Michael Hurley died last year, and wasn’t it starting to look like he wasn’t the dying kind? Every now and then someone goes, and it’s only then that you realise what you’d been hoping for: that they’d be the lingering light that death can’t touch. He was 83. Ten years before his death, he played some songs at a vineyard in Southern California. There he is, a worn roundabout 73, wearing an old polka-dotted mechanic’s cap and a wrinkled linen button-down with the collar popped up. Looking like an old engine that just won’t quit. Sitting with his back to the sun, he gives us: first, a slow, sorrowful version of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty, singing:
“I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes/I slept on the ground in the light of the moon/On the edge of the city you’ll see us and then/We come with the dust, and we go with the wind“.
There’s a looming finality in his rendition, a sense of someone staring something right in the eye. Then comes the only available recording of Boone & Jocko, which starts off with nothing less than “Jocko, you jack off too much/you’re gonna wear that bone to a frazzle“. Both Boone and Jocko are alter egos of sorts: a pair of canine do-nothings whose adventures Hurley turned into songs and a comic book series. This song includes the following lofty sentiment:
“I’ll wear a bone, Don’t you grieve on me, just because I know/Ain’t no time, for your petty crime/ Ahhhh, you’re beautiful-o, ho ho ho“.
Hurley’s work is candid not despite but because he isn’t unwilling to dole out lyrics where he morphs into a vicious werewolf, or an onanistic dog. Animal urges are there, animal fears too. And a playfulness that is still candid enough to go right up to you and say: ha, I’m having a hard time.
A hard time. Farewell, Jocko.
