Hank Williams - The Constant Bleeder

Hank Williams
Rare Demos: First to Last
1990, The Country Music Foundation

Hank Williams died of heart failure when he was only 29 and deaths like that freak you out when you get old. That’s a painfully young age to go, but too many pills and too much booze can snuff out the brightest candle.

It happened in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1953. Williams rode in the backseat of a Cadillac, on his way from Knoxville, Tennessee to play a show in Canton, Ohio. Sometime around 5 AM, his driver stopped for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia and then discovered that the great songwriter, who’d been silent for many miles, wasn’t merely sleeping off his latest bender.

No, he was even more pale than usual. Not breathing. Gone.

The story goes that Hank Williams died with these four things in his pockets: a loaded gun, a pint of vodka, tablets of chloral hydrate (a sedative), and a rough draft of lyrics for a new song written on a piece of paper.

All are symbols of what killed him and when I write about his death it’s not to romanticize it. No, it was pathetic and it shouldn’t have happened.

However, I can’t listen to Hank Williams songs without thinking about his death and that’s because they both reveal the same thing, which is the fragile soap bubble of human life. Our very hearts (in both the literal and figurative sense) sometimes try to kill us and often succeed.

Sometimes death is so close that it’s in your pocket.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #25: HANK WILLIAMS, Rare Demos: First to Last”

Frank Black and The Catholics
Black Letter Days
2002, SpinART Records

Frank Black’s music is always annoying somebody.

When an artist makes Surfer Rosa and Teenager of the Year and Black Letter Days in a fourteen-year span, they might leave a few fans figuratively stranded at a few train stations. Not everyone follows.

Today, the brief Frank Black and the Catholics period (1998-2003) is well-loved among the deep-diggers. A new vinyl box set of their six formal studio albums is out and the reappraisals are glowing.

Twenty years ago though, when, for all that anyone knew, Black might make Catholics records forever, some people were over it after three albums. They weren’t into this classic rock sound. Maybe they were tired of the broken-heart songs. Others resented that the guy who launched his solo career with expansive studio visions not long ago was now hooked on recording everything live in the studio to 2-track tape like it’s 1963.

On the flipside though, plenty of us enjoyed it. For me, Black was my mutant Bob Dylan. The songs were stunners, but I also got engrossed in how he was building a body of work that would someday look like a bottomless well, full of phases and stages that sometimes conflict and that people argue over.

In 2002, Black and the Catholics moved at the pace of a band signed to Elektra/Asylum in 1975. A new album (or two) each year nearly. Then a lot of long road trips. They sounded like a classic rock band ready to launch their own Rolling Thunder Revue, yet they also had the discipline of a great 80s punk band who take a blue collar approach to the work. They’re ambitious, but not in a way that has anything to do with breaking big in the mainstream. They’re not even thinking about that. It’s more about honing a vision.

After four years of getting better at it, the eighteen-track lost highway of Black Letter Days sounds like what naturally emerges.

Continue reading “Frank Black-O-Rama! #19: BLACK LETTER DAYS”