Butch Hancock – The Wind’s Dominion

It’s tempting to call The Wind’s Dominion Butch Hancock’s Blonde On Blonde, given that Hancock has often been referred to as “the West Texas Dylan,” and that this epic double-album arguably stands as his greatest studio achievement. Originally released in 1979, The Wind’s Dominion must have struck like a coming-of-age lightning-bolt for fans of Hancock, who had made his solo debut the previous year with West Texas Waltzes & Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes after first gaining attention in the early ’70s as a member of the later-to-be-legendary Lubbock group the Flatlanders.

West Texas Waltzes was a charmingly small-scale introduction to the artist, with nothing but Hancock’s “voice, guitar, foot and harmonica” (as the credits read) scratching out aural snapshots of desert life such as “Dry Land Farm”, “Little Coyote Waltz” and “Just One Thunderstorm”. The Wind’s Dominion subsequently blew in like a Tornado Alley twister, a fifteen-song opus full of rambling yet finely detailed border stories, character studies and metaphysical meditations.

Like many such musical masterpieces, The Wind’s Dominion starts off on an unsuspecting note, with Hancock — hardly a Pavarotti of the Plains — crooning an obscure a cappella tune called “Sea’s Deadog Catch” written by Milo Flagg. “Capture…Fracture…And The Rapture”, a song as abnormal and complicated as its title suggests, follows, blazing a trail for what’s to come with rapid-fire lyrical wordplay and lightning-quick instrumental interplay (courtesy acoustic lead guitarist David Halley and fiddler Richard Bowden). Next up is “Long Road To Asia Minor”, which is more in the vein of a traditional country-folk tale — except for a jarring minor chord that sonically shanghaies the last line of every stanza.

Having thus confounded expectations enough to establish his individuality, Hancock then fills the fourth slot with an unabashed classic, “Smokin’ In The Rain”, a song so perfectly constructed that it deserves to be mentioned alongside his best-known numbers such as “Bluebird” and “She Never Spoke Spanish To Me”. One of the most naturally flowing melodies he’s ever written weaves its way through no shortage of profoundly expressed observations: “Allow me to elucidate/Like they see theirs I see my fate/And babe I hope you see yours just as plain/It’s fire in the skies/It’s fire in your eyes/And it’s smokin’ in the rain.”

From there on out, Hancock just keeps upping the ante. The mood captured in “Personal Rendition Of The Blues” lives up to the song’s name; “Dominoes”, long a staple of Joe Ely’s repertoire, is as painstakingly constructed as the rows of dominoes that keep tumbling throughout the tune; “Own And Own” has more words (and more meaning) than you’ll ever hear anyone cram into a song that’s just two minutes and five seconds long; “Mario Y Maria” is a heartbreaking tale of lovers’ misadventures punctuated by a sad, simple truth: “There are those who never come home.”

All this builds up to the double-zenith of “Eternal Triangles” and “Only Born”, which clock in at 7:24 and 10:01, respectively. The former stays true to its triptychal title with three sets of three verses each — rendered, of course, in three-quarter time. “Only Born”, whose lyrics fill two pages of the CD booklet, is perhaps Hancock’s “Desolation Row”, or, in keeping with the Blonde On Blonde analogy, his “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”. The album ends with a two-song denouement, the title track finally surrendering all that has come before to “The Wind’s Dominion”.

Hancock’s legacy leapfrogged in the ’80s with several more releases on Rainlight, his own label; most of those likely will reappear in the years ahead as Butch continues the long-awaited transformation of his back catalog from vinyl to CD. It may well, however, never get any better than this.