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The Portland music community got a lot less weird and wonderful last week when it was revealed that 83-year-old singer-songwriter Michael Hurley had died in the early hours of April 1.
“Of course he picks April Fool’s Day to pass!” exclaims Rachel Blumberg, the versatile drummer who served as a member of Hurley’s local backing band The Croakers off and on since 2009. “Of course he did.”
If you knew the man or his music, you’d agree that the date was fitting. In speaking with Blumberg and several other of Hurley’s co-conspirators in the days following his death, the sadness and shock had still not entirely worn off. But what was helping heal their collective heartache was an unmistakable glow fueled by the playfulness and joy he brought to the world and the spiritual kinship they felt with him.
“All of my memories with Hurley are filled with a lot of laughing and goofing off,” singer-songwriter Kassi Valazza writes, checking in from her Australian tour via email. “He was just a giant goof. He was made of magic and made being strange seem normal. His songs made being a complete weirdo make sense.”
A quick recap for the uninitiated: Born in Bucks County, Penn., in 1941, Hurley grew up in a music-loving household, absorbing the sounds of R&B and early jazz and rock. Using a Stella guitar that once belonged to his sister, he began writing his own songs that revealed a love of fables, a bone-deep understanding of the blues, and his gently quavering singing voice. A chance encounter with folklorist Fred Ramsey Jr. led Hurley to record his debut, First Songs, for the legendary Folkways label in 1964.
It was an inauspicious start (reviewing his first LP, The New York Times sniffed, “[He] is not ready for consideration as a professional singer or songwriter”) but set Hurley’s constantly spinning wheels in motion. The songs kept coming. Oddball gems that were naughty and heartfelt, surreal and fully grounded. When he had enough tunes that he liked, and the stars aligned, he’d record them. Sometimes for big labels (Warner Bros., Rounder), sometimes for himself. All of them were festooned with his colorful, crocked artwork featuring grinning green demons and warped landscapes. A cult following grew with artists like Lucinda Williams singing his praises and Cat Power recording his songs.
After many decades bouncing around North America, Hurley landed in Oregon sometime in the late ‘90s, reconnecting with old friends Dave Reisch and Robin Remaily, with whom he had recorded over the years. At the time, he was just another of the freaks who orbited around the Laurelthirst, Lewi Longmire remembers. “There wasn’t the sense back then of his importance,” he says. “Around the time I met him, Blueberry Wine, a European rerelease of his Folkways record, came out. I’m starting to realize, ‘Oh my God, this guy who just hangs around here, they actually like him in Europe.’ That’s very unique.”
Around that same time, Hurley’s friends musician Tara Jane O’Neil and filmmaker Rankin Renwick brought him into a new record shop, Mississippi Records, to meet its young owner, Eric Isaacson. Hurley was told this kid was starting a record label and insisted he should be on it.
“I actually wasn’t too familiar with his music,” Isaacson says. “I had heard Have Moicy!, which was his sort of ‘hit’ record at the time, and I really didn’t like it that much. Two weeks later, I’m at Valentine’s and Tom Greenwood of the band Jackie O Motherfucker was working there. He starts playing First Songs, and I’m just flipping out. I called [Hurley] up and said, ‘I’m in. I’ll do anything you want.‘”
Hurley became one of the signature artists on Mississippi Records, with Isaacson rereleasing choice LPs from the back catalog and issuing new work. Isaacson also became something of a handler for Hurley, helping with travel arrangements and bookings, and watching as the musician’s profile continued to grow.
“He was really revered and beloved,” Isaacson says. “He could have grabbed for the golden ring at any point and jumped ship from playing at my record store for a 12-year-old’s birthday party or in a friend’s backyard because they offered him some really good jars of honey. But that’s what he enjoyed. He’d fly to France and play for 2,000 people, and he could hear a pin drop, and he hated it. It had no interest for him.”
What came out of every conversation I had with people about Hurley is that he tapped into a unique frequency that required patience and slowness among those who wished to hear it. And he seemed to have a knack for finding those people who could match his pace. When he saw Blumberg playing drums with Jolie Holland, he immediately clocked a kindred spirit. “He handed me his phone number,” Blumberg remembers, “and he said, ‘If you can play with her, you can play with me.’ I think he recognized that might be somebody who could follow him and flow with him instead of just trying to hold down a beat.”
Longmire, too, became fast friends with Hurley, onstage and off. Longmire would visit him often at his home in Astoria, one time even catching Hurley mowing his yard with a scythe. And as they got to know one another, they would spend equal amounts of time chatting as they would sitting comfortably in silence together. “He brought you to this place where this sort of calm beauty existed,” Longmire says. “You had to go down to that place if you wanted to be with him. And it was beautiful to be there, calming down enough to let the world just happen without the constant barrage of information and sound.”
Little wonder then that during the pandemic, a new, much younger audience in need of solace found Hurley. Then, when he started playing shows again, they flocked to see him. His frequent happy-hour gig on the last Tuesday of every month at Laurelthirst would regularly be packed, and by all accounts, fans swarmed to see what wound up being his last performances at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., on March 28, just a few days before he died. Hurley planted the seeds over eight decades of a well-lived life and, against all odds, they continue to sprout and flourish.
“We played at Zebulon in L.A. for a couple of sold-out nights,” Longmire says, “and 85% of them were 30 and under. I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’ and [Hurley] said, ‘Ah, that’s the new crop.‘”