Michael Hurley – Snockgrass

It’s hard to put a finger on Michael Hurley. Emerging in the early ’70s with a couple of homemade albums, Armchair Boogie and Hi Fi Snock Uptown (both on the Raccoon label), he appeared in the guise of a crazy backwoods Vermont folkie, singing about werewolves and maids, drinking weasel piss, and enduring sausage farts. But it was Have Moicy (Rounder), recorded in 1976 with Peter Stampfel, Steve Weber and the Holy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Fredericks and the Clamtones, that secured his sub rosa status as a bizarre musical genius.

Which is not to say that Hurley’s stuff is exactly avant garde. In fact, his first album was on the Folkways label. And Snockgrass (originally released by Rounder in 1980), though smooth as snake poop, still attests to the fact that Hurley is very much a throwback to what Greil Marcus has called “the old, weird America.”

The cover of Snockgrass pictures a profanely surreal uptown Saturday night, in a cartoon style that recalls R. Crumb. The music inside is much sweeter, blending an easygoing string-band sound with blues and jazz licks. It’s also perverse, sneaky and sardonic. It sure doesn’t hurt that Hurley has a great voice, or that he’s capable of twisting it around, from wistful to playful to leering.

He opens with “Midnight Rounder”, a bouncing bit of gentle boasting, and ends with “Grapefruit Juice Blues”, in which he touts a sure-fire hangover cure. The rest of the set finds Hurley singing about girls (“O My Stars”, “Tia Marie”), taking on hell with a gospel fervor (“I’m Gettin’ Ready to Go”), observing eternity (“Watchin’ the Show”), dreaming of meat (“I Heard The Voice Of A Porkchop”), and considering evolution, on a tune that has lately become a Cajun-zydeco standard (“You Gonna Look Like A Monkey”).

In short, as Robin Holcomb says in the liner notes, these songs will make you “smile, cry and ache, all at the same time.”