Hank Williams, Jr.: Hank Williams, Jr. & Friends : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

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 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 about fleeing to Montana for the winter and leaving his troubles behind, at the same time fantasizing that his recently departed lover will join him there. They will make love in a sleeping bag, sit on the Great Divide "and look out on America and feel so free inside," lines he sings with a wistfulness that speaks volumes. It's not the only good line he turns, either—in "Clovis, New Mexico," he describes his newly found lover in such detail that she takes on living dimensions women seldom attain in pop songs.

The capper is "Living Proof," a mournful ballad about "living for two men," in reference to the old drunk who comes up to Hank Jr. after a show and tells him he'll never be as good as his father. He swears he'll never let his son become a musician and vows to quit singing sad songs because they hit too close to home these days.

Therein lies much of Hank Jr.'s dilemma. The song that precedes "Living Proof" is an exquisitely crafted honky-tonker called "Stoned at the Jukebox," which is not only one of the saddest songs in recent memory but even quotes a line from one of his daddy's songs. It's beautiful, though, and I'll take his word when he says he sings it to "get the hurtin' out." He seems to understand that he'll never be able to escape his father's memory entirely, and he definitely understands the value of sad songs. But if this vibrant album doesn't purge him, nothing will. It's strong medicine, revealing a man born into a less than enviable situation who is doing his best to come to grips with it, perhaps faltering occasionally, but seeking both elbow room and the comfort of friends and lovers. Hank Williams Jr. and Friends marks his emergence as a major contemporary artist—and as his own man.