THE BOP SHOP AND ABILENE BAR AND LOUNGE PROUDLY PRESENT: MICHAEL HURLEY
Since relocating to Oregon in the early 2000s the man does not play on the east coast as often as in the past. At the same time his reputation has been soaring with a number of releases on illustrious labels like Mississippi and Davendra Banhard's Gnomonsong. Last year Michael played the Newport Folk Festival.
WHAT SOME FOLKS HAVE SAID ABOUT MICHAEL HURLEY:
"Undoubtedly one of this country's greatest folk singers, Hurley has little in common with the majority of today's folk performers. While they seem bent on demonstrating that all people are alike, such a suffocating presumption has no place in this man's work. Michael Hurley is nothing like his potential audience. What better reason to hear what he has to say?"
- Chuck Cuminale
"...I don’t know what else to say about what he writes and sings, otherthan that it is gosh-darned great. What kind of music is it? Hell, whatkind of weeds does God grow? Let's just shut up and listen and go towhere Michael Hurley is. After all, we can always turn around and comeback. He can't."
- Nick Tosches
"Hurley is a national treasure."
- Scott Schinder / Time Out New York
"Michael Hurley is the last unreconstructed folkie-shaman in America. His songs are primordial tales of the hunt for good cheer and satisfying sex, etched like cave paintings on city walls and farmland silos. Like many characters in his songs, his voice seems to have been run over by the dump truck of life, but it marries human mystery to forthright music like no other."
- Milo Miles
"Whether weaving a yarn about a mysterious hog or comparing the human heart to a mechanic's toolbox, Mr. Hurley create(s) elaborate vistas in a musical version of outsider art."
- Ann Powers / New York Times
"Hurley remains one of the elusive masters of American folk."
- Chris Morris / Billboard
"Trusting in his own peculiarities, Hurley makes the world spin just a little bit slower, and a little bit bumpier. Somehow it feels much more natural that way."
- Jim Macnie
"Somehow, thinking of Hurley, I find myself thinking also of Samuel Beckett. Now I don't see Hurley having much truck with the modernist strain of 20th Century art, and, as a high school dropout, he would probably be nauseated by the gasbag spewings of the ivory tower intellectual. A true and deliberate neo-primitive, his inspiration springs from nature, the rural blues and the lure of remote hills and woodlands, landscapes that loom in the backgrounds of his comics like vast parabolic gumdrops."
- Vernon Tonges
"Well, I can say once when we split a gig in New York in the `70s, he introduced me as "...not only a Señor, but a Monsieur." So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Michael Hurley, not only a Señor, but a Monsieur, a Herr, an American Original, and the ne plus ultra of Pearly Snockgrass. Or, as the great `50s DJ whose name I cannot recall would have said, "Cats and Kitties, I give you Michael Hurley, than which there is none whicher."
- Peter Stampfel /Holy Modal Rounders