Michael Hurley’s music has long been folk’s stranger thing
‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is the latest addition to the Bigfoot filmography
When Michael Hurley released his debut album, aptly titled “First Songs,” on Moe Asch’s Folkways Records in 1964, the folk-revival community wasn’t particularly interested. Though Hurley’s songs sounded as though they’d been living untended somewhere in the hills for generations, they were pure products of his own youthful imagination.
“I was writing songs, OK?,” says the singular musician, who is in the middle of a rare East Coast jaunt, with a stop Wednesday at The Rockwell in Somerville for a sold-out show. Since the late 1950s, the folk community had been dominated by pedants who preferred faithful renditions of songs in the public domain to the quirky originals by an upstart like Hurley.
Hurley skipped the rest of the ’60s, at least in terms of its increasingly wilder music scene. Having started a family with his first wife, he lived in and around Boston and Vermont, working odd jobs. He didn’t record again until the early 1970s, with help from his friend Jesse Colin Young and his band, the Youngbloods.
By the mid-’70s, certain corners of the music industry had grown shaggier, more willing to indulge weirdness. In 1975 Cambridge’s Rounder Records released the first of three consecutive albums featuring Hurley, “Have Moicy!,” a collaboration co-credited to the Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones. Those records put him on the map. Hurley’s offbeat songs have since been covered by Cat Power (“Werewolf ”), Yo La Tengo (“Griselda”), and others. Today, they’re cherished by the psychedelic “freak-folk” niche.
At 83, he says, he wouldn’t have much of an audience left if he relied solely on his peers.
“Mostly I’m picking up new, younger people,” says Hurley, on the phone from his home in Astoria, Ore., where he has lived for about 20 years. He speaks deliberately, with long pauses. He’s comfortable with conversational silence.
“It’s amazing how many people have passed away. It’s kind of appalling, actually.”
Much as “outsider art” refers to the folk art made by untrained painters and illustrators, Hurley makes music with little regard for convention or commerce. He’s been doing that since his teenage years in New Hope, Pa., a magnet for bohemian refugees from New York City, including Hurley’s parents.
“They liked their wine and their cocktails,” he recalls. “They’d have parties and sing. They hung out with artists, mixed-race people.”
As a young man, Hurley considered himself not a musician but an author in the making.
“If you asked me what I did, I’d say I was a creative writer. I wanted to write books. But I was going around with a guitar all the time.”
In high school he self-published three editions of a pamphlet, a kind of prototypical zine, that he called Outcry. Filled with his drawings and musings, the first issue cost five cents.
Hurley recently stumbled upon a box containing musty copies of his old magazines.
“Outcry, Volume Three,” he begins to read from the cover, chuckling. “Performing
Idiots, Misfits. Invectives, Vituperations, Abuse, Philosophy, Cartoons, Propaganda, Outrages, Sacrilege, Depravity, Violence, Pornography, Erotica, Trash, Humor, Sentiment, Etc. Etc.”
It was the time of the Beat Generation. “‘Non-conformity’ is what it was called in those days,” he says.
Somewhere around 1961, Hurley and a friend hitchhiked to New Orleans. They were enamored with the city’s piano music — Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint.
“Sometimes we’d play guitars on the street, or we’d find a little cafe that would tolerate us,” he says. They picked up with two other young men who were busking, one they called “Fingers.”
“That was the first time I heard the word ‘hippies,’” Hurley says. “We wanted to be Beatniks, I guess.” Fingers used the new word “with scorn, as an accusation — ‘These people aren’t real. They’re hippies!’”
Hurley’s house in Oregon is the first he’s ever owned. He’s lived in various parts of the country — Virginia, North Carolina, Texas — but he spent much of his time in Vermont before settling in the Pacific Northwest. Twenty years all told, he believes.
‘Sometimes we’d play guitars on the street, or we’d find a little cafe that would tolerate us.’ MICHAEL HURLEY, on performing in New Orleans circa 1961
“I’ve lived in about 16 different towns [in Vermont], just moving around,” he says. “I first went up there in ’66, I think. A lot of hippies were moving up there.”
At the time, he says, it was easy to find an abandoned house, track down the owner, and offer to live there as a caretaker. Sometimes he rented shacks for five bucks a month. He also stayed with friends.
“I had a sofa circuit. I’d run in an oval between central and northern Vermont. I thought of central Vermont as the ‘Insanity Belt’ and northern Vermont as the ‘Musicians’ Belt.’”
A little over 20 years ago, a small independent label in Chicago reissued “First Songs” as “Blueberry Wine,” with new artwork by Hurley to match the homemade cartoons that distinguish his other releases (more than 30 of them at this point).
“It was, like, year 01,” says Hurley. He means that the reissue came out in 2001. Subconsciously, he could be referring to the dawn of the modest resurgence of interest in his music.
‘Sasquatch Sunset” may be the most humane movie portrait of the elusive Bigfoot creature yet. It’s also deliberately comical, as is our ongoing obsession with the idea of a hairy, howling humanoid living off the grid in the land of grunge rock. Directed by David and Nathan Zellner (the latter also plays one of a family of four Sasquatches, alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Christophe Zajac-Denek), the film joins the growing mythology of the bipedal, preverbal big fella on film. “Sasquatch Sunset” includes elements of suspense, farce, heartwarming family fare, and quasi-documentary. Together, they cover the full range of ways the fringes of the film industry have approached the legend.
Here are 10 Bigfoot films of varying shapes and sizes, in order of appearance. (We acknowledge the existence of others. They’re out there.)
The Abominable Snowman
(1957) Produced by the estimable British horror house Hammer Films and starring Peter Cushing as a bedeviled explorer, this one has the distinction of being the first proper sighting of a Bigfootlike being on the big screen. In fact, it’s based on the Yeti, the Tibetan cousin of our own folkloric beast. Glimpses of the creature are fleeting: “I’ve seen what man must not see!,” howls a terrified Sherpa guide.
Bigfoot
(1970) Following the emergence in 1967 of the so-called Patterson-Gimlin film, the infamous footage of a purported Bigfoot encounter in northern California, the movie world witnessed a flurry of Sasquatch activity. First up was this ridiculous period piece, which features John Carradine, the cowboy actor Ken Maynbard, a biker gang, and a King Kong plot rip-off. Roger Ebert had a lot of fun with this one in his review.
The Legend of Boggy Creek
(1972) Set not in the Pacific Northwest but rather the fetid swampland of Arkansas, this pseudo-documentary features interviews with locals who claim to have spotted their own version of Bigfoot — the Fouke Monster, named for the town — going as far back as the 1940s. The film spawned several unofficial sequels. The brute is said to have an awful odor — a mix of skunk and wet dog.
Harry and the Hendersons
(1987) By the 1980s, Bigfoot’s trail of terror had subsided enough for John Lithgow to star in this family-friendly fantasy involving a lovable suburban Sasquatch named Harry. The movie (executive produced by Steven Spielberg, though he’s uncredited) spun off the TV sitcom of the same name, which ran for three innocuous seasons.
Drawing Flies
(1996)
Borrowing its name from a song by the Seattle band Soundgarden, this lightweight comedy has lived on mainly because it’s tangentially related to the “View Askewniverse,” the fictional world of the filmmaker Kevin Smith. In Jason Lee’s first leading role, he and his hapless roommates get lost in the woods and find themselves searching for Bigfoot, who represents these losers’ only hope.
Shooting Bigfoot
(2013) There are about as many Bigfoot documentaries as there have been sightings. This one, directed by the droll, BAFTA award-winning British filmmaker Morgan Matthews, follows several amateur American cryptozoologists — all of them armed, naturally — as they give our guide a peek into the backwoods of their minds.
Willow Creek
(2013) If Bigfoot makes one of the most terrifying sounds known to man, the comedian and filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait can rival it. The northern California town of Willow Creek, which calls itself the Bigfoot capital of the world, is the setting for this “found footage” horror film. Goldthwait’s camera follows two actors who play a couple making a documentary about the search for Bigfoot. The film premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston.
The Son of Bigfoot
(2017) Adam Harrison (Pappy Faulkner) is a typical middle-grade kid — typical, unless you count a wild head of hair that grows a foot overnight and feet that explode out of his shell-toe sneakers. In this animated lark, Adam learns that his absentee father is Bigfoot, an amiable recluse who looks more like Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine than the hairy hominid.
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot
(2018) Yes, that’s exactly what it’s about. Filmed in the Sasquatch hotbed of Turners Falls by Massachusetts resident Robert D. Krzykowski, the “Man” in question is Sam Elliott, he of the legendary mustache and heroic character to match. Fun fact: The hunt for Bigfoot is on because the beast is carrying a deadly, pandemic-causing virus.
Missing Link
(2019) He’s 8 feet tall and 650 pounds. “More like 630 pounds,” says Mr. Link, the sensitive, adorable Sasquatch voiced by Zach Galifianakis in this stop-motion feature. “You know, it’s the hair that can make me look heavier, I think.” With the help of explorer Sir Lionel Frost (Jackman), our benign Bigfoot embarks on a trip around the world to unite with his cousins in the Himalayas. From the animation studio Laika, which is based in … the Pacific Northwest.