Rock and Roll PING! email Weegee to get on/off this list (or grab it yourself to PING the rest)
Posted on 05/12/2005 7:45:22 AM PDT by weegee
Hasil Adkins. That's pronounced "hassle." Never has a name been more apropos - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Adkins, who died April 26, was his own beast, musically and socially.
Adkins was one of rock 'n' roll's great characters, the cultural missing link between Ernest T. Bass and Jerry Lee Lewis, replete with a downwind slaughterhouse whiff of Hank Williams and Sid Vicious.
He was a brawling boozehound and a law-breaking hellion who lived in rural West Virginia, a musical menace from the cinematic fringes of Deliverance.
He was also the unwitting archetype of the doublewide, downwardly mobile glorification of white-trash culture known as psychobilly. He didn't do it on purpose; it just ... happened. He didn't know (or care) that he lived and created way outside all socially accepted cultural guidelines.
One school of thought celebrates the notion that Adkins' psychotic chokehold on rockabilly - he released his first oddball singles in the mid-1950s - was related to the birth of rock 'n' roll, albeit the "funny" relative that nobody talked about. Another school contends that he spent nearly 50 years trying to kill it off. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Stop and think about it.
Consider that Sting had a pronounced dislike of him. Know that he was loved by Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols infamy and Lux Interior of The Cramps. Noted author Nick Tosches once wrote: "Like the Bible and toilet paper, the music of Hasil Adkins belongs in every household." He meant it.
Adkins was 67 when he died in the three-room tarpaper shack in which he had lived his entire life. The cause of his death has not yet been released. It could be anything. Adkins' conspicuous and continuous consumption of alcohol is well documented. His use of firearms, combined with his propensity for finding himself embroiled in antics of an almost surreal nature, is also a matter of record.
Speculation on Web sites dedicated to Adkins' music and serial misadventures points to possible injuries that he sustained after being hit by an all-terrain vehicle. It's possible. Anything was possible with Adkins.
Every ticket to see him was an all-excess pass. That's part of what made him special.
Adkins once had a prolonged close-range shootout with a jealous husband in which neither man was hit, but Adkins went to jail, his home away from home. During a performance, Adkins whipped out a pistol and started blazing away at a ventilator fan that he later said was hampering his concentration.
Adkins was "extreme" long before it became a trendy buzzword.
He speculated that he had written 8,000 songs. He was not long on book learning, but his imagination knew no bounds. This resulted in songs that were often outrageously funny - in a disturbing sort of way.
"No More Hot Dogs" saw him behead his hot-dog wielding girlfriend and mount her melon on the wall. Romance was also a bit of a problem. "She Said" chronicled a regrettable one-night stand, including the memorable couplet, "She looked like a dyin' can of commodity meat."
Adkins also had a thing about chickens. He devoted an entire album, Poultry In Motion, to the pleasures of barnyard buddies and fowl cuisine. "The Chicken Walk" was one of several attempts by Adkins to launch a dance craze ("The Hunch" was another).
He performed as a one-man band. He played/assaulted his guitar. The racket was raw and loud, rubbery and discordant - perfectly imperfect. He changed chords when he felt like it and he adhered to no set time signature. He accompanied himself on drums and off-kilter blasts of percussion. On occasion, he played organ with his elbow. It was the sound of a human train wreck, a true primitive at play.
His singing was a blend of sub-glottal moans and blood-chilling screeches, a slurred and garbled exercising of demons. It was as if he were singing in tongues, lured into a trance state by a passionate belief in what he was doing and an adult dose of vodka and cheap beer.
Every show was a fresh and invigorating adventure. A good show might last 40 minutes. Twenty minutes was more the norm. It didn't matter. Everybody got his or her money's worth.
Adkins was an unrepentant wild man, an idiosyncratic mess. His music was not pretty, nor was it technically adept. But it was pure, almost unfathomably so in this era of mass-produced product. It came from his soul and from his mind. It was his, and his alone. And he believed in it with every fiber of his being. It made you smile. It made you shimmy, shake and shiver. It was fabulous.
Hasil Adkins was an American musical original. The Real Deal. There aren't many people left who can make that claim. The result: The world's a bit sadder without Adkins.
And probably safer, too.
http://wfmu.org/playlists/FP/0505
He actually has some serious songs, they aren't all jokes.
He also regularly sent his records to the presidents.
Rock and Roll PING! email Weegee to get on/off this list (or grab it yourself to PING the rest)
At least I'm in good company. :D
BTTT
Interesting...
got me on this one weegee.
i'll have to hit my record dealing circut and try to track some of his stuff down.
thanks, ronnie
"original" records from the 1950s would be hard to come by (self-pressed) but Norton Records out of NYC reissued several albums of his work.
Tune into that archived webcast to catch some of it.
If you know of the Cramps, they covered his song "She Said".
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