Fifty years after its release, Have Moicy! returns for a new anniversary edition celebrating the wonderfully offbeat collaboration between Michael Hurley, the Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Frederick & the Clamtones. Arriving December 4 via Craft Recordings, the influential 1976 album will be available on LP, CD, and digital formats.
The LP edition is pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, while the CD and digital versions have been newly remastered and add a previously unreleased alternate version of Michael Hurley’s “Sweet Lucy.” Both physical editions also feature new liner notes from writer, producer, musician, and Transmissions podcast host Jason P. Woodbury.
“Sweet Lucy” is available to stream today.
ONE GROUP OF OLD FRIENDS
Have Moicy! may be credited to three acts, but its story is really about a circle of friends who had been crossing paths since the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s.
Peter Stampfel had co-founded the Holy Modal Rounders, whose mix of traditional folk, psychedelia, and irreverent songwriting earned them a devoted following. When different lineups emerged on the East and West Coasts in the mid-’70s, Stampfel’s New York group became the Unholy Modal Rounders. Jeffrey Frederick, who previously relied on the Holy Modal Rounders for his backing band, formed the Clamtones and pursued his own mix of folk, country, and rock.
Michael Hurley was the outlier of the bunch, a singer, songwriter, and cartoonist who largely followed his own path as a solo artist. But when the friends came together in 1975, their shared musical language made room for something much stranger.
TWO DAYS, NO RULEBOOK
Produced by John Nagy, Have Moicy! came together during an unusually fast two-day session at Boston’s Dimension Sound in July 1975.
As Jason P. Woodbury describes in the new liner notes, the process worked more like a song circle than a conventional studio session. Hurley, Stampfel, Frederick, and guitarist/vocalist Paul Prestitook turns introducing songs, with everyone else quickly learning, arranging, and recording them.
That loose setup became part of the record’s character. Hurley brought his laid-back grooves, Stampfel his unmistakable yelp, and Frederick his sharp humor, with songs moving freely between folk, country, blues, rock, psychedelia, and whatever else suited the moment.
The subject matter was just as unpredictable. Heartbreak and heavier reflections sit alongside bank robberies, hamburgers, pork chops, and big pots of spaghetti, all without much concern for where the serious stuff ends and the joke begins.
FROM CULT FAVORITE TO FREAK-FOLK BLUEPRINT
Released in early 1976 with artwork designed by Hurley, Have Moicy! quickly found champions in the underground. The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau ranked it his favorite album of the year in the publication’s Pazz & Jop poll and later called it “the greatest folk album of the rock era.”
Its reputation only grew with time. The album would eventually be recognized as an early blueprint for the freak-folk and New Weird America scenes that emerged decades later, finding fans in artists including Devendra Banhart, Cat Power, and Jeffrey Lewis.
Its songs traveled too. Cass McCombs later covered Hurley’s “Sweet Lucy,” while Yo La Tengotook on Stampfel’s “Griselda.” In 2015, Jeffrey Lewis and Stampfel even returned to the idea with Have Moicy 2: The Hoodoo Bash.
LISTENING NOTES
“Sweet Lucy”
The hazy Hurley classic is the perfect entry point. Start with the original, then head to the previously unreleased alternate version on the expanded CD and digital editions.
“Robbin’ Banks”
Jeffrey Frederick turns a mischievous outlaw tale into one of the record’s most memorable singalongs. Proof that a good folk song doesn’t always need a respectable protagonist.
“Griselda”
Peter Stampfel at his playful best. Its oddball charm proved durable enough that Yo La Tengo eventually took a crack at it too.
“What Made My Hamburger Disappear?”
Come for the title, stay for a honky-tonk meditation on impermanence disguised as a missing-food mystery. Have Moicy! in miniature.
“Hoodoo Bash”
Stampfel closes the record with a rowdy, Southern-flavored send-off that sounds appropriately like the whole gathering spilling out of the studio.
STILL MOICY!
What keeps Have Moicy! sounding so singular 50 years later isn’t simply its weirdness. It’s the chemistry of musicians who knew each other well enough to throw songs into the room, follow one another wherever they went, and leave some of the rough edges intact.
The anniversary edition returns to that original two-day burst of collaboration while adding a new piece of the session with the unheard “Sweet Lucy” alternate. Half a century later, the album remains funny, messy, soulful, and stubbornly difficult to classify, which is exactly the point.
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