Hank Williams III at The Chop Suey

Hank Williams III at The Chop Suey - Seattle 1-24-03


Attended the Hank Williams III show on friday night, but as a veteran live musical event enjoyee, I've learned the vagaries of show-going, knowing that these days most marqueed, widely known artists don't come out of their dressing rooms until after 10:45 pm at the earliest.

Showing up early out of fear of missing the first song went out in the late 80's for me. I've seen the Stones, the Beachboys, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Elton and even Devo and during that time, none of these made the stage until after some lessor known opening act bored the crowd to tears or just puzzled us with songs we'd never heard and likely would never hear again.

It is much better to take your time getting downtown, find a parking spot in a leisurely fashion, stop off for a beverage at a nearby watering hole and then waltz in after the first band has beat the crowd down with inanities. It was this way at the Hank III show on friday night. And when we finally strolled in the door of the 'Chop Suey', the name band was in full roil.

I was a little apprehensive about going to a 'country music' show, not really having been a fan of country music. I'm familiar with only the periphery of the country music scene, hearing news about the big, high grossing artists like Garth Brooks or Shania Twain. Even without benefit of cable tv, the sheer number of fans that these big names pull in alway seems to make news. I couldn't however name any of the songs they've done. Sticking with my trusty rock n' roll sensibilities, my computer hard drive is loaded with Zeppelin, Collective Soul, Nickelback and good old Elvis.

The music pounding out the door of this club was surprising though. I've heard Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Buck Owens, and so I have an idea of the purer line that those originals layed down, but I'd never heard the slant on this stuff that I was hearing as it filtered through the string of dungerees and tattooed attendees that was in the queue to the main room of this club.

To one side of some tall guy's mangled off-white cowboy hat, in the near distance, I could see two individuals on the stage bobbing their heads madly as the very loud, very correct downbeats signalled a fast shuffle, the rhythm guitar pinning down the top of each of those beats very cleanly, the stand-up bass exactly matching that big kick, the whole of it counterpointed by an amazingly pure steel guitar that rounded off every couple of bars with a tart flourish.

This was country music? As my pal Lorne and I neared the ticket-taker, I nudged him for an explanation. Lorne is a local one-man show in the city himself. For the last twenty years or so he has performed his act as 'Max', doing the tiny stages at places like The New Luck Toy, the Blockhouse restaurant, the Cumberland Tavern and any other place that needs a guy who can do 100 songs for 800 bucks in three hours.
He has many influences, being a fan of all music, but being the son of a local pedal steel guitar player who, as a union member in Seattle in the 40's and 50's played with greats like Ernest Tubbs and Marty Robbins, he has a much more thorough understanding of country than I do.

He turned to me with big eyes and was mostly unintelligible. It was pretty dang loud in there. We nudged and bumped our way into the crowd and when the song ended, he tried again, ' this is great man.. Mississippi Mud!.. that's country!' The next song thrummed up and we snapped back to attention.

It wasn't until I got home here to my computer that I learned that Mississippi Mud was written in 1928, ('it's a treat to beat your feet, on that Mississippi Mud..' ). The bulk of the skinny guy onstage's repertoire, so far, was just this sort of unflappable, original stuff, albeit with a bent on the volumn knob at eleven. Although the rest of the band looked like typical guys you might see milling around in a movie with horses and pickup trucks in it, Hank III himself was recognizable as the grandson of the man himself, Hank Williams I. High cheekbones and close-set eyes, Hank Williams-handsome.

The roman numeral designations, I learned later, was the popular method of understanding the pecking order of the William's family legacy. Hank I being the patriarch, the original Grand Ole Opry mainstay who penned and performed songs like, 'Move It On Over', 'Hey, Good Lookin', and 'Your Cheatin' Heart.' Number 'II' is son, Hank Williams Jr, of 'are ya ready for some footballlllll! fame, who had to make a name for himself in the enormous shadow of his famous daddy. He did so with a fusion of country and rock n' roll which culminated in the eighties with hits like 'All My Rowdy Friends (have settled down)' and 'Whisky Bent and Hellbound'. His son, Hank III is following a similar path, playing the old standards with all the twangy heart but including a set in every show that caters to 'new punk' fans who favor groups like The Misfits and Jesus Lizard.
While Grandpa was known as 'the hillbilly shakespeare'...Hank III, in his 2nd set, has garnered the epithet, 'hellbilly.'

I scanned the crowd to get an idea of what Hank III's fan base was like. There were the cowboy hats for sure. Mostly white, beat up and dirty ones, made out of starched straw like the one I left at home, but a few were black and fancy with silver badges and leather strings. There were permutations of cowboys and punks, 'cowpunks' who sported the hat, but also had arm to arm tattoos, multiple piercings, beer bottle and cigarette. Also in the mix were regular old fat guys like Lorne and me and even a few obviously gay men, which suprised me for a moment until I remembered that this club was in Capitol Hill. The music blared nicely, actually well controlled at the board so that I could still hear the individual guitar strings and force of thumb on bass, pick over pickup. It served to heighten my senses and I found myself hollaring at the top of my lungs with the rest of the crowd, even though I was oblivious to the references Hank made with certain lines.

'I'm gonna get me a #@*%$ an' a #$%@#?>! an then we'll go down to #$%#$ an ' we'll $%@**&?!

'Buuuwaaaaaahhhhh!' the crowd agreed.

All of this was going swimmingly, until a guy with eye makeup and berets in his hair became enamored with the musical beat and began to bump into Lorne. My pal, who is all of 290 lbs and strictly heterosexual, did his patented big-eyed glance at me and tried to endure the weirdo.
There was very little room to move to get away from the over-imbibed trans-whatever, and I was just glad that there was a barrier of Lorne between.
Finally, the mincer sashayed off to one side to begin annoying others and we moved closer to the center of the room. Hank finished a real fast song and then went into a diatribe about the sorry state of country music. He lambasted music stations for playing for pay instead of for the music and the crowd was enthusiastically supportive. He was profane in a loving way, thanking all the mother*#$%#s who came to show for the country set, but now he was gonna take a 5 minute break and when he comes back he was gonna do a Gawd#$% Mother$#*ing Metal set.

The crowd relaxed and smoked a cigarette. 'Three' came back onstage, but now he looked different. No cowboy hat, light brown, sweaty hair to his shoulders, his bass player traded the stand-up for a Fender P-bass and the drummer looked vaguely demonic. With the first horribly loud notes, the moshers began to organize.

For the uninitiated, the front center part of the club of today's popular rock music shows has become a place called 'a mosh pit.' I don't know the origins of the phenomenon, but suffice to say that 'moshing' is like a disenchanted Gen-Xer version of aerobics, and instead of drinking vitamin water and 'sweatin' to the oldies', moshers drink cheap beer and then become human pinball bumpers, crashing into each other in a sort of pseudo-angst, adrenalin driven, semi-controlled and encapsulated mini-riot. The floor, I noticed, was crunchy and slimy wet under my basketball shoes and in the flashes of light I could make out broken beer bottles.

As the next song began to storm up, a guy right next to me with way too much hair began to jump up and down and bob from side to side, standard mosh pogoing. He bumped into me a couple times and I bumped into Lorne. Lorne didn't like this much. He doesn't move very much either. I stepped back a little and tried to appreciate the whole flavor of the scene. I was pretty much digging it all. The energy level was amazing, Hank slamming his guitar, the bass player turning out to be the real demon, standing at the very brink of the stage, eyes and mouth open like three holes to the underworld, he virtually vibrated with the noise and, I think all who attended, at least momentarily, became minions of the gorgeous hellfire.

Hank finished that song, all of two and a half minutes, and launched into another by yelling, 'THIS SONG IS ABOUT F#$KING AND FIGHTIN'
and that's when I tapped Lorne on the shoulder. We schlepped our way backwards as the intensity grew. I saw a beer bottle go tumbling over somebodies head and before we got to the exit door, I saw a guy with an exxon valdez-coated hairdoo start swingin', in honor no doubt of the song's subject.

The night air was like a kick in face. Lorne looked at me and started speaking, but I couldn't hear him. Instead, I heard a haunt of 'You're Cheatin' Heart, but in triple time and with the devil at the mic.

SAR2003