Greenwich Village had the happening folk scene at the time. Hurley had been playing and writing songs since he was 13, and so had his pals Steve Weber (founder of the Holy Modal Rounders) and Robin “Rube” Remaily (who was in a later version of that band). They put together a combo called The Three Blues Doctors as much for their own entertainment as anything else. Playing a mix of originals and covers, The Doctors did some recordings on reel-to-reel tapes, but Hurley is cagey about what these might contain. The band played one gig—as a quartet, with pal Wayne McGuinness—at the Blind Lemon in the Village. It was a pass-the-hat gig, and The Three Blues Doctors’ performance approach—with everyone playing a different song simultaneously—proved to be more than the patrons could easily handle. The Blind Lemon gig may have represented the end of the The Three Blues Doctors, but it was Hurley’s first time on a real stage, and he liked it. Michael and “Rube” headed down to New Orleans to test their luck.
“We used to play together more coherently as a duo in New Orleans, playing in bars,” he says. “We’d go into bars and start playing, ‘cause they wouldn’t throw us out. It would kind of connect things for us, to be there just playing music. We didn’t get much free beer, but we’d meet people. They’d invite us to their houses and give us things to do—party jobs.”
Eventually the pair drifted back to Bucks County, and it was around this time that Michael acquired his sobriquet—Snock, or sometimes Elwood Snock or Doc Snock. His memory of the epiphany that led to this is clear, although as is often the case in Hurley’s tales, the dates are both specific and transitory.
“It was March 16, 1961,” he says. “I heard this music, and it was very snocky. It was like what you would hear when you hit hardwood sticks together. I heard a whole symphony like that. I thought it must be me, having my vision. I’d always read about the Indians who go out and fast until they get a vision and take a new name. They go out in the hills somewhere and starve themselves until they get a vision. Might be a bear or something. I was kinda following that idea. I heard this music and I kinda saw it too, over an ocean wave, like the surf was coming in. The surf was coming in just like this snocky classical music. That was it.”
In early ’62, Hurley moved up to Cambridge Massachusetts for a while.
“I went up there in the winter to see if I could survive, but I couldn’t really make it,” he says. “I had a little mimeograph magazine called The Morning Tea. I sold it on the street in Harvard Square for a dime a copy. I had a girlfriend up in Cambridge. She had a loft. So I was up there trying to inhabit that loft, but it was kinda rough living on The Morning Tea proceeds. My girlfriend kinda had this boyfriend. They worked in this frame shop together. I was kinda like persona non grata. I had to hide out. She’d keep me in the loft. There wasn’t much heat there, but there were crab lice, junkies and a Christian Mission on the bottom floor. A wino mission. That was down in the Combat Zone, but to sell the Morning Tea, I had to go up to Cambridge. I didn’t last long.”
The Morning Tea was an outgrowth of an earlier magazine Hurley did in high school called The Outcry, which ran two issues.
“It had tiny little poems and little drawings, adventure stories,” Hurley says. “Weber got kicked out of high school for selling it in his high school. He went to a different high school than I did. But he got expelled for selling my ‘zine. The first one I ever did was called The Underground Monthly. It had one story, a cartoon of a crap game in progress in an alley. I only have one page left out of it. It’s the end of the crap game and all these guys decide to beat the hell out of this one little kitty who was winning more than them.”
In this period, Hurley also made an important connection, meeting up with Perry Miller. Miller was from the Southern part of Bucks County, and he, Michael and a bunch of other wastrels shared a house across the river in New Jersey in the Summer of ’62. When Miller moved to St. Marks Place (where he worked selling mice wholesale to schools), Hurley had a ready place to stay. He moved to Manhattan and took rooms and couches where he could find them, playing gigs at the Fat Black Pussycat, the Cafe Wha and other pass-the-hat establishments. He even secured a booking agent, Peter Outlaw, whose clients consisted of himself, his future wife—Marjorie “Pasta” Sacco—and a street singer named Guitar Slim (no relation to Eddie Jones, the Mississippi-born blues musician who died in ’59). Outlaw took them around to various joints, but the only real success he had with his roster was getting them onto Bob Fass’s Radio Unnameable show on WBAI sometime in ’63. Director Paul Lovelace turned up a copy of this tape during his recent work on a Fass documentary (Radio Unnameable, 2012). He got a copy to Michael, whose views were mixed.
“No good for me and no good for Pasta,” he says. “But I was really happy to hear Guitar Slim, this guy who came out of nowhere, and disappeared, but who I knew for two years. Before this I could only think about him and remember him. It was nice that he was right there on tape, doing about five songs. He did ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ and some blues. He was pretty into improvising the blues. Just crank it up and let it go.”
The rigors of being a singer in NYC took a toll on Hurley. Early in ’63 he ended up in the TB Ward of Bellevue Hospital for six months, suffering from liver damage, TB and Mononucleosis. His stay was lengthened by bad reactions to some of the medicine, but he was in good spirits most of the time, and had brought his guitar with him.
“One of the songs I wrote in there is ‘In the Morning,’” he says. “Another one which I never recorded was ‘The New York Line.’ But I mostly observed a lot of talk. We were all in one room. It was supposed to be lights out and no talking at 9:00. So as soon as the lights went out it was story time. That was the best time of day. ‘I remember the snows in the winter of ’59…’, somebody’d say. There was one guy in there, his name was George Flowers. I ran into him on the street after I got out. He was stretched out on a park bench. He tells me to come over and says, ‘We were in that hospital together and you serenaded us all.’ That was the only time anyone ever recognized that I was playing the guitar.”
Following his release from Bellevue, Hurley returned to Bucks County, sharing a house with Rube, playing parties and hanging out. In the course of this, he met Fred Ramsey Jr., an archivist, collector and engineer with deep ties to Moses Asch’s Folkways Records. They hit it off, and Michael would hang around Ramsey’s house, listening to his collection of pre-war 78s and playing his own songs on his Stella acoustic. Ramsey recorded a three song demo on the same deck he used to record Leadbelly’s final session and secured Michael a deal with Folkways. They recorded Hurley’s debut album, First Songs, in the same way. The album, cut when Hurley was 22, doesn’t sound like the work of a kid. The arrangements are stark and often slow. His voice has a hint of a bohemian Hank Williams on songs like ‘Just a Bum,’ ‘I Like My Wine’ and a tune that would become one of his signature numbers, ‘The Werewolf Song.’ And he doesn’t actually sound ancient so much as timeless. Even on the one song where Rube joins him (‘Captain Kidd’), there’s little sense of which decade of the 20th Century this recording is being done in. It exists as part of a troubadour tradition that starts when music does, and that will end long after we do.
Captain Kidd done flipped his lid
Wavin’ his sabre in the air
Captain Kidd soon left the moon
‘Cause there wasn’t any wine up there
While it became a very sought-after record before it was reissued, almost no one noted First Songs when it was released. Perhaps sensing this, Hurley played a single gig at Bryn Mawr College after it was released in the Fall of ’64, then split down to Mexico with Pasta for six months. They were headed for Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Nayarit, but didn’t like it much. So they ended up spending their time in Campostella, about 40 miles of winding mountain roads inland. What they did there, we can only guess. They got back to NYC in late Spring of ’65, to find that a promoter was putting together a Folk Festival at Carnegie Hall and that Hurley had been suggested as a performer by Folkways. Several days with all the Village folkies, plus people like Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Jimmy Driftwood followed.
“All I did was play ‘The Werewolf Song,’” Hurley says. “Some people played full sets, but for me it was just play one song and get out of there. Chuck Berry was the best the night I was there. Johnny Cash was supposed to follow Chuck Berry. But after Chuck Berry refused to get off stage for a long time—he had a guitar cord that was about 200 feet long and he would duckwalk off stage and duckwalk back on—Johnny Cash decided he didn’t want to come on. He said, ‘Forget it. That guy played too long.’ But he finally came out. And he played ‘Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog.’”
Following this big break, Hurley moved out to a tipi in a quarry by the Delaware River called The Kook Kamp. Another resident worked at the Second Fret (the folk club in Philadelphia) so visitors included Taj Mahal, Shel Silverstein and various other players who were on the circuit. But Hurley mostly kept playing for himself. He kept in touch with Fred Ramsey, and knowing that Folkways was interested in a follow-up LP (having paid $100 for an advance), they did a few more sessions in ’65 at Fred’s house. These have recently been released as Back Home With the Drifting Woods, which reprises a couple of tunes from First Songs and generally maintains the same out-of-time vibe as the debut, although Michael claims it has more psychedelic touches. At the same time, the Holy Modal Rounders had begun recording as a duo (Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel). The Rounders included a Robin Remaily song, ‘Euphoria,’ on their eponymous debut LP. And Perry Miller, rechristened Jesse Colin Young by a producer, had cut a pair of solo LPs and was well on his way to founding the Youngbloods. Using typically perverse logic, Hurley and Pasta moved around a bit more as the weather got cold, then decided to go to Philadelphia.