Excrusiasion ’86 (1988) was recorded on the trio tour he did of the East Coast in the Winter of ’86. One side of the tape is from Folk City, the flip was done at the Blue Plate in Holden, MA. Despite some dubbing speed anomalies (at least on the copies I’ve heard), it almost functions as a live Greatest Hits package. Growlin’ Bobo (1991) was recorded at the Mill in Winooski, VT in late 1980 with a pared-down version of the Snockgrass band. Played before a rowdy audience, it sounds like the homecoming of a conquering hero. Woodbill Brothers (1992) was recorded in the Summer of ’92 in Richmond and is the lowest lo-fi one in the batch.
“It has lots of tape hiss,” Hurley admits. “I ran it through a four-track and ran each track separately, so the hiss adds up. Also, down in Richmond in the summertime they have these special insects that put out a heavy buzz right in the windows. So every track I added put on another layer of those bugs singing.” Still, Woodbill has the first recorded appearance of ‘$10 Gig,’ one of Hurley’s greatest love songs of the era.
I ain’t mad
I ain’t sad
But I’m doin’ kinda bad
Since I moved to the county where I live
It’s somewhere between a piece a firewood and a food stamp
And a $10 gig, a $10 gig, comin’ up comin’ up at the end of the week
During this label-less period, Hurley also began taking his paintings around to shows.
“The way I started to paint was that I got back into cartooning,” he says. “After high school I kept up drawing, but there was no boredom driving me to draw. So I didn’t draw much for a couple of years. Then I was taking a bunch of drugs and I started doing it again. The characters Boone and Jocko were different when they came back. Then one day I just wanted to get some color into the cartoon pictures. I was always drawing stars in the background somewhere. And it started out with me pasting a little star—you know those stars you get at the store—and I stuck a star in one of my cartoon panels instead of drawing it. And the color kinda of got me. So I went and bought a little watercolor set. I painted a few more things in that picture. It just eventually got to where I filled in the whole picture with color. Then I made it bigger. I just kept giving them away to people for a while. I’d hang ‘em up for decorations in wherever I lived.”
At one show at Folk City he sold over half the paintings he’d brought, and realized he was on to something.
“I can sell ‘em faster than I paint them,” he says. “I’ve never had a gallery show. People say, ‘Why not have a gallery shows?’ Why bother? Wherever my paintings are up, I should be able to sleep on the sofa there. You get a $50 discount for sofa access. For a while, the paintings were making my living, not the music. The paintings made it possible for me to stop working jobs like painting houses. Now I don’t really need the paintings, but it’s easier if I want to stay home and don’t want to tour. It’s better to paint.”
Hurley also did a series of four cartoon books around this time. They feature lots of hijinx from Boone & Jocko, and collect material done over a 30-year span. The first is called Uncle Gaspard Joins the Bograt Navy is a tale of whiskey madness, murderous rodents and monophonic blues records. 8 Track Sidetrack/Jesus Saves, combines a story about the philosophical implications of an 8 track tape’s infinite looping with a couple Broadside strips. Heartbreak Hotel & Prayer has one yarn about alien truck abductions and another about the power of positive drinking, and The Honking Duck Marina is an ode to “the three p’s—pointing, pie and pool.” Needless to say, they’re all essential reads. Hurley has long claimed he’ll do an omnibus edition once the fifth saddle-stapled volume appears, but it has been a while! There was also a VHS video tape released around then. I can’t find the damn thing, but I’m pretty sure it was called The Earthquake of ’89, and was a self-shot documentary about a West Coast tour that coincided with the Loma Prieta/”World Series” earthquake.
“I was at Michael Kane’s house when the earthquake happened,” Hurley says. “I saw the ground in waves. You know that song, ‘California Earthquake’ by John Hartford? There’s a line in there about, ‘The ground was like ocean waves.’ That’s not a figure of speech. I can’t explain what I saw during the quake, but I was outside and it seemed that the ground I could see was moving in waves. There were these swells, their crests were about ten feet apart. The ground looked like it was four feet deeper. If you just took me and shook me, I wouldn’t see the ground that way. I was fighting to stay on my feet. I was kind of wobbling around, but I was right next to this dumptruck, about a foot away. So after the quake, I thought about that truck. I thought it must be loose because I’d seen it swaying like hell. I went up to it and I couldn’t move it an inch. It was just as solid as a wall. Nothing had happened to the structures where we were. We were in Olema. And no windows broke or fell off the house or anything.”
It’s while still based in Richmond that Hurley got his first international connections. A German rock writer, Thomas Meinecke, tracked him down and got him to record a track for a compilation of love songs he was assembling for Peter Schneider at Veracity Records. This led to a German package tour in support of Love Is My Only Crime. While in Germany, Hurley convinced Schnieder to release an album of new recordings called Wolfways. The album was laid down in bits and pieces all over New England, with a wide roster of players. A bunch of the tunes are new versions of his own songs, but the arrangement are big, wily and very lush at times. The background harmonies are particularly fetching.
“After that, I convinced him to put out Parsnips Snips in 1995,” Hurley says. “Whereupon the finance police seized Veracity’s assets. About 25 copies had made it to the US at that time. After that, his dad pulled the plug on him.”
It was also during his Richmond days that Hurley got into 8-track tapes. He needed a new audio set-up for his car and thought cassette decks looked too modern. “I didn’t want that kind of anachronism glaring at me from the dash,” he says. Luckily he found a place in Barre, Vermont that sold old 8-track players for $5. He started finding cheap tapes in old department stores and junk shops and it kinda went from there. Before long, he and Bob Jordan had conspired to get all the 8-track tapes that Rounder was getting rid of. They also found an old Radio Shack manual about how to fix the things when they broke. Hurley illustrated it with Boone & Jocko and sold copies through Goldmine and 8-Track Mind. One time, David Greenberger (from Duplex Planet) had some car trouble in Richmond. It was gonna take a couple days to fix, so he looked up Hurley and remembers spending a couple of quiet days with him, fixing old tapes and listening to the flies buzz. Hurley seems to have moved beyond his 8-track phase now, but he was pleased as hell when Secret Seven Records did a limited 8-track-only reissue of Blue Navigator. Who wouldn’t be?
Blue Navigator is also the name of the Irish fanzine, put together by Brendan Foreman to document (more or less) the musicians associated with Have Moicy! He also assisted Hurley in getting gigs in the UK and Ireland, and was responsible for releasing his next album in 1998, The Bellemeade Sessions. Again, the music includes a few new versions of old Hurley tunes (including a great version of ‘$10.00 Gig’) plus a lot of covers, including Tom T Hall’s ‘Pay No Attention to Alice,’ which was a live staple for much of the ’90s. Unlike Wolfways, however, this one has a very unslick feel, which I credit to Nick Hill, a longtime fan and WFMU DJ who supervised the sessions. It’s funny, though, ’cause many of the songs on here are the ones you’d only hear live on one of those occasions where Michael had an open schedule and could play for a few hours. After about 90 minutes he’ll start digging deep into his stash of cover tunes. Bellemeade Sessions has that same late night feel.
After hanging around the Northeast a good long while (painting a great mural on the wall of Amherst MA’s Mystery Train record store in the process) he headed off for the driveways of Portsmouth, Ohio, taking his evil doppelganger, Kornbred, with him. I’m not sure how to describe Kornbred, except to say he’s a comic book figure come to life. A corn mutant with a long snoot, a bulbous head, and very bad manners. He has sometimes been known to invade Hurley’s live shows with his banjo, and has been a frequent subject of Michael’s visual art over the last decade-plus. Kornbred also appears as a backing vocalist sometimes. but honestly, the less said of him the better. Hurley ended up living in Ohio off and on for a while. And if you can still remember the story ’bout him visiting Cambridge in 1962, well…old habits die hard.
Weatherhole was the last album that was planned during Hurley’s Richmond phase. Nick Hill was doing A&R for Koch Records and he thought it could be slotted in as a follow-up to Wolfways (which Koch has licensed for the US). Typically, Nick got the boot from his job before that could happen, so he put it out on his own label (Field Recording Co.) and it was finished up in Brooklyn. The band on it (including Dave Reisch) is great, and Hurley mostly plays new songs, including ‘Your Old Gearbox,’ ‘The Rue of Ruby Whores,’ ‘Nat’l Weedgrowers Assoc.’ and ‘Wildgeeses.’ And while I would never say a harsh word about any Hurley album, since all have given me untold pleasure, Weatherhole is easily his most solid collection since Water Tower.
And now I see the wind
Blowin’ from Northwest
And I hear them honkers again
On their rounding quest
Over Lord’s Valley I’ll roll like a ball
And in the wind I hear them call
Wild goose, loose goose
I count them all
Yonder steppin’ that old light walkin’ wolf
Hungry as always
Long legs & long ears & tail
And a long long wail
I had an old goose & tried to keep her
But she awake & I the sleeper
She flew away left me the weeper
The next few years Hurley continued living in Ohio (technically), but he was all over the place. He’d be in New England for a while, then off to Europe, then the West Coast and wherever else. Brendan Foreman released a solid set of tunes, recorded by a trio with Dave Reisch and Tommy Beavitt called Live in Edinburgh in ’99. It’s mostly run-throughs of the hits, but it’s the first place you’ll hear Snock’s wonderful tribute to Scotch Whisky, ‘Knocando.’ As the new millennium dawned, hipster interest in American roots volk music continued to grow. But still, his most enthusiastic audiences were in Germany. And through some chicanery, he managed to get the Trikont label (best known for its roots reissues) to put out a new album called Sweetkorn. Recorded between Boston and Portsmouth, Sweetkorn is a lovely, somewhat stark LP, with light acoustic arrangements and thorough backing vocals. A few covers, a few old songs, but mostly new. It’s a bravura effort. As is its follow-up, Down in Dublin, recorded in a studio there for Brendan Foreman. Introducing such classics as ‘Goners’ and ‘Uncle Smoochface,’ it also includes the only cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho & Lefty’ that actually bests the original. Hurley still maintains he and Dave Reisch were not in good shape at the end of that tour, but I don’t really hear the problem.
“Dave and I were both really sick and we were exhausted from a three week tour,” Hurley says. “Brendan told us, ‘Okay, now. We’ve booked the studio for this album.’ He had Dave sing a few songs, but we were really sick. We’d gotten this horrible Dublin Rot. The audiences all had it too. We’d always hear coughing throughout the audience. Reisch was smart enough to put a kibosh on his contributions. He sang two songs, but said, ‘No way.’ I let that one go through.”
As the 21st century unspooled, Hurley found himself embraced by a new generation of fans. It wasn’t an onslaught or anything, but it was cool. After three years or so, he left Ohio for Oregon, where he has stayed more or less to this day. He has toured a lot with younger musicians—Vetiver, Ida, Espers and various others—and he was joined by Tara Jane O’Neil on his next album, The Ancestral Swamp, which was recorded between Ohio and Oregon for Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s Gnomonsong label. Dave Reisch and Lewi Longmire put in brief appearances as well, but it’s mostly a solo outing. Mixing trad material with some of his old songs, and some new ones—including great studio takes of ‘Knocando’ and ‘She Got a Mathematic’—it’s instructive to hear how Hurley makes small changes in style seem like major form shifts. In many ways, the approach on Swamp is no different than it was on Armchair Boogie, but you can feel the years hanging on him a bit more than before. Not that he ever sounded young, but he’s now completely grown into his wily coot persona, wearing it like a comfortably ratty barn coat. Released in 2007, Swamp is a record that reminds you even the laziest alligator still has big fucking teeth.
It was around 2007 as well that Lisa Foti-Straus’ ill-fated documentary, Elwood Snock & the Land of Lo-Fi, was in the works. Much footage was shot, many folks were interviewed, and Lisa had just about a final cut of the thing. Hurley didn’t like the way it came out, though, so he nixed its release. Too bad. I thought it was pretty cool. There’s even some boss animation of Boone & Jocko. But Hurley is picky about this stuff. “Yeah, I told them to go back to the drawing board,” he says. I mention that he did the same thing with the Snockument compilation that was being assembled by Non Sequitor in the early ’90s. He objected to the versions of songs that Jad Fair and Loren Connors had recorded.
“Well,” he says. “They had these two songs, ‘O My Stars’ and ‘Love Is the Closest Thing,’ which I figured were really pretty songs that people liked a lot. Jad Fair did ‘O My Stars’ and he didn’t have the melody, he didn’t have the words, so what did he have? If he woulda copyrighted that I would’ve had no problem at all, but I didn’t want the song represented that way. I figured, ‘This is one of my best songs and I want it out there in the public like it is.’ The same thing with the Loren Connors thing. It sounded like a pile of ghosts moaning.”
He much preferred a pair of other films shot around the same time as Elwood. Lisa had given him a video camera to record stuff, and he took it on a tour he did with Ralph White. The result is a rambling, weirdly entertaining, thoroughly Snockofied film called American Boogie. The other one is a short called Snock ‘N Roll: Adventures with Michael Hurley by Marc Israel. It’s about a traveling kambucha salesman getting a ride from Hurley and then hanging out with him and seeing some gigs. It’s loose, but funny.
“He painted me as a kombucha freak,” Hurley says. “I guess he needed something to tie his film together. So the story is that he’s hitch-hiking up to Woodstock with a case of kombucha for me. So now, wherever I go people bring me bottles of kombucha. Or they’ll give me a six pack. There was even a kombucha manufacturer in Portland who got in touch with me. They figured—this is our man. The wanted me to play for their tea house. And they’d give me a case of kombucha. That’s when I figured out I wasn’t too fond of kombucha. Once I got through that case.”
Hurley’s second album for Gnomonsong was Ida Con Snock, a surprising collaboration with the New York indie band, Ida. Recorded at Levon Helm’s studio up in Woodstock, Hurley calls it “my most state of the art release of all.” And indeed, it is. Ida and Tara Jan O’Neil provide a fine, stately accompaniment for a set of Snock hits, weird oldies like ‘Ragg Mopp,’ and a few new ones. The new version of ‘Wildgeeses’ is particularly beautiful, and the whole set swings with such slow surety it’s mighty fine.
2009 was also the year that Hurley hooked up with Eric Isaacson at Mississippi Records in Portland. He was on a tour with Vetiver and Andy wanted to hit the store. This led to reissues of the Raccoon LPs, Parsnip Snips, Back Home with Drifting Woods, Fatboy Spring, an EP with Betsy Nichols and a new album called Blue Hills. Blue Hills is a wild, idiosyncratic record. On the first side, he plays electric piano and pump organ. Hurley has a special relationship with keyboards, and he uses them to trance the hell out. I’m pretty sure the organ pieces were recorded by Aaron Rosenbloom out in Kentucky, and they are masterpieces of wrecked form. They ramble in the most sideways drifting manner you can think of. Absolutely unique and not much like anything else in the Snock canon. The flip side has another three tunes on which he plays guitar. There’s a new version of ‘The Tea Song’ from First Songs and a nice ode to Feathers’ Meara O’Reilly, but the album as a whole is suffused with a dark bluesy vibe that is as addictive as anything he’s ever recorded.
A little before Blue Hills came out, Hurley also had a bi-lingual book of lyrics published by the great l’oie de Cravan Press up in Montreal. The Words to the Songs of Michael Hurley/Paroles de Chansons de Michael Hurley, is a beautiful, illustrated guide to many of the master’s greatest lyrics. Some of them absolutely do not conform to what you think you hear, others are spot on, and they all read so well it’s an incredible rush to go through the book. The translation by Marie Frankland (an award winning translator of French avant garde poets) is also aces. But just reading Hurley’s words lends a lot of credence to the idea that he’s a functioning surrealist writer, whether he agrees with that assessment or not!
In the works right now is a new studio album called (probably) The Land of Lo-Fi, unrelated to the earlier tape, recorded with a bunch of Northwest musicians, in the purest house environment available. Hurley is also responsible for a new daughter, appropriately named Wilder, who requires a good bit of due diligence. He also has some art shows scheduled. He’ll be showing in Astoria, OR in late summer, and then down in L.A. next year. It seems like the biggest thing on his mind, however, at least as he told it to me, is an anti-Monsanto compilation he’s trying to get together to protest the whole GMO food thing. He wants to compile an album of songs that profile the evils of big agrobiz without being pedantic. Think of the way Hurley writes songs—simple on the surface, but as deep as anyone would ever care to take them. I suppose he’d like stuff on that level, but he’d be happy to just have tunes that sounds good. So send ’em in, c/o this mag if you so desire.
And why does Hurley care so much about this stuff? Hard to know. Maybe part of it’s for the future of his little girl. Maybe part of it’s just pure cussedness. But another part is that this GMO shit just don’t fit into the universe of Boone and Jocko and Kornbred and Snock. It is a weird, compelling place, parts of it as old as American history itself, other parts of it twisted into the the most immaculate post-stoner architecture imaginable. But none of it cottons to goddamn mutant seeds. And maybe that is the bottom line.