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
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 …
