Michael Hurley – Living Ljubljana
Feeding Tube Records – 2 November 2018 (LP)
A true original, Michael Hurley has over 50 years of singing and recording his unique brand of old time folk and blues under his belt. Throughout his career he has remained resolutely under the radar, his only near brush with fame of sort coming when Robert Christgau (“The dean of critics”) proclaimed the 1975 album Have Moicy, which Hurley recorded with The Unholy Modal Rounders and The Clamtones, as, “the greatest folk album of the rock era.” Given that Hurley wrote and sang songs about werewolves, the digestive system and hanging clothes on the washing line and was the probable originator of lo-fi it’s not too surprising really that most folk would ask, “Who?” when his name is mentioned.
However, over the years, Hurley has amassed his supporters with artists such as Yo La Tengo, Cat Powers and Devendra Banhart praising him while many of his early albums, long unavailable, have been reissued. Touring the UK earlier this year he played to healthy crowds but back in 1995, when this album was recorded, he had virtually disappeared from view. A German rock journalist, Peter Schneider, was a fan and he had persuaded a German label to release a new Hurley album, Wolfways. In addition, Schneider organised Hurley’s first overseas appearances, mostly in Germany, but including this date at KLUB K4 in in Ljubljana, Slovenia which he recorded to DAT, and which now gets a vinyl only release with cover art from Hurley based on the original tour poster and T-shirt commissioned for the shows. It’s a lovely artefact and includes liner notes from Hurley regarding a press tour of Germany he undertook prior to the shows. Without even listening to the disc, one reckons that this is a must for any serious Hurley fan.
As for the record, it faithfully captures Hurley’s shows of the time but in better quality than the fan tapes which began to circulate as the internet started to wake up. Accompanied by drummer Mickey Bones and bassist Robert Michener, Hurley is in fine voice and his guitar picking is supple and rhythmic while the rhythm section are content to merely give the songs a little extra push, a little drive on the faster songs, an excellent lazy pulse to the more laid back ruminations. The set list includes songs from his back catalogue which would have been familiar to fans at the time including The Portland Water, Letter In Neon, I Paint A Design and an achingly wonderful O My Stars. There are also a couple of songs which were only available back then on cassette’s sold by Hurley and of these The Beggar’s Terms sounds as if it were from some collection of traditional folk songs while Horse’s Ass, a wonderfully shambling and somewhat Rabelaisian take on frontier life, farts and all, is just magnificent. It really should be filmed by the Coen brothers as an addendum to their recent movie, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, sharing as it does their darkly comedic view of the old west. Turay Turay, a Hurley song which, to my knowledge, has never officially made an appearance, highlights his vocal dexterity, a sort of folky scat singing, on a song with some slight Cajun influences. Meanwhile, a rollicking version of Ernest Tubbs’ Driving Nails In My Coffin reminds us that Hurley grew up in the heyday of Tubbs and Hank Williams while he manages to adapt the words to fit into his mythology.
Hurley sounded as if he came from an earlier age when he recorded his first album back in 1965 and throughout his career, he has inhabited his own niche, a living embodiment of the songs Harry Smith collected for his Anthology Of American Folk Music. Living Ljubljana is an excellent addition to his canon of work.
Living Ljubljana is out now.
Order via Feeding Tube Records | Forced Exposure