Steve Weber, guitarist in oddball folk band, dies at 76

Steve Weber, the guitarist of the Holy Modal Rounders, a cult psychedelic folk group that grazed the popculture mainstream with a song featured in the 1969 film “Easy Rider” and influenced generations of underground musicians, died Feb. 7 at his home in Mount Clare, West Virginia. He was 76.

His death was announced by the Davis Funeral Home in nearby Clarksburg, which did not give a cause.

The Holy Modal Rounders emerged in New York in 1963 as a duo, with Weber on guitar and Peter Stampfel on fiddle and banjo. Like countless others swept up in the folk revival of the time, they were inspired by the traditional songs in the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” compiled by the filmmaker and historian Harry Smith in 1952.

But though most of their peers approached old material with reverence, Weber and Stampfel stood out with their spontaneity and almost boyish mischief. On their first two albums, released by the folk label Prestige in 1964 and 1965, they freely rewrote lyrics to 1920s songs like “Blues in the Bottle” and “Bully of the Town,” and sang gleefully with a peculiar kind of nasal harmony.

Their antics did not endear the band to folk purists, although Weber, who grew up in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was noted for his mastery of traditional guitar styles.

Weber developed a reputation as a charmed character. Tall, strapping and handsome, he would wander barefoot through the

Lower East Side of Manhattan and never seem to step on a shard of glass, said Stampfel, who described Weber in those days as looking “like an idealized Li’l Abner.”

The two young men began to drift into ever more radical and warped forms of pop music. In 1965, they played on the first album by the Fugs, whose leaders, poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, relished the anarchic and puerile side of rock but had only the most rudimentary skills playing instruments. Weber wrote one of the group’s most popular numbers, “Boobs a Lot.”

By this time, Stampfel and Weber had largely ceased playing as the Holy Modal Rounders; Stampfel said he had grown frustrated with Weber’s preference not to rehearse.

“I like to keep things fresh and natural,” Weber said in an interview in “Always in Trouble,” a 2012 book about the underground record label ESP Disk, by Jason Weiss.

By the early 1970s, the pair had parted ways, with Weber taking the group to Portland, Oregon, where it enjoyed years as a hardrocking bar band. Stampfel remained in New York. But they gathered for occasional reunions.

Weber was born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1943, and grew up with his mother in Buckingham, Pennsylvania. There he met Robin Remaily, who would become a longtime member of the Holy Modal Rounders, and Michael Hurley, a singer-songwriter and illustrator who also would have a long association with the group.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.