Thursday, April 8, 2010

It Feels So Goood














Legend has it that when rockabilly wild man Hasil Adkins (1937-2005) was young and listened to Hank Williams on the radio, he thought that Hank was playing all the instruments - guitar, bass and drums - by himself, and all at the same time at that. In his isolated neck of the woods, Hasil never had any idea one could have a band, with different guys playing different instruments.

So what did Hasil do? He simply learned to play the way he thought Hank did it, all by himself. And he´s been a one-man band ever since. The manic She Said from ´64 was made popular by The Cramps, but I tell you there´s nothing like the original. "She jumped up outta the car, pulled her hair down her eye... Do you know what she tried to tell me?"

Hasil Adkins - She Said MP3
The Cramps - She Said MP3

1 comment:

ib said...

I'm still trying to get myself back into the blogging loop after getting bogged down with some other stuff.

Hasil Adkins was the real deal. An amazing talent.

I got into his stuff, too, after tracing back The Cramps'famous cover some years back.

Adkins was a real Horror movie buff. A year or so before his death, when he got run over in his own backyard by a teenage hoodlum on a quadbike, he made a cameo appearance in a George Romero flick.

Scarcely recognizable from the famous picture you use here, it seems to have been one of the last public performances he ever made.

A lot of the stuff to be found on the Norton retrospectives was originally released on the Virginia imprint - I think - Jody Records.