His bladder was in rotten shape, and he was stewed, though
the two cowboys with him said Hank hardly ever boozed a performance. It was
around Spring of '52, and Williams' was going bald. His face looked like a dead
man's.
He'd been pretty wobbly in the Riverside Rancho parking
lot before he started sharing the Johnny Walker Red with me and Barry Bowron,
son of L.A.'s then-Mayor Fletcher Bowron. We were with another pal, Mike Parey,
a Hell's Angels biker with a fat-bob Harley that'd first caught Hank's eye.
'King of Western Swing'
Spade Cooley had made it big there during the war, with Tex Williams singing in
his band. Cooley then moved to the Santa Monica Ballroom the year after V-J Day,
and Tex (no relation to Hank), formed his own Western Caravan band at the
Rancho. It wasn't long after Spade's Jamborees were being broadcast from the
ballroom that Cooley killed his own wife and went to prison.
"Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette," Tex's big one, was
known around the world. 
Tex was starring in movies and lived in Bel Aire off
Sunset Boulevard. He was also friends with my father at the Hollywood Masonic
Lodge, and often sang Bob Nolan's Sons of The Pioneers songs at shows and
festivities. Once I walked with Tex across Hollywood Boulevard for cigarettes
and to look at the foot prints outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. A few people
asked Tex for his autograph and we were talking about Gene Autry–filming in
Bakersfield at the time, and Tex said another boy he knew, Hank Williams, was in
Bakersfield, "or maybe down in San Diego on the road." Hank was going
to be in L.A. long enough to play a weekend at the Rancho for Tex, who invited
Barry Bowron and myself to catch Hank's performance.
Hank's appearance had been a spur of the moment decision. Tex later said,
"Hank was coming to town about a movie deal, and we got to chewing the fat
about the Rancho and I said I sure wish he'd come over and play a Saturday
night, and Hank said that's what he had in mind if it suited me. I said it
suited me fine."
Marty, the owner of the Rancho, worried about booking Hank
for fear he'd fill the ballroom then fail to show, too drunk to make it.
According to Dallas, Tex's wife and a singer, Marty put a lot of faith in Tex's
judgment. "Marty knew that if something went wrong," she said,
"Tex would right it in a matter of minutes. If Hank had some kind of
problem, Tex would back him up..."
"Hank's a funny bird," Tex said that night at
Grauman's Chinese. "He's got a truckload of troubles hitched to himself,
off on his own, cut off like he is from Nashville, he's a salmon in the desert,
and the damn guy's running headlong at disaster but nobody can figure it
out." He said he loved Hank, though he was having a bad time making dates,
but knew he'd show at the Rancho. "It's a certain way we have of saying
something and setting it between us."
Tex and Dallas convinced Marty of Hank's sincerity to stay
sober long enough to do the show. Hank had been jailed for shooting a revolver
in a hotel, and I'd been told he hardly ate anymore and sometimes couldn't
remember where he was or where he was going . "His problems are getting the
best of him," Tex said. "But I'll take his word because on certain
things he's as solid as gold. I hope this'll be one of those occasions where he
shines through..."
Phones were jumping at the Rancho, Dallas told me later,
and by that afternoon they was taking reservations, "and the Rancho didn't have
reservations," she said. "We would just fill the place until the
fireman came around warning us to herd a bunch of the people back out into the
parking lot until the next show..."
As soon I
learned about Hank's appearance, I called Barry Bowron. We'd talked about
forming a group called the Tumbleweed Trio while students at The Marion Colbert
School for Individual Instruction, on La Brea by Pink's Hotdogs. I passed the
news on and drove to Mike Parey's in Burbank. A little older than Barry or
myself, Mike hung with a rowdy bunch of Valley Hell's Angels. His father had
been a drummer for Spade Cooley, and Mike played the best unprofessional boogie
piano I'd ever heard. When I catch certain pieces of boogie, I think of the
suntanned girls at the Burbank pool, jitter-bugging in their bathing suits
beside the Coke machine while Mike played the old upright piano.
Barry and I were at the Rancho when Mike showed up in his
leather jacket with the skull on the back. He wasn't wearing Hell's Angels'
colors so he looked just like any other cycle-hound that made the cops nervous.
We met in the coffee shop of the Rancho that occupied the west end of the brown
wooden building. The rest of the structure housed the dance floor and the bar
upstairs. A long, narrow platform along a side wall made up the stage, backed by
a big Home on The Range mural that was brown as resin from all the smoke.
The Rancho described as a "ballroom" by other
writers isn't accurate. A wooden honky-tonk down in a gully, with a barn-like
dance floor and bar in the hayloft is closer to fact. You turned off Riverside
Drive which bordered Griffith Park on the north of Hollywood, and drove down
into a wide dirt parking lot, mostly taken up by the city for a baseball field
and swimming pool on the corner heading into Glendale. At the top of the slope
and along the road ran a railing of two-inch steel pipe fitted into concrete to
keep cars from crashing down into the parking lot.
Behind the frame building the ground leaned to the rim of
the L.A. River, a wide concrete storm drain designed to solve the city's flood
problems, which it didn't.
Sort of down in a hole, the Rancho had a big sign sticking
up from the roof on stilts, announcing DANCING to the passing traffic. Some
nights when the fog crept low, the sign had a pale, peeled-paint look of green,
but at other times it glowed bright, all the reddish-pink lights blinking on and
off. After a while, the bulbs started popping out, but nobody replaced the burnt
ones.
We sat in a booth by the window, eating chili burgers and
pushing the jukebox buttons for Hank's songs, Teresa Brewer, Tennessee Ernie
Ford, Kay Starr’s Wheel of Fortune, Les Paul and Mary Ford's How
High The Moon, or Hank Snow, and Frankie Laine's Mule Train.
Headlights from cars coming off Riverside angled up and down the driveway like
search lights. People were pouring in to see Hank, though he'd just been on the
Kate Smith Show, and neither Barry nor Mike had ever seen him perform.
Almost three years earlier I'd taken a Greyhound bus to
Memphis to see my grandfather, Claude "Mac" McFerran, a railroad
locomotive engineer for Illinois Central. Nothing was as important to my
grandfather as an Illinois Central locomotive, not his own son, home, wife and
daughters (one was my mother), who fled Mac's indifference to find lives of
their own away from the south. He had the rare notoriety of having ridden with
the legendary Casey Jones shortly before the engineer's fatal accident. Mac
would retire after fifty-six years of operating steam and diesel engines from
New Orleans to Sioux City. He'd played guitar and wanted to be a singer like
Jimmie Rodgers, the "singing brakeman," and while Mac strummed along
with the radio or phonograph, and knew performers from his tent-show hopping in
the late 1920's and 30's, he couldn't "break away from the road long enough
to learn a decent song..."
Country Western star Red Sovine once rode with Mac in an
engine and said it inspired him to write one of his songs. He understood Mac's
love of trains, as did singer Red Foley, who Mac had met in Chicago, and while
Mac admired these men, he never understood their admiration of him. Wherever
Foley appeared, Mac had an open door to the best seats in the house, and in
Nashville that meant the Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Old Opry was
broadcast.
After getting into Memphis, we highballed it to Nashville
to visit the Opry. He gave me a blank Illinois Central notebook to doodle in,
and I started making notes about the railroad stops and what we ate. Eggs sunny
side and roundhouse pork chops, black-eyed peas and T-bone steak in another
place like the tin cabin of the Log Cabin Syrup container. I wrote about the
taxi we took to downtown Nashville and the badge on the driver's cap that had a
small electric lightbulb in it.
He drove us around back of the Ryman, like an old foreign
hospital in a movie or a dingy church with arch-shaped windows. Some of these
appeared boarded over, but the crowd waiting were lined down the alley and
around the block. Things had a mystery to them, the old wood doors of the Ryman,
the concrete steps and stream of feet up and down, and the security guard Mac
talked to a Ku Klux Klansman from Jackson, a hundred or so miles west along the
rails.
We went through a rear door to one side backstage, an area overhung with rows of
backdrops and huge curtains on pulleys and ropes, crowded with performers and
hot and busy as a movie set. In a few minutes Red Foley was shaking Mac's hand.
When Foley shook mine he also held my arm and shook that as well. I think of Chattanooga
Shoeshine Boy, and the line about popping a shine rag when I remember
Foley's teeth. A "Pepsodent Smile" carried all the way through. Little
Jimmy Dickens and Minnie Pearl were behind us as Foley told a man in a straw hat
and sleeve garters to seat us up front. The man said they were all filled up,
and Foley, still smiling, said, "Well, scoot them on over, hoss!"
I remember hallways and doors, drapes and platforms, and
seeing Kitty Wells and Hank Williams laughing with a fat man by a water cooler.
Jam Up and Honey, a pair of white comics in black face, were laughing with Hank,
and Jam Up spotted my grandfather and came over to say hello. Kitty Wells had a
scarf or long silk handkerchief she kept wiping her neck with as she and Hank
talked to the fat man. I heard Hank's voice above the other sounds, a high,
sharp pitch. "That's the fellow every one's here to see," the man in
the straw hat said as he led us down onto the floor of the auditorium. He said
to some one else, "Foley says to seat them up front," and the other
person asked some people to "squeeze to the right" on the church pew.
Mac and I were on the end seats, just right of center.
Tense excitement shot through the crowd when Hank
finally approached the WSM microphone. They began applauding and whistling,
stomping and shouting even before he opened his mouth. He twiddled the neck of
his guitar uncomfortably as Foley joked about Hank's being so "hankering
lean as a stovepipe...needing to be stuffed full of possum..." Even though
he was in front of the microphone, Hank's voice didn't sound as clear as it had
backstage. I could hear him snatching his breath as he twisted his face to the
side with a sort of sheepish look that had nothing to do with Foley's joke. Some
private game Hank had with the audience, laughter exploding sporadically, they
knew what he meant, whatever it was. His angular fingers clutched the guitar as
though he expected it to break away from him any moment, and he looked strained.
Each minute he stood there without music seemed to put him in pain. When Foley
said, "Now, Hank, you're going to give us a song," the shouting and
stomping broke out again, and Foley backed away, giving them a little salute.
They kept cheering as Hank maneuvered his guitar, then tipped his head to the
microphone, still looking back to one side of the band.
He said, "Okay, boys, we're all here to make some
music so we might as well get her going..." Putting his mouth close to the
microphone and leaning forward, he said to the crowded auditorium, "...this
here song's about a purr fella with a rough row to hoe, so we're gonna see where
we go with this–" There was a loud ping as his finger flicked a string,
and then his right foot went thump thump thump on the boards of the stage, and
on the fourth thump the fiddle slashed in as sudden and loud as a gun.
Hank's voice broke out above the band as though letting
loose something he'd carried all knotted and bunched and struggling to get out.
It was leaping free as the fiddle bow sawed and Hank cried out, mouth at the
microphone, his breath making a scratching noise rarely heard on records.
It's been written about Hank dipping his knees as he sang,
but he also swung them from side to side like in a slow-motion Charleston,
half-bent and almost crouching over the guitar, face breaking out in sweat. He
kept his upper body stiff like the bones were somehow fused, and turning his
head he had to turn his shoulders, too, like someone with a neck that didn't go
to the side. His eyes were almost angry, he didn't love anybody in that crowd.
The skin hardly moved on his rigid face, except to wrinkle at the edges like a
stiff decal smudged off under water.
Desperate
is the way to describe Hank's singing–a man cornered, trapped by something.
He'd look through people as if seeking some secret exit through which he'd make
a mad dash any moment.
I didn't find that frantic look at the Rancho. Numb with
booze, he looked as if stuffed by a taxidermist and wound up with some electric
gadget that spewed out the song or like he was being worked by remote control.
I'd stood at the foot of the stage, and can only look back and trust Tex
Williams' opinion that Hank felt comfortable in the honky-tonk, somehow on a
long, loose rein. It was the space around him. When his music ricocheted through
an enormous area, the personal space surrounding seemed to shrink in.
A couple of times at the Opry he looked furtively at his
wrist watch as though late for an appointment, but the crowd was yelling for Lovesick
Blues. Before he finished what he was singing, he nodded to the band, no
break in the music and they jumped right into Lovesick Blues. A few times
Hank's body jack-knifed backwards and forwards as he sang, and the tendons stuck
up in his neck and the backs of his hands.
His performance stunned me. It would take years to sort
the impact, the experience had a life of it's own, more than Hank's songs or the
band or the wild crowd.
They went crazy during Lovesick Blues. A middle
aged woman to the right of us fell forward out of the pew onto her knees,
gasping and clutching her face. Girls were screaming, men beating on the
benches, determined, swept up. It made me uneasy.
His piercing glare never slackened. He didn't smile or
flirt or cajole, and his looks weren't even friendly. He'd squeeze his eyes shut
on certain cracks or jumps in his voice, that foot thumping like a rabbit's
though he had the look of a howling dog.
We were pooling resources in the Rancho cafe, Barry
and my Hell's Angels pal, Mike, waiting to see Hank charge the batteries once
again. Mike'd gone out to check the progress as Barry and I listened to the
music bleating through the east wall of the building. It wasn't Hank's Drifting
Cowboys, more the swing beat of the Caravan. Mike quickly reappeared at the
window and knocked on the glass, saying something about "Hank
Williams!" and pointing to the parking lot. I couldn't hear him. and he
hurried into the cafe and said, "Williams is pissing in the lot behind my
bike!"
Barry and I followed him out and to where his Harley was
against the embankment between a big Packard and a panel truck. The Packard's
rear car door was open and two men were standing between the car and Mike's
bike, one tall and lean like a rake handle, wearing a white suit with black
music notes all over it like splotches of paint in the near dark. The Packard
faced the slope, and another man was reaching into the rear seat. The taller one
was Hank. He wasn't pissing now, but he didn't have his hat on and the lights
reflected off his balding scalp. He was leaning with one arm on a high-rise grip
of Mike's angel wing handlebars, and holding a paper sack the size of a milk
bottle. When he saw the three of us approaching, he bent into the car and came
out with his hat.
Mike was the first to reach him and he nodded to Hank,
saying something I couldn't hear. Hank said, "I sure do thank you for
saying that." He smiled and said, "You don't think I hurt your
motorsackle none?" He pronounced cycle as sackle. Shaking his head almost
apologetically, Mike told Hank he could ride the bike if he felt like it, and
said nobody could hurt a Harley Davidson.
Hank said, "I was looking at this here doohickey, a
gettin' a fix on its purpose, and I see there's one of these what you call
suicide gears–"
"Shifters," Mike said. "You're right. It's
called a suicide clutch because you got to let go with one hand to shift while
you're squeezing with the other. No brake, no gas."
"Sounds like a fella's got his job cut out,"
Hank said, winking to the other cowboy standing beside the car.
"You get used to it like anything else," Mike
said. "I'm serious if you want to ride it, just take it out." Mike
said he'd be honored, but Hank waved his hand, shaking his head a little.
"I'm just killing time on solid ground," Hank
said, "partakin' 'til they're ready for us inside..." He said the last
time he was on a motorsackle it had tried to get out from under him. "Just
like a lot of gals I know," he said, and Mike laughed. Hank said, "You
bein' one of these Harley fellas, you know that notion of goin' over the side of
the road." He reached up his hand and made a fish-tailing motion.
"Creepin' away from the road," he said.
"Going to the high side," Mike said. "A
bike'll do that on a winding road or a curve in the highway..."
"You're right about that highway," Hank said.
"I don't recollect the particular road, but seems to me there was some
pitch in it like an old road... One's sunken down in the middle and the hind end
of the motorsackle was a slidin' uphill of it." "Going to the high
side," Mike said again.
"That's just what she did," Hank said. He moved
the top of the sack away from the mouth of the bottle and drank from it, then
looked at me and asked Mike, "This here your brother? You California fellas
just all this naturally good lookin'?" Hank switched hands with the paper
sack and reached to shake my hand. He said, "I'm called Hank..."
I remember his handshake as if it were yesterday. A lot of
people have joked around, saying, "Let me shake the hand that shook Hank
Williams," but it was a funny feeling. His hand was long and felt like
bones, sinewy and hard like made of something other than skin. And icy, like
ice, as though he didn't have any blood in his veins. Like touching my dead
grandmother, the first dead person I'd touched. I was in the slumber chamber
with my mom, seeing my grandmother laid out, and we talked about how her skin
felt, and what the undertakes had done to get her looking as good as she did,
and what they'd done to Jean Harlow with some kind of rubber tube or siphon
device.
After shaking my hand, Hank stepped back like he was about
to fall, but leaned towards Mike's bike, grabbing the seat to balance himself.
"You don't mind if I sit on your saddle?" he asked Mike.
Hiking a leg up and over, he eased onto the bike, his
knees jutting out to the sides like wishbones. Mike monkey'd with the headlight
and ignition, saying he'd kick it over if Hank wanted to rev it a little, which
seemed like a good idea. In a second the ignition was on, and Mike turned down
the pedal on the kick starter, then pushed down hard with his boot and the
engine fired up. Hank laughed, nodding, but looked scared and his teeth were
very yellow. Mike twisted the grip a couple of times, stirring up some
backfires, then killed it because Hank seemed too nervous and the other cowboy
was about to shut it off. "Bet she'll rip," Hank said. "Is she
fast?"
Mike grinned. "Drives the cops nuts... But like I
said, on the open road it can get a little spooky."
"Like knocking some gal up," Hank said. He
glanced to the cowboy and said something, and the cowboy said he didn't know for
sure if Hank had done it, and Hank said, "Oh, like shit it wasn't!"
He'd handed the sack to Mike, and was straddling the bike with both hands on the
grips. "This boy's right," he said. "This goin' to the high
side's the way of puttin' it that makes it understandable." He said to
Mike, "Talkin' about headin' for trouble..."
He gestured to pass the bottle along, and I took a gulp.
It was Johnny Walker Red and I gasped. When Hank tipped it back, he seemed to
just pour it down into himself as if swallowing water. He then got off the bike,
tilted closer to the car fender and said the cowboy was "Roy Rogers, here
to make a motion picture movie about the pitiful side of life..."
The cowboy said, "I'm not Roy Rogers, but if the law
comes through here they're gonna to be doin' some Roy Rodger'n with us lickerin'
up juveniles..."
Hank feigned a shocked look. "Are y'all juveniles?"
he asked. We shook our heads, and Hank said, "Better finish what we're
doin' before the law does get here." Then he asked, "What time do they
get here?"
"The bewitchin' hour," the cowboy said, shaking
his head. Hank offered the sack to Mike who said no thanks, but passed the
bottle again to me. I drank as Hank watched me with a curious smile. He said I
had a "yearnin' look" and "like he's goin' through life sideways...like
seein' what he's maybe leavin' behind..." Barry wanted to take some
pictures and Hank said he didn't mind, so Barry snapped off some shots with his
new flash bulb attachment. I handed the bottle back to Hank who shook it and
said it felt like "half a pint," and he drank it straight down. There
was a trickling sound, and I thought the liquor was leaking out of the sack. But
it was Hank pissing in his pants as he drank. The urine trickled through the
trouser material to form a puddle around his double-eagle boots. Hank apparently
didn't notice it, though he straightened up from the fender. When he saw the
puddle at his feet, he said, "Well, sonovabitch!" and spat down at the
ground. The cowboy brought a small suitcase from the car and said something to
Hank about changing his pants. Then Hank started to laugh. It was a hee-hawing
sound like a donkey, and he rubbed his forehead hard with the fingers of both
hands. He looked like a zombie.
Two other men had come out of the Rancho, one I recognized
from the Caravan band. They looked at Hank disgustedly and at us, and one said
they were set up inside. The Roy Rogers one said, "He doesn't do this as a
rule, you understand..."
"It ain't their fault," Hank said. "Go on
in and I'm comin' in." The men turned back to the Rancho as Hank climbed
into the Packard to change his pants. "Now I 'spose I'm ready," he
said, and as he climbed out and came forward he put his hand on my shoulder. 
We
walked to the side of the Rancho with his hand placed there as though on a stick
or a rudder. When we got to the door, he said, 'You boys come in with us and
enjoy the show." Then he said something like, "Any man that's been
sharin' don't need a breach in companions..." He turned his head to Mike
who was right behind us. Hank's neck looked skinny, the collar sticking away
from his skin when he moved his head. Caught between the dark of the parking lot
and the bright lights of the ballroom, Hank looked very tall and wide, but like
a cut-out figure or a flat cowboy suit with wide padded shoulders hung out on a
stiff clothes hanger. He said to Mike, "Some time, son, we're gonna take
one of those rides."
"I'll ride you up the grapevine," Mike said
eagerly. "A person can have a swell time heading up the mountains. Hell,
it'll haul ass to Vegas quicker'n a car..."
Hank asked the cowboy, "We been to Nevada?" but
before he was answered, he said to Mike, "It's dark here as I reckon it
gets there... They all run into one another, even for a natural-born traveling
man, I'd be all busted up come down on the side of night."
We followed Hank and the cowboy through the side door into
a sort of atrium, and past a stone wishing well and rock fireplace. Straight
ahead through the big doors was the dance floor--the ballroom and the stairs to
the second floor bar led off the main part of the room.
Up on the Rancho's small stage, Hank and the Drifting Cowboys punched right into
the music. It was the first time I'd heard "I'll Never Get Out Of This
World Alive.", and Hank sang it twice. Where he sang "no matter how I struggle
and strive," on the last part of strive, his upper teeth and lower lip
pulled the word out, and the last sound to it, the VE, sort of caught and hung
vibrating even while he'd gone on with "I'll never get out of this world
alive."
Less than eight months late he'd be dead, keeled over in
the back seat of his Cadillac convertible on the way to a big show in Canton.
The driver kept going in the middle of the night, thinking maybe Hank was dead
but unsure of what to do if he was, and knowing he'd get yelled at if he tried
to wake him and he wasn't dead.
The cream of Nashville's music had the best seats at
Hank's funeral, including those that had fired him from the Grand Old Opry not
long after I'd seen him there. More than ten-thousand people pressed at their
back to get a glimpse of Hank in the coffin. He didn't look too bad.
World-renowned music-maker Roy Acuff came out on stage unsteady from a little
too much "nippin" in the back. Hank's coffin was in the orchestra pit,
and when the service was finished, Acuff said to a friend, "If Hank could
see us now, he'd say 'I told you so, I said I could draw a bigger crowd dead
than all of you alive...'"
Hank had been dead about three years when I ran into Tex Williams eating pancakes in
the Mayflower Coffee Shop on Hollywood Boulevard. I'd seen him a couple of times
at Republic Studios when I'd been on movie interviews, but he'd never had time
to talk about Hank. Tex asked me to join him in the Mayflower, and after some
talk about my father and the Hollywood Masonic Lodge, I brought up Hank's
aborted movie career. He'd signed a contract to make pictures but just turned
his back on it. Slim Whitman once told me, "Oh, Hank forgot about it. He
couldn't remember he'd done it because he wasn't sober when he'd signed for all
that money."
Hank's movie stardom was tossed out before it began. Tex
said, "It could've taken place, by god, not like John Wayne or Tex Ritter,
but he could've done better than Bob Wills who wanted to be a movie star more
than anything, like Gene Autry did. Bob thinks of himself that way and he's told
me as much... Hank never said a thing about movies because he didn't care about
'em ..."
Tex pointed to a sign on the coffee shop wall, the
Optimist's Creed: "As you ramble on through life brother/ whatever be your
goal/ keep your eye upon the doughnut/ and not upon the hole."
For Hank, "Life was the hole," Tex said.
"He lived in life's hole and never got out. Even though he had fame by the
tail, and could've pulled himself through like you'd use a rope to get out of
any hole, he couldn't hold it and took fame down in the hole with him..."
Tex said that Hank liked him, they appreciated one
another. "But we never did have a close affiliation outside of music... 
I
don't know if anybody did or could have because Hank was all alone... He had a
streak like one of those characters chasing a carrot that's hung on a stick and
on his head... Spade Cooley was no different, except for his ability to trick people, and he was
crazy to be top man on the hill so he never got stuck in a hole. Spade was
chasing carrots front and hind-end, and that divides a person. Hank didn't want
to settle for a good-sized hunk of the doughnut, as Tex had done. "Hank was
a divided fellow," Tex said, "and lacked Spade's sense of trickery...
Couldn't play both ends." Spade wanted the whole doughnut, Tex told me,
while Hank saw only the hole. It was only Hank's outstanding talent as an artist
that kept him alive as long as he lasted. "There was nothing," Tex
said, "to be improved upon. The boy's life burned up fast..." Looking
at me across the table almost mysteriously, Tex said, "Hank's existence was
misery and sadness. He lives on in people's insides, like he might as well be a
real disturbance in other people's souls..."
and