Hank Williams, Jr.
Hank Williams, Jr. & Friends
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No Depression (11-12/00, pp.104-5) - "...A country music milestone....peppered with passion, insight, wonder and humor in all the right places...
Last August, on a hunting trip near the Great Divide at Missoula, Montana, the recently divorced Hank Williams Jr. fell 500 feet down a mountainside, peeling off most of his face. He was in critical condition for six days, has since undergone major surgery several times and has still more ahead of him. Three months later, his mother, the legendary Audrey Williams, died. Hank Jr. came to the funeral looking, as one writer described him, "like death itself." The fires of the ghoulish Hank Williams legend were stoked as high as they'd been in
Read More 25 years. This album was recorded just before the nightmarish events but is in itself ample evidence that Hank Jr. was already in a turbulent frame of mind, a man suffering great personal emptiness but determined to take control of his life. There are advantages and disadvantages to being the son of Hank Williams. While you never have to worry about being a success, you'll always have doubts as to why. And you are expected, as the Faron Young song puts it, to "live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory." If Hank Jr. broke the script by surviving his fall, he was already in the process of doing so when he recorded this country equivalent of John Lennon's primal-scream LP. It's one of the very finest country-rock albums to emanate from either side of that hyphen. It's not surprising that as he matures and steps out on his own for the first time in a career relentlessly manipulated to milk the Williams legend, he would enlist rockers like Toy Caldwell, Charlie Daniels and Chuck Leavell to help him. Nor is it all that surprising that he would turn to rock for inspiration. Though a professional country singer for ten years, Williams is not yet 27, which makes him younger than most rock superstars. No matter how insulated he was kept, he must have had some affinity for rock all along but couldn't rock out himself because he was the son of country music's greatest figurehead. But while his mainstream country material has always been among Nashville's best, little of it can match up to this. These songs are highly personal and intimate, but not obscure; they have the kind of vividness that only the best singer/songwriters can produce. Hank Jr. has cast off the usual Nashville detachment to sing each one as though, uh, as though his life depended on it. They are laced with jolting Southern guitar solos, biting instrumental interplay and durable riffs. In one way or another, every song is about being adrift, though few suggest feelings of utter helplessness. Aside from "On Susan's Floor," one of the classier New Nashville-type songs (by Vincent Matthews and Shel Silverstein) and Caldwell's "Losing You" and "Can't You See," they're all by Hank Jr. Two of them, eerily enough, allude to circumstances similar to those that later put him temporarily out of action; "Montana Song," with its startling imagery, is now almost unbearably ironic. In that song, Williams sings a
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