I'd Love to Turn You On #245 - Michael Hurley, the Unholy Modal Rounders, Jeffery Frederick & the Clamtones - Have Moicy! (1976)

Back in late 1975 two folk scene stalwarts, Michael Hurley and Peter Stampfel (on hiatus from the Holy Modal Rounders at this point), got together with younger singer-songwriter Jeffery Frederick to make an album that ended up being more consistently entertaining - and more consistently goofy - than anything I’ve ever heard by any of them separately. This is why the record is, clumsily but accurately, credited to "Michael Hurley, the Unholy Modal Rounders, Jeffery Frederick & the Clamtones" - though that gives the impression that three bands got together to put out a compilation, rather than the sympathetic communal wackiness that's actually on display here.

The three main (vocal) personalities at play here are as follows:

1. Peter Stampfel, 37 year-old co-founder of Greenwich Village folk scene regulars The Holy Modal Rounders (who you may know from "If You Want To Be A Bird" on the Easy Rider soundtrack). He's a weirdo and a seeker of music who digs into deep Americana to find songs to cover, rip off, or sometimes just inform his own writing. And he sings with a wild enthusiasm that's hard to match (or resist), even if that enthusiasm does not often translate to any kind of musical accuracy.

2. Michael Hurley, the easy-going 34 year-old "outsider folk" prodigy who began writing and recording in his early teens, but didn't get a career rolling until his 20s due to illness, and then began a slow outpouring of his laid-back, almost soulful folky ease. Only by having Stampfel next to him does he seem like a normal musician.

3. Jeffery Frederick, at 25, the baby of the bunch, an East Coaster relocated to Oregon, who approaches the musical side of things somewhat more professionally - relatively speaking - but his words are every bit as wacko as his confreres.

Lyrically, Stampfel will sing about bidets, Paris, wine, young people in love, dancing, and the freak party on the edge of town; Hurley tells us about spaghetti, dirty dishes in the sink, heartbreak, the blues, and oral sex; Frederick tells us about robbing banks, hamburgers, the blues (also), and a heart attack. Among other things. Musically, it flows beginning to end, from the Parisian wine at the beginning to the Thunderbird wine (and a pound of hash) that closes things, with members of each leader's band performing alongside each other throughout the album creating the kind of musical consistency that's rare in any collaborative project like this. Special kudos go to the fiddler and mandolin player credited solely as Robin here, though the fine work of the understated but supportive drummer known as Frog should also be mentioned.

            The album passes singing and songwriting duties around from track to track like the joints they no doubt shared during the record's creation, and the result is a melodic, good-natured, hilarious exploration of what happened to "The Scene" of the late-60s by the time we got to the mid-70s. Rather than becoming wistful for the past, as many of the older guys' contemporaries were already doing by then, they found their joy in smaller pleasures like those detailed above. It kicks off with "Midnight In Paris," a 1935 pop tune turned all banjo-and-mandolin bluegrass style here, where Stampfel (credited as "Pierre" instead of Peter for this track) gets the ball rolling in his best American-ese "You wear my bee-ray/and I'll use your bee-day/I'll be clean and you'll be free." And then they take off from there, straight into Frederick's "Robbin' Banks," a song about exactly what it says, supposedly inspired by his bank robbing grandfather, but just to prove his freak bona fides, he throws in lines like “If you get scared and run you bastard, I’ll break your arm.” Up next is Hurley, with "Slurf Song," where he envisions a feast for all his pals, but laments the cleaning up afterward, and follows the feast right through to its (bio)logical end.

            And so it goes. Other highlights include Stampfel's "Griselda," written by the Greenwich village folk scene musician Antonia who introduced him and the other Holy Modal rounder founder Steve Weber back in the 60s, Jeffery Frederick's "What Made My Hamburger Disappear?" which sounds silly (and was supposedly performed on Sesame Street) but is written from the point of view of a burger eater having a heart attack, Hurley's slyly naughty "Driving Wheel," and the killer Antonia-penned capper "Hoodoo Bash," which may as well be describing the freak party that is this album.

            Of course, if you can't attenuate Stampfel's vocals into something your ear can easily digest, if you want your folk music all serious and stately instead of lively and of-the-people, if you like your freaks a little more toned-down than these guys, maybe this record isn't for you. For anyone who's in it for the fun though, dig in. You won't regret it.

            - Patrick Brown

Fables of the Reconstruction: Michael Hurley

I don’t like a lot of folky Americana music because it’s too pretty and politically correct and not at all like America and American folk as they really are -- kinda good, kinda bad, and generally weird in a beautifully ugly sort of way. Michael Hurley’s music is an exception. It’s like the stuff you hope to find when you wander the backroads in the boonies not knowing what you’re looking for. It’s got all the ingredients of folky Americana -- vocals and acoustic guitar, mainly, with some electric guitar and bass, snare drum and fiddle thrown in here and there -- but it’s lopsided, a little bit dirty and forlorn, like an old man selling junk out of the carport of his doublewide, a guy who’s drunk and a little bit racist but friendly enough, and who happens to have something hideous and stupid but absolutely priceless that he’ll let you have for a couple bucks. Hurley’s music was like that even when he was in his early 20s, in the mid-60s, when he recorded his first batch of songs for Folkways, and he’s stayed that way throughout his career of nearly 50 years and 19 albums that hardly anyone knows about.

I’d never heard of him before last March when my uncle played Have Moicy! for me. It’s a record Hurley did with the Holy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Fredericks and the Clamtones in 1976. During the opening track, a hillbilly send-up of “Midnight in Paris,” my uncle laughed and said, “This record should have never been released,” because it’s sloppy and silly. The cover has a crude drawing of a band of werewolves playing at a honky tonk, and the liner notes make no secret of the fact that the record was made in two days, songwriting included. My uncle loaned it to me and I listened to it a lot because it’s so damned peculiar, and because it’s mellow and perky enough to go well with my morning coffee. Then one of my favorite contemporary musicians tweeted something about Hurley, and I went looking for more info about him. I found out Robert Christgau put Have Moicy! at the top of his annual A-list for the Village Voice in ’76 and called it “thirteen homemade, chalky, fit-for-78 songs that renew the concept of American folk music as a bizarre apotheosis of the post-hippie estate,” and “the greatest folk album of the rock era.” I can’t disagree. All the songs are wonderful and odd. There’s one about robbing banks and poaching chickens and another about a disappearing hamburger. I like the ones sung by Hurley the best because his voice has a way of nestling right into the coziest nooks of the melody and making you feel all warm and sad and happy inside -- even when the song is unapologetically dumb, like “Slurf Song,” which begins, “Oh a little wishbone, I make a wish for a potato. I make wish! For a potato!”

            I found out that a lot of Hurley’s records are available on vinyl as reissues, so I snatched up a bunch. There’s not a mediocre one among them, much less a bad one, and Hurley has quickly become one of the very few artists I can listen to anytime, in any mood, and honestly say, “This is perfect.” Some of his records are solo acoustic, with maybe just a bit of female harmony vocal thrown in here and there. On others he plays with a full band of friends and hired hands. The songs are consistently simple and satisfying no matter how many people are playing on them, and they’re always all quite lovely without ever being precious and idyllic the way a lot of folky stuff seems to be. And weird, too, endlessly weird and interesting, the way America is.

- Joe Miller

Snock 'N Roll: Adventures With Michael Hurley (Complete Documentary Short) from Marc Israel on Vimeo.