Michael Hurley’s plainspoken surrealism is no more.
He was a guy who didn’t much care about a music career, just someone who would get up on a stage and strum a few quiet chords, but people wouldn’t believe the stuff he was singing. Sort of like Jimmie Rodgers, the older Singing Brakeman one, not the pop singer one, who yodeled a bit but why were the words about a Protein Monster eating a sack of poison sugar, rolling his eyes as he crawled out of the barn to die in the weeds? Well, I wasn’t sure but it did paint a picture in my brain.
Moved on a couple days ago. Recorded lots of records. Played lots of places to mostly small crowds. Them folks will miss his strange music and cruddy cartoons of wolves and woodpecker-notes or whatever they were, and naked drunk men and women careening through some podunk town’s main street. I know I will.