Expired Commodity Meat: RIP Hasil Adkins

Hasil "Haze" Adkins has died. He's best known for the song "She Said," (available on the excellent Out to Hunch CD), which is best known for the cover version by The Cramps. It is, in fact, one of the few Cramps covers that actually improves on the original, but that's not to say that the original isn't a great tune in it's own right. Hasil was a "one-man band," who could sing, play guitar and harmonica, and rock a foot-powered drum set. If he had tried to play with a band, they would probably have been completely lost trying to follow his sense of rhythm. "I taught myself how to play and I change chords and beats whenever I think I should change", he says in the liner notes for the Rockabilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease compilation. "Like for instance, you hit down on your strings and count 1-2-3-4, then change to another chord, well, I don't play that way." He couldn't even march to the beat of a different drummer--just had to do the drumming himself.
Hasil lived most of his life in Jack's Branch, a backwoods, middle-of-nowhere town in Boone County West Virginia, where he was something of a local legend, perpetually being arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior, car crashes, DUI's, and discharging firearms, and receiving fan mail from all around the world. In an ameteur documentary that a friend lent me, his lawyer describes an incident where Hasil and some friends got drunk and went to the trailer of his girlfriend to confront his husband, the situation turning into a full-blown gunfight out of a Peckinpaw movie, and miraculously nobody getting injured. A car crash sidelined his career just as he was about to get his big break, but it's hard to imagine any break big enough to get mainstream America interested in his lunatic brand of rockabilly. He was part of a dying breed, a truly unique musician in an increasingly homogenized world.


A while back, Cartoon Brew posted a story about WB's plans for the latest incarnation of their Looney Tunes roster of characters, to be called Loonatics. It looks like the most awful thing since...well, since Baby Looney Tunes. But apparantly, it wasn't bad enough. They aren't scrapping the stupid concept, but they plan to change the designs to make them more cute. Excuse me while I kill myself.

Oh, and if you live in NYC or the SF Bay Area, you really need to pick up the Chowhound Guide Book for your area. Don't be caught reading Zagat!