Hancock remembers walking out of Dallas that night, though he has no idea how he wound up in the Austin hospital where he was treated for a near-lethal case of salmonella poisoning. But he didn’t forget his spiritual awakening.
“I said ‘God, I want to serve you,’ and He said, ‘If you want to serve me then you need to serve your brothers and your sisters because they’re my family and they’re your family too.’ That’s the deal; I take care of my family and He takes care of me. I could go on and on but I don’t want to sound like a preacher or a religious nut ’cause I’m neither one. But I don’t care if they come to me with a stack of money; I’m already taken care of. This job is going to get done.
“Well before I even got out of the hospital, everything just started happening so fast. I had my first gig opening for Rusty Weir. I met T.J. McFarland who introduced me to Ray Benson who introduced me to Willie Nelson and Johnny Western.”
Suddenly, Hancock found himself in a thriving musical community with sensibilities in line with his own. Almost overnight he was a respected and highly sought-after performer, and was hired to play rhythm guitar and sing backup in Benson’s band, Asleep At The Wheel.
Benson was particularly fond of a haunting and evocative ballad Hancock had written called “Thunderstorms And Neon Signs” that recalls the restless days of his youth:
I grew up on the road from town to town
My daddy’s line of work kept us movin’ around
I’ve got fond memories of the way things were back then
The warmth of the neon when a bad storm’s movin’ in
That bandleader wasn’t the only admirer of “Thunderstorms And Neon Signs”. Jo Harvey Allen, a West Texas playwright married to renowned artist/songwriter Terry Allen, heard it and decided it would be perfect for her musical Chippy, a stage drama based on the real diaries of a West Texas hooker who died of syphilis in the 1950s. Hancock was brought on to play the role of Mr. Jukebox, an apparition who appears during scenes of emotional intensity and captures the mood in song. A soundtrack to Chippy was released on Hollywood Records in 1994 and included “Thunderstorms”.
Hancock subsequently hooked up with Steve Wilkison, who at the time was operating an up-and-coming Austin-area independent label called Dejadisc. “A friend had sent me a couple of demos, and I thought it was really cool, original stuff, in the sense that there weren’t a lot of people doing that kind of real hard-core honky tonk in 1994,” Wilkison recalls. “And then he found a manager, who happened to be a friend of mine, so we decided to do a record together.”
In June 1995, Hancock went into the studio with noted producer Lloyd Maines to record his debut album. The result,Thunderstorms And Neon Signs, was released on Dejadisc in the fall of 1995; the album received widespread critical acclaim and launched Hancock’s career.
“They recorded that first record in like two or three days,” says Wilkison, now president of Eminent Records in Nashville. “It was all done pretty much live, with everybody in the room. He had a real vision of what he wanted, how he wanted his music. He insisted there be no drums on the record. I suggested maybe adding a fiddle on a couple of tracks to sweeten up. No, he wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe piano? Nope. He had a very set vision in his mind of what he wanted, and for the most part I go along with the artist if they have a vision of what they want.
“At the time it became the best-selling record we had at Dejadisc. Wayne was touring a lot, which really helped. He wanted to be out on the road. We got him featured on NPR, and I think that had a real impact.”
In 1996, Hancock signed with Ark 21, which put him to work on his second album, That’s What Daddy Wants. Almost from the start, Hancock began to wonder if he had made the right decision. He says the label insisted on including drums on some tracks and overemphasizing certain aspects of Hancock’s style, most notably his ‘call-outs’ to the band, which were charmingly spontaneous on Thunderstorms but more deliberate on the second record. Despite such “overproduction” (this one only took three days), That’s What Daddy Wants was another gem, ranging from the conjunto-styled “87 Southbound” to the Orbison invocation “Misery”.
