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Hank3 is hittin’ the road
We interrupt this national day of mourning for Whitney Houston with a totally unrelated but nevertheless vitally important piece of news: Hank3 is hittin’ the road! Yes, the badass inventor of hellbilly and cattlecore will be bringing his trademark multi-set onslaught of trad country, metal and the aforementioned genres to 15 lucky cities this March. If any of the shows sell out faster than usual, I’m sure it’s because I just talked about him on The Dinner Party podcast/public radio chat show.
Here are the dates:
3/2 Chattanooga, TN @ Rhythm & Brews
3/3 Montgomery, AL @ Rock Bottom
3/4 Mobile, AL @ Soul Kitchen
3/6 Orlando, FL @ Plaza Theatre
3/7 Ft. Lauderdale, FL @ Culture Room
3/9 Melbourne, FL @ Levelz
3/10 Tampa, FL @ State Theatre
3/11 Jacksonville, FL @ Brewsters
3/13 Raleigh, NC @ Lincoln Theatre
3/14 Norfolk, VA @ Norva
3/15 Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
3/16 Philadelphia, PA @ Trocadero
3/19 Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant St
3/20 Indianapolis, IN @ Vouge
3/21 St. Louis, MO (Sauget, IL) @ Pop’s
Jake and I will be stuck back here in LA, so if anyone makes it out to one of the shows, please give us a report. To give you a little taste of what you can expect, here’s a fan-made video of the “3 Bar Ranch” portion of his set, the part that features cattle auctioneers set to speed metal:
So yeah…bring your earplugs!
Hank3
It’s gotta suck being the musician kid of a famous musician. On the one hand, you want to carve out your own identity for yourself; on the other hand, how you sing and how you play and even how your write songs is embedded in your DNA. Dhani Harrison can’t help sounding like his dad George no matter how much Radiohead he listens to and how many members of Wu-Tang Clan he collaborates with. Harper Simon, son of Paul, toiled in obscurity on various unsuccessful musical projects until his late thirties, when he finally said “Fuck it” and made a Simon & Garfunkel record. Heredity is destiny, or something like that.
So it’s kind of amazing that a guy like Hank3 exists. Hank3 is better known as Hank Williams III, grandson of the great Hank Williams and son of the not-so-great Hank Williams, Jr., that dude who sings the Monday Night Football theme. Any halfway sane offspring of that musical legacy would probably be on his third tour of duty with Celebrity Rehab by now. But happily, Hank3 is just the right kind of nuts to live it all down and do his own thing.
That thing, for years now, has been playing back-to-back sets every night of pickin’ and grinnin’ traditional, honky-tonk country, followed by a rip-your-face-off onslaught of punk, psychobilly and speed metal. Yes, Hank3 somehow manages to have it both ways. He honors the family legacy and extends an upraised middle finger to it, every night.
Because of the schizophrenic nature of his music, Hank3′s always been more than a little weird. But he really went off the deep end just recently with the release of 3 Bar Ranch Cattle Callin’, one of four different albums (well, technically three, because one was a double LP) he released on the same day earlier this month.
The other albums are all pretty much par for the Hank3 course. Ghost to a Ghost/Guttertown is a mix of trad country, the country/punk hybrid sound he calls “hellbilly,” and Hank’s swampy, spooky version of Cajun music. Attention Deficit Domination is a straight metal record, although it’s slower and sludgier than fans of Hank’s punk/metal band Assjack might expect.
Then there’s 3 Bar Ranch, which is a critter of a different color entirely. It’s an entire album’s worth of cattle auctioneers accompanied by speed metal. Hank3 calls it “cattlecore.” We call it…well, let’s just say the man famous for putting the “dick in Dixie” and the “cunt in country” really outdid himself this time.
Links:
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
Today’s weirdo was suggested to us by a fellow named Bunche, who has a nifty little blog called The Vault of Buncheness that we highly recommend checking out. He mostly seems to write about movies and comic books (and was apparently once on the staff at Marvel Comics—we’re not worthy!), but he’s also a connoisseur of weird music, and suggested we get better acquainted with a dude called The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, whom he calls a “phantom genius who unfairly hovers deep in the outskirts of musical limbo while other far less trailblazing country stylists such as Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, Sr. have gained immortality.” Holy crap, Bunche! Calm down already. You convinced us.
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy—or “The Ledge,” as he likes to call himself—is the stage name of one Norman Carl Odam, an early rockabilly performer from Lubbock, Texas whose greatest (well, okay, only) claim to fame was a 1968 novelty hit called “Paralyzed.” Clocking in at roughly two and a half minutes, the song is basically just one long proto-psychobilly freakout, with The Ledge wailing and yodeling incoherently over one frantically strummed chord and some frenzied drumming (played, oddly enough, by T-Bone “I somehow survived this to go on and produce the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack” Burnett), punctuated by what we’ll call, for lack of a better term, a bugle solo. (“Bugle rape” might be more accurate.) It makes the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” sound like a Puccini aria by comparison.
By his own account, The Ledge cooked up “Paralyzed” because he wanted to write “a wild song that would captivate everybody.” Improbably enough, it worked. The song got Odam a recording contract with Mercury Records, landed him on Laugh-In (which was a very big deal in 1968), and even attracted the attention of a young British singer named David Bowie, who later created a character named Ziggy Stardust as a nod to The Ledge. This part sounds made-up, we know, but it’s really true. There’s a widely circulated photo of Bowie and The Ledge together from around 2002, when Bowie covered another Odam song, “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” for his Heathen album. They’re buds.
Unfortunately for The Ledge, he would never be able to repeat the success of “Paralyzed.” But that sure as hell hasn’t stopped him from trying. Odam continues to record and perform to this day—mostly, it seems, for people who are just interested in making fun of him, but he soldiers in with the cheerful demeanor of someone who’s either batshit crazy or has achieved some Zen-like level of enlightenment the rest of us poor suckers can’t even conceive of. It’s probably a bit of both.
We’ll leave you with one of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s most famous clips. This is from a performance of “Paralyzed” that was done for an Australian variety show called Hey Hey It’s Saturday. The image quality is atrocious but fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), the sound is pretty top-notch. If The Ledge were actually forming words, you could almost make out what he was yelling.
