Album of the Week
I'm not one of those types overcome by nostalgia for the Great Age of Vinyl, but I admit that I've been spending more time around my turntable lately. The ball got rolling when I invested in a high-end LP reissue of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks; that album remains on the market in its original late-‘80s CD incarnation, still the worst-sounding digital release available anywhere.
After getting my ears warmed by the Morrison LP, I took the plunge and picked up a few long-players issued by Mississippi Records, the vinyl-only offshoot of a like-named independent record store in Portland, Oregon. The label initially caught my attention with compilations by idiosyncratic pre-war musicians like bluesman Skip James and sacred singer/dolceola player Washington Phillips; they also threw down some powerful rockin' gospel compilations like Life is a Problem and Oh Graveyard, You Can't Hold Me Always). Sonic Boomers potentate Bill Bentley will be delighted to learn that Mississippi has reissued Bongo Joe, the 1969 Arhoolie album by the oil drum-playing Houston street musician George Coleman, who inspired young Bentley to take up the skins.
By my lights, the choicest Mississippi product to date is the company's utterly lovely PVC edition of Michael Hurley's sweetly twisted folk opus Armchair Boogie, an album that seriously bent my young, impressionable mind when it was released in 1971. Available until now only as a CD-R (from Hurley himself) or as an Amazon digital download, this fuzzy little head-render is best heard in platter form.
Known to a die-hard cult of fans (including Cat Power, who has covered three of his songs) as "Snock" or "Snockman," Hurley began his recording career in 1964, when historian and folklorist Frederic Ramsey recorded his album First Songs. That dizzy and eccentric set, which included such serenely weird Hurley originals as "You Get Down By the Pool Hall Clickety Clack," "I Like My Wine," "Tea Song," "Captain Kidd," and the original version of "Werewolf," was released by Folkways Records in 1965; briefly out on CD as Blueberry Wine, it is now available as a CD-R from Smithsonian Folkways, and I recommend it highly.
After his pixilated debut, Hurley vanished from the record racks for six years. Somewhere along the way he became friendly with those freaky traditionalists the Holy Modal Rounders. He also shared a Pennsylvania house with Jesse Colin Young of the folk-rock band the Youngbloods, who issued Armchair Boogie on their quixotic Warner Bros. imprint Raccoon Records.
Recorded in Hurley's Brookline, Massachusetts, bedroom, the album is an unique listening experience. To this day, there are times when it seems like it's playing underwater; at other times, I feel like I've chugged several bottles of cough syrup while it spins. The record, on which Snock is accompanied by a small, quiet band that includes the Rounders' Robin Remaily on fiddle and mandolin, draws on easily recognizable folk, blues, and jazz forms, but it occupies its own terrain and moves at its own deliberate speed.
Kicking off with the definitive version of the monstrously sympathetic "Werewolf" ("Cryin' nobody, nobody, nobody knows/How much I love the maiden when I tear off her clothes"), Armchair Boogie lurches through tradition-based songs that speak in their own drifting, dreamy tongues. I don't think there's a clinker among the 14 tracks, but my favorites include the droning, cheerfully chauvinistic "Sweedeedee," the lubricious "Open Up" ("Open up, eternal lips/And swallow me"), the cryptic "Light Green Fellow," and a veering reading of "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano." The album concludes with the cornet/mock trumpet instrumental "Penguins," which wafts along on a fat musical cumulus cloud.
My sole complaint about Mississippi's reissue of the album, which sounds warm and utterly pristine, is the label's failure to include the small Hurley-drawn comic Boone and Jocko in the Barren Choking Land, which was included with the original Racoon pressing. That wee book, starring the titular wolves who populate Snock's cartoons and watercolors (available through his Web site), convulsed me in my weed-burning days, and I miss it.
On the basis of his early material (which includes Have Moicy!, his 1976 hoedown with the Rounders), Hurley has maintained a devoted fan base; he still records and occasionally plays a low-key concert date here or there. But I don't think he's ever released an album with the charm or the imaginative charge of Armchair Boogie. If you don't know his stuff, it's time to hook up the ol' LP changer, pull up your own armchair, and get down.
