Hancock also surrounds himself with gifted musicians, and is scrupulous in his desire to let his players truly shine. “Nobody works for me,” he says. “I’m not your boss; I’m bringing something to the table, you’re bring something to the table. You do a good job and I’ll make sure your name is in lights even after you leave the band.”
A solid but unremarkable rhythm guitarist, Hancock is uninterested in expanding country as a musical terrain. His approach is that of a craftsman whose priority is to render his art correctly, thereby allowing his personality and experience to shine through.
At his best, Hancock manages to make the old sound fresh without making it sound new. Paying homage to Sinatra on his new album, Hancock approaches the classic ballad “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, And Me)” with delicacy and nuance. “Everytime”, one of Hancock’s own ballads, sounds like something Sinatra might have performed in his early days.
A-Town Blues is Hancock’s deepest personal statement since Thunderstorms And Neon Signs. Many of the tracks are an exploration of how his devotion to what he sees as his calling has strained his personal relationships. The end of a romance with a woman in Austin has him living mostly out of his van, but in truth, he is still reeling from his split five years ago with his longtime girlfriend Sue Foley, a blues guitarist who has released several albums of her own.
“Boy I really fucked that one up,” he reflects. “Self-worthlessness is an easy trap to fall into in this field, in a world where music is considered a great job if you can get it but is not considered great work. Try getting an apartment when you put down under employment ‘Musician.’ Being a musician and being dedicated leaves little to no time for anybody else, which means that I’m alone most of the time. That hurts; I hate being alone.”
That comes across in several tracks on A-Town Blues. “Sands Of Time” finds Hancock reflecting on a lost love:
I hear that you’re doing well now
Everywhere I go I see your name
I used to wonder if somehow I wronged you
Now I know nobody shares the blame
While Hank Williams comparisons may abound, Hancock’s originals on this album, especially “Sands Of Time”, “Life’s Lonesome Road” and “Happy Birthday Julie”, are fundamentally different. Williams’ songs were elegies of a life he felt powerless to control in a world that failed to understand him. Hancock’s songs, informed by similar experiences, strive to reassure the listener, but also to remind that responsibility and the hope of salvation lay squarely with the individual.
“If you’re not going to write a song that’s going to help somebody, then why write it?” Hancock asks incredulously. “If someone ever came up to me and said, ‘My kid loved your music and at 19 he got in his car just like you said in your song and drove into a wall and died,’ that would kill me. Instead of writing songs about killing ourselves, let’s write songs about living and how to get through heartaches and fucked-up relationships.”
“Miller, Jack, And Mad Dog” is a more overt example of this. The cautionary tale of youthful boozing gone awry raised some chuckles from producer Lloyd Maines, who jokingly remarked that the state of Texas might adopt it as a public service announcement. Hancock, a recovering alcoholic, was nonplussed.
The relationship between Hancock and Maines, who has produced all Hancock’s albums to date, is so comfortable that when a disagreement does occur, the studio goes silent. Only once did this happen, when Maines suggested that Hancock rework the ending of “Route 23”, a ballad about a man whose fiance is killed in a car wreck.
“Well, I just think it ends too abruptly for such a sad song,” says Maines after a few minutes of escalating debate.
“Well it does end abruptly; his girl dies in a car crash and it fucks his life. Pretty fuckin’ abrupt,” says Hancock in a pitch that implied the argument was over. Maines, evidently satisfied to have made his opinion clear, does not raise the issue again.
After all the taping is finished and the musicians paid and seen off, Maines and Hancock decide to cut one more track. So one evening, the two of them sit down in the studio, guitars in hand, and belt out a straight-up honky-tonk tune of Hancock’s called “Railroad Blues”.
Hancock’s voice, tired from two days of recording, cracks quite a few times; Maines’ solo is good, but hardly brilliant. Really, just two good ol’ boys playing a tune for their own amusement after a hard day’s work. The result is a work of startling honesty, unselfconsciously pulling the musicians and the listener back to the days when the simple act of recording a song was not loaded with pretext.
We’ve been trolling the countryside for hours before finally driving back toward Austin. We talk about the city Hancock loves most, but which he doesn’t really call home.
“In the ten years I’ve lived in Austin I’ve never had a real residence. I’ve lived with friends and certain women I was dating at the time. I’ve got a P.O. Box here, but I don’t live here because, quite frankly, this van is my home. You hear that sound? That’s the most beautiful sound in the world. That’s highway moving under your feet.”
We pull onto South Congress and make our way down to the Austin Motel, just across from the famed Continental Club where Hancock has played so many times. After a few more minutes of conversation I decide to call it a night. We say our goodbyes and head into our adjacent rooms.
Just as I’m nodding off to sleep, I hear Hancock’s door open and close. I peek out my window and watch him get behind the wheel of his van. The engine turns over and Wayne Hancock pulls the van out of the parking lot and into the big Texas night.
Christopher Flores, who lives and works in Washington, D.C., is originally from New Jersey, which Wayne Hancock refers to as “the Texas of the North.”
