Hanging Out with Hank

In 1988 in New Orleans I met a group of men who had backed Hank Willliams (the first one). The Hackberry Ramblers were all in their late 60s, and dressed like they were going to church on a hot day: white shirts, black trousers, bolo ties, and white cowboy hats.

What was he like? One of them answered, “He was always drunk as a skunk, he could hardly stand up – but when he got up on stage he sang like a hummingbird.” 

Lucinda Williams’s father, the Arkansas poet and academic Miller Williams, spent time with the man himself (as well as being a friend of Flannery O’Connor). At the Oxford American’s blog, he recently described their meeting:

[In 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, "Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I'd be honored to buy you a beer." To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month.

He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I've got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence.

The Nelson-born country star Tex Morton also got to hang out with Hank Williams. So too did the veteran music journalist Ralph J. Gleason, who mostly covered jazz. His classic article about their 1952 meeting has a title I’ve never forgotten: Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and then God! It opens:

Hank Williams came out of the bathroom carrying a glass of water. He was lean, slightly stooped over and long-jawed. He shook hands quickly, then went over to the top of the bureau, swept off a handfull of pills and deftly dropped them, one at a time, with short, expert slugs from the glass.

Victors and history

1. You make my heart sing

Farewell, then, Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs, a group memorable for ‘Wild Thing’ one of the great dumb songs in rock’n’roll history – a well-stocked subset – and also participant in the scatological bootleg classic, The Troggs Tapes. In this, the eloquent, lubricated group take time out in the studio to discuss how to make a hit record: “Just add some f***in’ fairy dust.”

We can also thank the Troggs for Chris Knox’s mid-80s stint as a music critic. In Rip It Up he covered a late Troggs gig at the Gluepot, circa 1984-85, and described seeing Presley, his hard-working hero – aged a shocking 43, and still rocking – aprés gig in the backstage room, “fat and sweaty in his Scants”. That unforgettable image led to further work.

Update: In the comments, below, Joe W has written with what I’m sure is a more accurate memory of that Knox line. And I’ve changed the first link to go to the Independent’s obit of Presley, which shows how much more there was to him than ‘Wild Thing’. That song was written, of course, by Chip Taylor – Angelina Jolie’s uncle. Another song provided a late-career payday for Presley. I love it when that happens to songwriters.

2. Ascension Day

Angel Eve “guiding Holmes through”

“He’ll be with Eve now” opens an especially memorable story in the vast coverage of the recent death of broadcaster Paul Holmes. And in this morning’s Herald, headlined “Holmes gets haka as body heads to Auckland”, we are told that the funeral is a moveable feast:

The body of Sir Paul Holmes left his Hawkes Bay home this morning in a moving ceremony that included an emotional haka. A convoy of about seven cars is taking his body to Auckland for his funeral.

3. Academic rigour

In the February 4 New Yorker, Thomas Mallon writes an essay on Richard Nixon, and his relationship with his colleagues, competitors and the media. It concentrates especially on the 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which Nixon denied inappropriate funding or gifts – apart from a coat for his wife, and the family dog, neither of which he was giving up. Mallon reviews a recent book about the speech, by Kevin Mattson: Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking, Socking’ Election of 1952 (Bloomsbury).

In this new work, Professor Mattson seems to believe that he’s again playing fair, summarizing Nixon’s response to the charges as a “bizarre mix of authenticity and performance art,” but the author’s thumb is never long off the side of the scale on which he piles up evidence of Nixon’s political and personal awfulness.

… Mattson makes clear from the first page of Just Plain Dick that he would really rather be writing a novel. “If the brain waves of Richard Nixon,” he begins, “had been read between September 18 and 22, 1952, they might have gone like this.” What follows is a four-page italicized and wholly implausible internal monologue in which Nixon sounds like a cross between Andy Hardy and Bela Lugosi. … When Mattson does consent to work within the normal confines of nonfiction, he operates like an academic with dreams of a mass audience, or, at least, the hope of receiving teaching evaluations that will commend him as an especially with-it prof.

4. Tone Deaf

In Thesis Eleven, May 2007, Australian music writer Clinton Walker – who wrote Buried Country, an excellent history of Aboriginal country music – expressed his problem with academics writing about popular music.

When the academy finally discovered that popular music and culture might be a useful measure of history and society, it was like a dam wall breaking. The problem was that fashionable obscurantist deconstruction became the orthodoxy. That’s why Australian music studies has given us too much information on current local hip-hop, say, because it ticks the correct boxes – post-modernism, globalism, multi-culturalism – at the expense of fast disappearing histories.

As a music professor friend of mine said of this species, “I looked in at one of their conferences, and it was like they weren’t talking about – or had even listened to – music at all.”

Olympian

James Brown at the Olympia, Paris, 1971 - the complete show, with Bootsy Collins on bass. 



Aretha Franklin live in Amsterdam, 1968. 



Monitor: Open Culture

From St Kilda to King’s Cross

Paul Kelly’s “song memoir” How to Make Gravy (Penguin, 2010) is as expansive and rich in gems as Australia itself. This is no conventional autobiography, and all the better for it. Written using an A-Z of his songs as its structure, it is digressive, thoughtful and honest. He is a raconteur with a sense of history and a guitar at hand to illustrate a point.

With maternal grandparents who were Italian opera singers, and an Irish-Australian father who was a Shakespeare-quoting friend of Don Bradman, Kelly’s love of music and story-telling combine to shape his greatest work and perhaps the most substantial and literary musician’s memoir. (Against this, Dylan’s Chronicles is just an aperitif).

He talks of the joys of big families, touring the outback choking on the tales of Slim Dusty, wasting years and wasting relationships while dabbling in heroin, songwriting friends such as Dragon’s Paul Hewson and Cold Chisel’s Don Walker (“the Clint Eastwood of Australian music”), collaborations with Aboriginal musicians, a pro-active commitment to social justice, and endless summers of cricket. As asides, lyrics and lists (great opening lines for songs, a recipe for gravy, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s concept album). The best songs keep nagging you, “like a tongue with a loose tooth”. So does this. Two years after reading it I still don’t feel I’ve quite scraped the best bits off the pan.

A long televised interview with Kelly, conducted by the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster, is recommended. So too is Forster’s thoughtful essay on Kelly’s work, “Thoughts in the Middle of a Career”, written for The Monthly.