I was introduced to the sounds of Michael Hurley in the late 80s by another lunatic in the psych patients’ lib movement, and although my tunes collection runs towards rock and classical, with authentic blues and bluegrass being rare, I soon became quite fond of this dude.
Because it was what we did back then, she let me borrow her cassette tapes and I made copies of the tracks I liked. Her tapes were not commercial but were taped from radio broadcasts and in several cases it appeared that the radio station didn’t have albums in the best of condition to begin with. One thing that got lost in the process of recording radio broadcasts of lousy vinyl and then recording the output of the cassette tape was recording quality, hence my desire to upgrade. (I do want the tracks I’ve had all this time, though. These are my Michael Hurley tracks, you know?)
Step One in the process smacks me up against the Second Thing that got lost in the process: a genuine set of track names and the names of the albums they come from. I’ve matched most of them and done some visits to the iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s CD store and Barnes & Nobles’s CD listing (their online samples helped a great deal in helping me identify the tracks and the albums they came from… not always a simple endeavor given that Mssr. Snock recorded the same song more than once for more than one album, etc).
I’ve got a couple mystery tracks I haven’t nailed down yet:
a) The Revenant, not the version on Watertower. Was in existence before 1988, because I copied it from L’s tape before 1988. I can’t find a track listing showing The Revenant on any other album except for albums that were produced long after 1988. ???
b) This one’s harder. It’s got no damn words. Yeah, a Michael Hurley instrumental. That ought to narrow it down significantly, since he didn’t record lots of tracks without words. Conceivably not officially him… the only other folks he played with fairly often were the Holy and/or Unholy Modal Rounders. It would be an album featuring him and them prominently if it wasn’t specifically a MH album, but it’s definitely not on Have Moicy, the most famous joint effort.
Then there’s the little matter of the 7 tracks I want that are from Blue Navigator. The label producing the album had their office go up in fire, which consumed the master for the album, and subsequently & consequently went out of busiiness. Link. I’m trying to track down a specific attribution to the statement that no one has any ill will towards anyone who records and passes along Blue Navigator, as it would be nice to acquire MP3s of these 7 songs with a sense of legitimacy, since acquiring the rare album itself would be difficult and prohibitively expensive.
I have made some short clips from the “mystery track”, the instrumental I referred to above…if anyone has an MH album with an instrumental track on it and could verify whether or not it’s the one I’m seeking info on, I can upload the snips and post links for you to listen to, please let me know. (Towards the end he starts humming along with the string-plucking, in case that confirms or eliminates anything).