The success of Have Moicy! allowed Hurley to add NYC to his touring schedule, and also resulted in Rounder Records signing him for a pair of albums. Long Journey and Snockgrass were both recorded with a mutating string of Vermont based musicians. After the reception which greeted Have Moicy!, Hurley told Rounder he had a few more batches of songs, so he and the boys would head down out of the VT hills and suit up for service. Long Journey (with guest banjo by Stampfel, and bass by Dave Reisch) has some incredible tunes on it, “Whiskey Willie” and “Hog of the Forsaken” (later used to good effect by HBO’s Deadwood), but its arrangements and Hurley’s vocals seem shaped by years of playing snowmobile festivals in Vermont. The denizens of the North wanted some basic bar boogie (not always a bad thing, of course) to go along with their beer and burgers. On Long Journey, Snock was more than happy to help ’em out.
The same is not true of 1980’s Snockgrass. This was the first Hurley LP I actually got a promo copy of, but my editor at NY Rocker would not let me review it since it had what he called a “porno cover.” Ah well. Various Rounders and Clamtones play on this one and they bring a certain feel to the proceedings that Journey may have lacked. That, plus the fact that the album includes ‘O My Stars,’ ‘Tia Marie,’ ‘I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop,’ ‘Watchin’ the Show’ and many other faves make it one hell of a pleasant listen. Still, one feels sometimes that Hurley’s true voice is constrained by the dictates of being in a real studio with all that entails. Snockgrass set no commercial woods aflame. How could it, in the year when most hepsters wanted to hear nothing apart from PiL or Joy Division? Hurley reportedly sent some other demos to Rounder, including a proposed album of songs for kids, but nothing happened. He and the label opted to part company, although Rounder commissioned a mural for their warehouse office. And it’s a good one.
The third LP in Hurley’s Vermont Trilogy was the ill-fated Blue Navigator. Released by Bill Wright’s Rooster label in 1984 (primarily a home for local Vermont folk and bluegrass musicians), Blue Navigator has a few old songs reconfigured, some overt rewrites and swinging hillbilly sound with pedal steel and other tasty licks. It’s a multi-faceted session, with some of Hurley’s patented (though rarely recorded) slow boogie woogie piano playing. Some people claim it’s one of Hurley’s best, but that may have something to do with the fact it’s one of his rarest. The Rooster Records warehouse went up in a fire later in the ’80s, taking all remaining copies, plus the master tapes with it. More recently it has been reissued on 8-track by Secret Seven Records.
Around 1987, Hurley gave up on Vermont.
“I finally got priced out of Vermont by the yuppies,” he says. “All the time I was up there you could find a house that no one was living in. You could contact the owner and tell them you were a carpenter or something and it was always a good deal for the owner to have someone there to keep it from leaking, and vandals from breaking the windows. I had a long string of places like that. The last place I was living I paid 35 bucks a month. Usually I’d either have something like that or free. But it got to where you couldn’t find that so easily. So, I moved to Richmond [Virginia] ’cause you could have a lotta nice stuff for like 120 bucks a month—heat, a flush toilet, electric upstairs, downstairs.”
While based in Richmond, Hurley released the Watertower LP thanks to the championing of Eugene Chadbourne. A beautiful, largely-acoustic session recorded in Vermont, the songs are mostly new and feel somewhat slight at first, although ‘The Revenant,’ ‘I Paint a Design,’ ‘I Still Could Not Forget You Then,’ ‘Broadcasting the Blues’ and ‘Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls’ are all growers.
Well I heard about them Injun chiefs
Camped up on the top of the hill
They smoke their pipes
And they roast those snipes
Hunters and they hunted still
Hurley dug using Richmond as a home base, but he was on the road a lot during his years there. He had started playing a lot of live shows. Working with Worcester Mass wildman Bob Jordan, he assembled one of the stranger “circuits” seen in recent years. I remember seeing him one time in the early ’90s at a rug store in Northampton, Mass. A fucking rug store. Not one that usually did shows, either. How that sort of stuff happened is anyone’s guess. But Hurley and his pals were finding ways to make it work without a record label or more than a skeleton crew of fans. He played teetotaler “bars,” arts centers and various other non-standard venues. He also pioneered the “merch” concept, issuing cassettes and comix to sell at shows.
The tapes included new material and old. Hurley’s in-house label, Bellemeade Phonics (their motto: “There’s always room for improvement”), released four cassettes in this period. Land of Lo-Fi & Redbirds (1988) has one side of wonderful low-key duos with Dave Reisch from ’88. On the flip is a side of the Redbirds, live at Folk City in ’76. It’s a goddamn pip, and probably the clearest record we’ll ever have of the sound Hurley evolved during his years without a label. Snock has occasionally talked about reissuing it. Not least because he thinks it would seal his claim to be the inventor of the term, lo-fi.
“I coined that term,” he says. “I see it all over the place now. It’s practically a genre. And I claim ownership. It hit me five or six years after the tape came out. I was in Germany and I was talking to this German music fan. I asked what he liked and he said, ‘Oh, the lo-fi. It’s the hippest thing.’ That’s when I started paying attention. Then Elmore Leonard used it in one of his books, and he’s known for picking up on street lingo. Getting his characters’ dialogue just right.”