firmly planted in the counterculture and would make sense with the punk and new waves seeking to upend the old musical guard.
Enjoying a frequent on-off revival across the 1990s and 2000s, Hurley and the gang have been heralded by Lewis and Josephine Foster as one of the key freak folks that signalled the way for the disaffected and iconoclastic armed with an acoustic and cutting wit. Owing much to their collaborative heady country brew, Have Moicy! foreshadowed more than most antifolk’s warped sense of humour.
