Hank III Going Straight to "Hell"

Sunday News
Published: October 8, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Hank Williams III's latest album, "Straight To Hell," released in August on Curb Records, continues his unapologetically self-obsessed fascination with drinking, drugging, evil and general bad behavior. Though the musicianship across the board is respectable - often first rate -and one or two songs show a glimmer of genuine talent for songwriting, Hank III cannot help but be himself. He has been accused of taking his obsession with drug and drink to the point of absurdity, making a mockery of the hard-core country music he claims to love so much.

His lyrics include such insightful couplets as: "I'm drinkin', druggin'. I'm havin' lots of fun/I always carry 'round my loaded shotgun" and "I've been awake for eight days straight/Well, it must've been them pills I took" and "I've been up for four days, so cut me out another line/An overdose of drugs, overdose of sin" and so forth.

Regarding his boozing, smoking and pilling, Hank is quick to blame the industry. "When you are on the road and playing all the time to the people we play to, that kind of stuff is everywhere. It's just part of what goes on," he said from his home outside Nashville. He's been to rehab once, but says he stays away from the hard drugs. "It's crystal meth that's killing America, not weed or whatever."

For a taste of the chemically fueled Hank III, attend one of his shows. (He's playing Lancaster's Chameleon Club Wednesday.) They usually start out with fiddle-heavy country music, including the occasional Hank Sr. cover. But by the end of the night, his band's punk alter ego lets loose with furiously distorted guitars and hard- core vengeance.

He's never been able to choose between the two styles. "I can't write or read music, so if I ever try to make it all work as one, I'll need some help. I'm no Frank Zappa." Jones, Cash, Haggard, Jennings, Coe, Hank Jr. and Hank Sr., the folks Hank III claims to hold in such high regard, certainly sang their fair share of songs about self-destruction. But they were, first and foremost, storytellers, and darn good ones. Not one of them released an entire album of such debauchery.

"[The dark stuff] is a big part of what country music and what those guys did is all about," Hank III insisted. To some, his art might seem to be a colossal put on, too perfectly disgusting to be true. Maybe it is. Maybe all of his tattoos are, in a sense, painted on. But III recently told NPR that he has pretty much been under the influence of one substance or another continuously since the age of 14. He also has claimed involvement in satanic activities. He dedicated "Straight to Hell" to the late punk misfit G.G. Allin, a bona fide sociopath.

Hank III's obsession with death, pills, booze and Beelzebub, regardless of whether it's cultivated for effect, is laced with a tragic irony. It was the sauce and painkillers that killed his grandfather in the back of a car on some frozen back road in West Virginia at the age of 29, and it was drugs that led to his father's attempted suicide in 1974. But in the 14 years he's been making music professionally, Hank III has given no indication that these or any other warnings will change his nasty ways.