Hasil Adkins is a backwoods surrealist from rural West Virginia who spent most of the '50s, '60s, and '70s bashing ultra-crude rockabilly into an ancient reel-to-reel tape deck, one-man-band style (no overdubbing allowed -- Adkins keeps the beat with bass drum pedals while laying down the melody on guitar and howling his lyrics in a single fevered take). Adkins' approach would be odd enough no matter what his songs were about, but a quick scan of his lyrics indicates this is where he really star   [ read more ]

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Every great songwriter has their great subject, and Hasil Adkins -- rock legend, one-man band, and creator of America's slowest-rising new dance craze, "the Hunch" -- is no exception. A perusal of Adkins' back catalog reveals that "the Haze" is a man who loves his chicken, and for this set the like-minded lunatics at Norton Records have combined six new recordings with highlights from Adkins' previous albums (and a few vintage unreleased cuts) to create Poultry in Motion, a collection of 15 s   [ read more ]

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More crazed '50s and early-'60s sides. (Import) ~ Cub Koda, All Music Guide

CD $22.78

The West Virginia wildman shows the other side of his talent, tackling a batch of early country standards and quirky originals in his usual one-man-band style. As far removed from modern country as you can get, Adkins originals like "Gonna Have Me a Yard Sale," "Song of Death," "Of Course Not," "Leaves of Autumn," and "Tomorrow I'll Still Be Loving You" sit alongside Bill Monroe's "I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling," Hank Williams' "You Win Again," and Johnny Cash's {&"I Still Mi   [ read more ]

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While Hasil Adkins is best known for his rough-terrain D.I.Y. filtered through a West Virginia lunatic brand of wild-ass rock & roll, a quick listen to his stunning reading of Merle Haggard's "Turning Off a Memory" off the 1987 Wild Man album reveals a hitherto unexplored talent for high and lonesome ballads. Moon Over Madison delivers on that promise with 16 generous songs of what Adkins refers to as "late-night music," all but one emanating from Adkins' home recordings between 1   [ read more ]

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After exposing the world to the special magic of Hasil Adkins with the epochal 1986 compilation Out to Hunch, which gathered the best of ten years of Cheeze-Whiz-encrusted home recordings on to one LP, the masterminds at Norton Records subjected Hasil to the rigors of modern recording equipment for the first time in 1986, during the sessions that spawned the album The Wild Man. Like on his previous recordings, The Wild Man featured Hasil singing, playing the guitar, and stomping out the   [ read more ]

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Hasil Adkins albums fall into two distinct groups; since his rediscovery in the 1980s, he has recorded an avalanche of new material, some successful (The Wild Man), some not (the disastrous and chaotic Live in Chicago). By far the best are the ones that have been assembled from the homemade recordings Hasil cut in his West Virginia tar-paper shack home between 1956 to 1963, referred to as "Haze's Golden Decade" by true believers. This one falls into the latter category, plumbing more wild-man tr   [ read more ]

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The back-cover blurb on Best of the Haze describes the album as "a one of a kind compilation that documents the career of a true original artist." As it happens, that description is a bit short of the truth. If anyone in rock & roll was ever a true original, it was Hasil Adkins, the rockabilly one-man band from West Virginia whose ragged but wildly energetic approach and singular worldview made him perhaps the most unusual artist the genre ever produced. However, if you're expecting this disc to   [ read more ]

CD $13.25