Hasil Adkins has long been a favorite subject of mine to paint. I went through my main "Hasil Period" between 1997-2001 during the time I was selling my artwork under the name of Spunt. I sold at least 40 paintings of Hasil during this time, and am unsure about most of their whereabouts. If you own one of my Hasil paintings, please get in touch with me. Generally my paintings portrayed Hasil as a combined version of his older and younger selves, giving him the energy and physique of his youth but with the hat, mustache, and cheap sunglasses that were so often trademarks of his during the last 15 years. Some of the situations were based on well-known Hasil anecdotes like unwittingly eating Miriam Linna's souvenir can of Andy Warhol soup, or answering "meat" when the waitress asks for his order. ("what kind of meat, hon?" "meat".) Others were rural gags like being caught without any liquor on Sunday in the South, and fishing from a bucket (one of my favorite old Pogo Possum routines). Peanut Butter and "Commodity Meat", both essential elements of Hasil's iconography, often made appearances as well. I was thrilled to finally have the opportunity to meet Hasil when I booked him for his first-ever Lexington, KY appearance, at a now-defunct bar called Yat's in the also-now-defunct South Hill Station, which later turned out to have been built over a desecrated cemetery. I maintained contact with Hasil over time, and recorded an album with him called Night Life that still lies in the can unreleased. Perhaps it will see the light of day soon. The importance of Hasil to Rockabilly and country music was, and shall ever be, massive. His death brings closure to Rockabilly itself, in fact: like bookends, Rockabilly began with Elvis' first record and ended with Hasil's last. Everything else, all those years of everything-else-ishness, from Sonny Burgess to the Meteors, is just the filler in between. What I will remember most about Hasil is that despite his advancing age and imposing countenance, he really was still just a big kid. A big kid that never stopped wanting to stay up all night, drinking beer and watching Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, playing Jerry Lee Lewis records, chasing skirts, and frightening squares by being equal parts scary and silly. Hasil died much too soon by an ordinary man's reckoning, but the truth is he'd lived enough already for three men. Not only by his powers of creation (writing 7,000 songs), but by the man's powers of consumption. If I were to consume as much alcohol, cholesterol and women as Hasil Adkins, death at 67 seems like a fair price.