The Haze lifts.

The rockinest insane screaming hillbilly one-man band you probably never heard of died on Tuesday. I came across Hasil Adkins' brilliantly wacked-out music when I was a dj at UNC's student station, WXYC, way back in the early '90s and got to see him perform at a long-ago Sleazefest. Allmusic.com's overview says:

A crazed rockabilly one-man band, Adkins has been recording in a tarpaper shack in the hills of West Virginia since the mid-'50s. The absolutely crudest and wildest of all rock & rollers, Hasil's lyrics stray as far from the standard '50s clichés as you can get. Songs about eating peanut butter on the moon, chopping girls' heads off and mounting them on his wall, and doing something called the "hunch" are typical lyrical fare for Adkins. Combining a three-octave voice that can go from sub-glottal Elvis moans to blood-curdling screams with an over-amplified guitar that sounds like a gigantic rubber band, there is nothing in pop music that sounds like Hasil Adkins, a true rock & roll primitive.

Here is an interview with Adkins from Maximum Rock n Roll magazine and, in case you are unfamiliar, an mp3 of his hit, "She Said."

Oh, and it's pronounced like hassle, not hazel.