Brand New Country Star

I GUESS YOU would call them redneck bars. They line rural highways throughout the South and West, claustrophobic, smoke-filled little places with sawdust on the floors--places where if you look someone in the eye you're prepared to fight or say, "Gee, I thought you were a buddy of mine. Can I get you a beer?" They smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke, with maybe a tinge of reefer wafting up from a distant corner, and there's always puke on the floor, it seems. And out in every parking lot is a half-crazed drunken fool loading a pistol in a half-paid-for pick-up truck.

It was a habit I got into, I guess, in my senior year in high school, going to the Town & Country Lounge at Big Chimney, the Meadowbrook Inn at Mill Creek, or the Bridge at Spencer. I'd talk to the construction workers who drank hard liquor every night and went to work every morning at six, to the whores with the piled-up hair the construction workers screwed every weekend, to the pool sharks and the bootleggers. All that was interesting, but what really pulled me there on Friday and Saturday nights when my friends had dates was the music. In every joint there is a Wurlitzer filled with country music, and maybe a little K.C. & the Sunshine Band thrown incongruously in for dancing and revisionism. The best songs in the jukebox were progressive country: Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings (and the Waylors), Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, Emmy Lou Harris, along with Jimmy Buffet in a more folk-pop direction and Merle Haggard in a more mainstream country tradition. With his Friends album, Hank Williams, Jr. joins this group.

Progressive country music is marked by a strong rhythm section, especially a driving bass line more rock-and-roll than country. It generally features a prominent lead electric guitar--a distinct break from the older country tradition where the guitar work often consisted of two guys thumping away on six-string acoustics, both playing rhythm. Progressive country is also characterized by its willingness to use the keyboard instruments scorned by older country music. The movement owes its origins to the music of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, with a more than perfunctory nod in the direction of Bob Wills.

ONE MORE CRITICAL feature of the progressive country movement is that is exists mainly outside the Nashville area. Walker, Jennings and Nelson work from an Austin, Texas base, while Haggard is responsible for a Bakersfield, California sound. Nashville can provide the most sophisticated recording studios and technicians in the world, but its eminence is being superceded by studios in places like Doraville, Georgia, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Williams recorded the major portion of his new album.

Hank Williams, Jr. was barely two years old on the December night his father died in the back seat of a Cadillac in southern West Virginia, minutes after finishing his last gig. Williams pere casts an awesome shadow over country music--"Jambalaya," "Hey Good Lookin'" and "Your Cheatin' Heart" have entered the pantheon of American popular music.

The spectre of Hank Williams hangs most heavily over his son. Hank Jr. has been a country singer since his late teens, but only with the Friends album has he been able to break out of the pattern of bland and banal country tunes that marked his previous albums. Still, he is haunted by comparisons with a ghost he must feel hovers at his shoulder. The best song on Friends is "Living Proof," a testament to what it means to be the son of Hank Williams:

When I sing them old songs of Daddy's

Seems everyone comes true.

Lord, please help me, do I have to be The living proof.

Just the other night after the show

An old drunk came up to me

He said you ain't as good as your daddy, boy

And you never gonna be

Then a young girl in old blue jeans

Said I'm your biggest fan

It's a good thing I

Was born Gemini,

Cause I'm living for more than one man.

WILLIAMS FINISHED the album and cleared up a messy divorce last August. In an effort to recuperate from both, he embarked on a near-fatal hunting trip to Montana, where he fell 500 feet down a cliff side. He was in critical condition for six days, spent three months after that in the hospital and still faces more surgery. With this in mind, the album's songs take on an eerie, almost morbid quality in places. For example, on "Can't See You," which closes side one, Williams sings:

I'm going to the highest mountain and throw myself off...

Oh honey, can't you see what you're doing to me.

The same eeriness pervades "Montana Song," in which Williams longs to make love to a lady on the Great Divide. He fights down an urge to call her, and ends the song hoping that he can find another woman to "help me sing my Montana song."

The five Williams songs on side two are the strongest part of the album. Sandwiched between "Montana Song" and "Living Proof" are "Clovis, New Mexico," an adventure song about two drifters, and "Brothers of the Road," an up-tempo song about staying out on two-month tours:

You bring $50,000 home and they say you're overdrawn

It'll just about get you down.

The overall tone of the album is near despair, and its saddest song is "Stoned at the Jukebox." When Williams sings of "loving that hurtin' music, 'cause I been hurting too," it seems to come from the heart-wrenching realization that Hank Williams, Jr. can never be entirely accepted for his own music, no matter how good that music is.

WILLIAMS IS ON less solid ground when he does other people's songs on side one. "Losing You," with Pete Carr's pulsating electric guitar and Charlie Caniel's soaring fiddle, is very fine musically, but the mood of this basically sad song is spoiled by the uptempo beat they provide. "On Susan's Floor" is a pleasant ballad, which seems out of place on this album. The best song on the side is again one of Williams's own, "(Baby I Loved You) I Really Did," which details a break-up as bitter as it is timely.

The album consists of only nine songs, scarcely any of which run more than four minutes. There is no dead wood--it seems Williams was out to achieve the tightest set possible. His back-up band is superb, especially Carr's electric guitar. Williams recruited Charlie Daniels's fiddle and the Allman Brothers' Chuck Leavell to play keyboards, and the influence of these rockers blends with Williams's own country background to make the musical part of this album first-rate. Williams's vocals are always on target, ranging from a hurting, plaintive whine on "Living Proof" to a rocking shout on "Brothers of the Road."

The old cliche about country music is that if you listen to it long enough, your story will come up on the jukebox. This album, by telling Hank Williams, Jr.'s story in very real and poignant terms, marks the emergence of a man who could become a major force in country music. Hank Williams, Jr. has spent most of his life searching for a father, to find only legend. There is no need for him to search any longer; at 26, Hank Williams, Jr. has come of age.