Listening to the radio in rural Madison, West Virginia, in the late 40s, an eight-year-old Hasil Adkins heard the DJ credit some songs to Hank Williams and assumed the country great had played all the instruments. He tried to replicate those sounds with an old water bucket and other household objects, progressing to toy guitars and kazoos. By the time Adkins got his first real guitar in the mid-50s, he’d learned that Hank hadn’t done it all himself, but he couldn’t find any reliable coconspirators. So he jury-rigged a drum kit that allowed him to play rhythms with foot pedals as his hands flailed away at raw rockabilly licks and he sang about the WPA and eating candy on the moon in a demented hiccup. In 1981 the Cramps covered Adkins’s “She Said,” and the previously obscure rocker became America’s most influential one-man band.
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This week a phalanx of single-headed groups, many influenced by Adkins’s innovations, marches into Chicago for the Uno-a-Go-Go one-man-band festival. Organized by Jake Austen–the underground pop culture maven behind the public access dance show Chic-a-Go-Go, masked garage band the Goblins, and the obsessive music zine Roctober–and Fireside Bowl booker Brian Peterson, the six-day extravaganza features performances by more than 50 acts as well as a full day of movies and videos. Austen and Peterson had been discussing such an undertaking for the last few years, but didn’t get down to business until six months ago. The event coincides with Roctober’s tenth-anniversary issue, a “One Man Band Encyclopedia,” featuring more than 1,000 entries, from Abandoned Pools to Buh Zombie.
Austen isn’t the only culture broker with one-man bands on his mind. Toronto filmmakers Derek and Heather Emerson spent three years completing their one-man-band documentary, Let Me Be Your Band, which premieres at the festival, screening for free at the Chicago Cultural Center on Thursday, October 3, at 6 PM. “As you start talking to one-man bands or people who know about them, everyone has a story about another one that you haven’t heard of,” Derek says. “It never stops, which is one of the reasons it took us so long [to make the movie].” A 1998 performance by Chicago’s Lonesome Organist (aka Jeremy Jacobsen) gave the Emersons the idea for the documentary. “When he did a song with field drum and tap dancing, that pretty much sealed it,” says Derek.
