An American Song

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A Visit with The Great Jimmy Webb

Songwriting master unveils the mysteries of ‘Wichita Lineman’

God spoke to him and then he fucked up the rhyme

Great artists talk directly to God. Sometimes, more often than not, they do it only once. Maybe a handful of times, at best. Why God chooses some people to talk to and not others is a mystery that other artists love to savor and ponder and get jealous about, which is a solid reason to prefer the company of normal people instead. The truth is that real artists tend to be as mysterious to themselves as they are to everyone else. If you ask why God chose them, the honest ones will tell you that they don’t have a clue. Some artists lead careful lives, shrewdly calculating their chances at earthly prizes, while others love to smoke and drink and fuck and drive fast cars. My own guess is that the kind of giftedness that I am describing is one of God’s typical little jokes, which tend to emphasize, affectionately or not, that man is a species of dust. The joke, as always, is on us. And as they put it in Hollywood, everyone in the room gets credit for the joke. Jimmy Webb is one of the most …

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Boone and Jocko's Best Pal Snock

Michael Hurley, authentic folk survivor of the weird old America, is now 81 years old and still plays paying gigs

Mail five dollars to a farm in Del Rio, Texas, and you’d get a shoebox full of peyote, he recalls

Have Moicy! was named best record of 1976 by Bob Christgau, the obnoxious Village Voice critic, if anyone alive still gives a crap

By Habib Sabet

East Fairfield is a small village of just over a thousand people in northern Vermont, about half an hour from the Canadian border. Approaching from the west, you crest a large hill and the land begins to open up. Horses graze in slanting pastures, and the faint smell of manure comes and goes as you pass the occasional dairy farm. It was here and in the surrounding towns that the folk singer Michael Hurley spent much of the ’70s and ’80s, playing at ski lodges and bars with his bands The Redbirds and Automatic Slim & the Fatboys. When music didn’t pay the bills, he worked for local farmers, transporting bushels of hay and clearing rocks from fields. Hurley cemented his cult status with the 1976 release of Have Moicy! — a record so wonderfully strange that longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau named it album of the year. In the five decades since, Hurley — who is playing here tonight — further developed his unique brand of folk music, churning out records full of slapstick …

An American Song

American Glossary

Boone and Jocko's Best Pal Snock