About Stan Hubbs

It's Thursday. It's sunny and it's growing colder in New York. I'm on the phone with Will Louviere, one of the fellas behind Companion Records. I've never met Will. He's never met Stan Hubbs. Neither have I. And we can't meet him, because Hubbs is dead. "It true he died from smoking too much pot?" I ask Will. There's laughter, of course, though not much -- Will's probably fielded this question one too many times since he reissued Hubbs's private-press rock meisterwerk, Crystal, this past summer. "Well," he says, "that's up for debate. No one will ever really know the truth on that one. But if anyone could, it was Stan." I'd guess as much. Ever since reading the outlandish marijuana anecdote in the latest edition of Patrick Lundborg's outsider-rock encyclopedia, The Acid Archives, and ever since I've been priveleged enough to pore over the reissue and thumb through its amazing lyric booklet, it's been clear to me that Hubbs was at least a consummate 'head, a dyed-in-the-wool '60s/'70s relic who nailed down an impossibly hazy and lysergic hard-psych recording in '82 -- years after such music was fashionable or fathomable. He had to be grinding seeds/stems way back when.