Williams says he hasn’t slowed down his partying too much, even though Curb “threw” him into rehab a couple years ago. He thinks the rehab stint had more to do with his approach to the press than it did anything else. Upon the release of Risin’ Outlaw, he did not keep silent about his dissatisfaction with the finished product. “They said I was out of control and tried to send me to media school seven or eight times, but I said no way,” he says.
“Why didn’t they tell that to Willie Nelson or a bunch of these other motherfuckers that were twice as crazy as me?” he asks, looking genuinely puzzled. “I’m not even on the level some of them were.” He walked out of rehab and told the higher-ups at Curb that they could hold the album back if they wanted, but he wasn’t about to change for anybody.
He thinks that attitude paid off with the new album. “I think they finally listened to me. Curb said, ‘Let’s stay out of his way,’ and I’m so glad they kept their nose out of this record, pretty much.”
He still loves to smoke dope, but knows that “eventually, any drug will bite you.” Still, he says “drinking’s not hurting me any. I’d like to say I’m clean and all, but I’m just not there yet.” And he says he’s never missed a show on account of being too drunk or stoned: “I’ve never canceled unless it’s for being sick. Never been too messed up to do a show.”
Another song on the album, “Whiskey, Weed And Women”, lets us know he doesn’t intend to slow down. He sings about raising “hell all night long.” The song also includes this line, “I got drunk the day my pa went to prison,” inspired by David Allan Coe’s recording of “Call Me By My Name”. Hank III wrote the line especially for Coe — one of his musical heroes — and hoped to duet with him on the record, but lawyers interfered. “We just ran out of time, dealing with legal stuff,” he says, “so he didn’t get to do it with me.”
All the songs on the new album are his own, except for his infamous cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”, which some Springsteen fans criticized as being too country. The song originally appeared in 2000 on the Sub Pop compilation Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, in a shortened version. “They had to talk me into using it on the album, but I did because it got cut short on the tribute,” he says. “I wanted the whole song to be out there.” He arranged the song himself, and says Springsteen was never an inspiration, but someone he can at least respect.
Respect is not a word Hank III throws around lightly. When it comes to mainstream music, he likes such acts as Asleep At The Wheel, Junior Brown, and Dwight Yoakam. “I like some of Ryan Adams’ stuff, what I’ve heard of him,” he says. “I thought his cover of ‘Lovesick Blues’ [on the Hank Sr. tribute disc Timeless] was pretty damn cool; weird and psychedelic.” His favorite new band in town is the Shack Shakers.
Hank III grew up on the likes of KISS and Ted Nugent. “That’s the stuff that really got me,” he says. He always liked Southern Rock, but knew it wasn’t his thing. “I just couldn’t play that kind of music good,” he says. “I never felt comfortable playing that music, although I always liked people like Lynyrd Skynryd and some others.”
Mostly raised in a single-parent home by his mother, Gwen Yeargain Williams, KISS was the first group he was widely exposed to. His mother’s sister, Gayle, bought him four KISS albums the Christmas he was 9 years old, and changed his life forever. “Gayle completely messed me up, man,” he laughs. “She was the one who was always cranking ZZ Top and Ted Nugent,” he says, noting that his mother’s tastes were much milder; the only thing he can really remember her playing are Elvis records.
His mother raised him strict, making him go to church three or four nights a week until he was 18 years old. “I had my albums burned, forced to go to church, all that,” he says, picking at the carpet. “That’s probably what gave me my love for heavy metal.”
While the paternal side of his family was known for hard living, his mother’s family was not. “I was raised in a family who didn’t drink, who didn’t smoke. There were a couple people on Mom’s side who were pretty wild, but I wasn’t really around that growing up. But I just always felt more comfortable hanging out with the wrong crowd. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do for me. I enjoyed getting stoned.”
He spent most of his adolescence in North Carolina, where his stepfather worked at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Hank III liked being around the racing lifestyle. He peps up when he talks about those days. “It was cool seeing that side of life,” he says. “I’d get to meet the drivers, and we’d always have pit passes, a Winnebago in the infield for every race.”
Right around this same time, Hank III began to come into his own as a hellraiser. “I’ve put my mom through hell and back, man,” he says, and pauses for a long moment, looking away. “I mean, I haven’t exactly been the perfect son. But she’s always stood behind me 100 percent in whatever I’ve done. She’s always been just your most loving, caring mother.”
Hank III thinks his wild nature is due more to the way he was raised than to the wild streak in his genes. He says things might have been different had he been around his famous father more often. “If I had seen my dad getting drunk and being stoned and falling down all the time, I might not have wanted to be like that,” he suggests. “But I grew up knowing my ass would be nailed to the wall if I got wild, so that made it that much more of a thrill to me.”
Slowly we have been making our way to that part of Hank III people know the most about. It is not hard to get him to talk about the Williams clan, but he doesn’t seem to be busting at the seams to do so. Although he will continue to use the moniker that unmistakably associates him with his father and grandfather, he likes standing on his own two feet. For the record, he’s not really a third Hank; his real name is Shelton Hank Williams (friends and family call him Shelton). No matter, though, since his daddy is not really a junior either, his name being Randall Hank Williams.
