“That’s when I developed this Applause Pedal,” he says. “I made this thing, it was a sign on a six foot stick. It would lie flat face down on the stage. It was rigged to a foot pedal, so that when I hit the foot pedal it would erect into the air, this sign that said, ‘Applaud!’ I’d go into a solo then hit the Applause Pedal, and the applause would occur in the middle of my solo. I always liked that effect on jazz albums. That really worked well. People loved it.”
Soon after Armchair Boogie was released, the Holy Modal Rounders changed line-ups again, taking on Robin Remaily as a full member, and soliciting Hurley for cover art for their fifth LP, Good Taste Is Timeless (Metromedia, 1971). His cartoon cover—of the band in full flight with Boone and Jocko lurking in the background is a classic, and it’s also the third of theirs in a row to include at least one Hurley tune. Even if Michael didn’t give a hoot himself, there were plenty of people who wished him well. One of the less-expected tributes was on the solo debut LP by UK folk artist, Barry Dransfield. His eponymous 1972 LP on the legendary UK Polydor subsidiary Folk Mill, contains a cover of ‘The Werewolf,’ apparently learned from the First Songs. Because of the album’s extreme rarity, this cover was all but unknown until it surfaced on a Hurley-oriented radio broadcast in the mid ’80s. Maybe there are still some unknown versions lurking out there still.
For the follow-up to Armchair Boogie, Hurley drove to the Youngbloods’ home turf in Northern California. Upon arriving, he discovered things were not good. There was a lot of friction within the band, and Young was too preoccupied to find time for his record. Luckily another Youngblood, Lowell “Banana” Levinger (who’d been in Boston band, The Trolls, with Michael Kane) offered to step in. But first, there was a Raccoon Records package tour to do.
“I went on tour with the Youngbloods and Earthquake and a band called High Country,” says Hurley. “All up and down the West Coast. I was delighted with all that. Then after the tour, nothing was happening for a long while. I was living in my truck with my girlfriend, and Banana could see that this was not proper decorum for the county. The cops would wake us up every morning. ‘You can’t park here.’ That was in Marin. For a while we lived in Michael Kane’s house. Michael had a tremendous brewing operation going at that time. His whole porch was stacked up with brewed beer. He had ginger beer. He had spruce beer. His spruce beer—I’d really like to have a bottle of that right now. He’d say, ‘You know how beer makes you sleepy? Well, this beer wakes you up! It’s spruce!’”
The resulting album, Hi Fi Snock Uptown is another masterpiece. Recorded with all of the Youngbloods but Jesse, much of it has a super warm small combo sound that compliments the intimacy of the songs perfectly. Hurley’s voice still has a bit of a wild edge, but it’s all contained beautifully, and it has many memorable tunes—‘Water Train,’ ‘Twilight Zone,’ ‘In Florida,’ ‘Mr. Whiskerwits’ and ‘Eyes Eyes.’ One of Hurley’s most beautiful songs ever, its lyrics typify the alchemy of which he seems uniquely capable.
Protein monster ate a sack of poison sugar
Crawling out of the barn to the weeds to die
Rolling his eyes, eyes, eyes eyes
Mama Molasses broke my glasses
Then the moon came up and we wiggled our asses
She got red eyes, eyes
The werewolf rides and everybody hides
He won’t be scared when he dies
Look in his eyes, eyes
Marilyn Monroe pointed her toe
Crawling out of the pool from the waters so cold
Camera flashes flashing back from her eyes, eyes
Smoky the Bear standing there
In front of the woods all black and bare
Tears in his eyes, eyes
She calls me a bum
Sleeping through the day
There was nothing i wanted to say
I closed my eyes, eyes
Unfortunately, Raccoon Records (and the Youngbloods) did not long survive this release. But Hurley was not overly concerned. He drove back to the East Coast and began several years of yo-yoing between Martha’s Vineyard and Vermont. In Vermont he joined an extant electric band called Puddledock (the original name of the town in which they were based) and convinced them to change their name to Automatic Slim & the Fatboys.
“I told ’em, ‘We’ll make a million just on that name,’” he says. “I lived in this shack and in the woodshed I found this big stash of actual down pillows, the ones with the stripes. I said, ‘We’ll put these pillows in our shirts and really look like fat boys. This’ll go good.’ I actually got them a couple of times to show up with those pillows, but they’d always be taking them out and leaving them at gigs, so I was running out of pillows. These guys never responded to all my showbiz enterprise. And it’s funny. People always want to know who’s the leader of any group. We’d get somewhere and they’d ask, ‘Which of you guys is Automatic Slim?’ We had this old geezer we took around with us. He was like our mascot. We’d pick him up and take him to every gig. He would always be up for going to anywhere. He’d even go to Martha’s Vineyard. He was on the permanent extra room circuit—not the sofa circuit. We would claim he was Automatic Slim.”
This is the band that recorded Fatboy Spring, an album that was not released until 2011. It contains protean versions of songs like ‘Drivin’ Wheel,’ ‘Automatic Slim,’ ‘Watchin’ the Show’ and others, delivered in the most purely rural combo setting Hurley had yet achieved. There are a few tunes unique to this release as well. Nothing too mindblowing, but a nice peek at Hurley during a long lost period.
“We had a house—a dairy farm up by St. Albans—where we practiced,” he says. “There was a room upstairs where we set up a Teac 4-track. The first four songs or so are recorded with our most skilled efforts, and they sound pretty good. The rest of the album is half-assed practice sessions, from which we salvaged stuff, and live recordings from a rowdy bar. There was this guy who used to come to our gigs with a 4-track. I remembered listening to the tapes he’d made, and they sounded really good. I finally found him a couple of years ago. The stuff I was really interested in had all been taped over, but there was still some good bits. I got the title Fatboy Spring because it was written on one of the tape boxes. It just said ‘Fatboy Spring.’ I knew that meant the Spring of ’73, but I thought, ‘That’s a good album title.’ You don’t think of fatboys as being that springy. Although some of them are pretty swift.”
The Fat Boys’ yo-yo between the Vineyard’s easy bar gigs and Vermont’s rougher venues went on for a good while. In the meantime, the Holy Modal Rounders splintered, with Steve Weber heading a group in Portland, OR and Peter Stampfel leading a troupe (subsequently dubbed the Unholy Modal Rounders) in NYC. All of these elements came together in 1976 for an epochal album called Have Moicy! The specifics are far too tangled to get into here, but the basic idea was that Jefferey Fredericks (originally from Vermont) had gone out to Portland to replace the truant Steve Weber. Dave Reisch was one of the musicians who’d moved over to the Portland Rounders, but he went back to the era when the band recorded their Good Taste Is Timeless LP. He was in touch with everybody, and the general theory is that he was the one who suggested the idea for the album—a meeting of unknown underground minds that would become one of the few universally-loved folk albums of the early punk era.
If you’ve never heard Have Moicy! it’s hard to describe how pleasing it was to hear in the year of 1976. The Rounders had split into factions by this point, and Stampfel’s Unholies were doing a regular gig at Broadway Charlie’s in NYC (a long-gone hippie bar, sort of across the street from where the Strand is). The shows were fun and all, but it had been a while since the Rounders had recorded a really mindblowing album and expectations weren’t too high. The Hurley cartoon cover looked boss, however, and the record just wailed. It truly features the best of Hurley’s, Stampfel’s and Fredericks’s repertoires at the time, played by a kind of unknown dream supergroup. Amongst such readymade classics as Stampfel’s ‘Griselda’ (beautifully done later by Yo La Tengo) and Jefferey’s ‘Robbin’ Banks,’ is one of Hurley’s most requested/played tunes, ‘The Slurf Song.’
Oh a little wishbone
I’ll make a wish for a potato
It goes from there, with a very funny punchline. And the song has evolved over the years. I think I’ve heard three or four extra verses at various times in various combinations, but the original just swings so damn hard it is irresistible. Such heavies as Robt. Christgau foamed over the album, and I’ve heard it’s listed by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 of the ’70s (as if anyone cared what those dried up scumbags think, but still…) Those fans who are deeply into the Hurley experience have a tendency to rate his other records more highly. But Have Moicy! is a decent gateway for the uninitiated.
“Reisch didn’t bring too many people from the West Coast, besides Jeffery and Jill,” Hurley says. “My band in Vermont was called the Redbirds then. He used two guys from my band for the sessions, then Stampfel and Paul Presti from the Unholies, and then Jefferey and Dave. That group of people just did all their songs. Everybody always raves about that album. I still get letters. People tell me stories about how much they listened to it, and what they were doing when they listened to it all the time. Dave knew all the music. He had played all the songs. There was no winging it, and no case of anybody not knowing the material. There was a single weird appearance of the whole group up in Vermont at this place called the Bethel Inn.
“We did a gig up there and it’s kinda depicted on the cover of Have Moicy. My brother’s girlfriend heaved a beer across the room at that gig. It hit a fiddle that was leaning against an amplifier and I did a drawing of that. It broke the fiddle. So it was Froggy’s idea—that painting of Thora chucking this beer. Froggy was looking at my drawings and says, ‘You don’t have it right. You gotta get the dimensions of the beer right. Bring that beer up, make it bigger. Make it so you can see that she threw it and so that you can see what it’s gonna hit.’ No one sees that the fiddle was doomed, but that was the story. Paul Presti came up and played that show. That was when I first met him. The Unholies, Jefferey Fredericks, and my band were all there. I forget what the hell we were doing, but we put on a show. And my brother’s girlfriend was disgruntled. She was always doing things like that.”