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Friday, November 29, 2002

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

WANTED: Country standup bass player who can also rock out with a hard-body electric, and an electric fiddle player, for grueling tour of smoky bars. Must own instruments and have a high tolerance for alcohol and other distractions. Stetson and boots, optional.

	Hank Williams III: "I'll tell you, Nashville ruined country music." Hank Williams III Where: Club Laga, Oakland When: 9 tonight. Tickets: $17, 412-323-1919 Web Site: www.hankthree.com

Shelton Hank Williams III is in a bind. He wears out musicians like some pickers wear out strings, and a popup on his Web site advertises for replacements. The grandson of the first and greatest country music superstar, and son of Hank Williams Jr., he goes by Hank III (say, Hank three).

Lean, expressionless, dressed for the stage in old-school Western duds -- from across a crowded bar he's the spittin' image of a grandpa he never knew. At 29, he's the same age as Hank Williams when he was found dead in the back seat of his 1952 Cadillac, clutching his final page of lyrics. A notorious connoisseur of alcohol and amphetamines, he died of alcoholic cardiomyopathy -- he drank himself to death.

"Well, no sir, I don't draw any parallels between him and me," says Hank III, in a telephone interview during a Chicago sound check. "He did what he did. I do what I do."

In fact, the progeny has in many ways forsaken much of what was forged by the progenitor, one of the founders of country music. Hank III has rejected most of the country music establishment and the feeling is very mutual, or maybe it's the other way around. Put it this way, the guy's got a song called "Trashville."

"When I started singing they were all coming over, 'Hey, I knew your granddaddy and here's what we can do,' " he says. "They wanted me to sing all this [stuff] that they make out there in Nashville. I'll tell you, Nashville ruined country music."

Bucking the system, Hank III alternates his alt-country from simple, slow guitar ballads to raucous rockabilly and chicken-pickin' cowpunk metal, music he calls "hellbilly." Commercial radio won't touch it, but he's become the darling of the young tattoo-pompadour-bowling shirt set.

Two albums into his recording career, his latest is "Lovesick, Broke and Driftin'." Songs like "Whiskey, Weed and Women," "Five Shots of Whiskey," "Nighttime Ramblin' Man" and the title cut speak for themselves of a lifestyle choice eerily reminiscent of his grandpa's.

While the mainstream press bashes Three for having the gall to look like Senior without writing like him, they seem to be missing the point. He doesn't want to be Hank Williams.

"The music business killed him by pushing him to do more, more, more, and they [screwed] with my dad for years," he says. "And, well, Curb Records [screwed] me, too. They made me put Bruce Springsteen's 'Atlantic City' on the [latest] album. I don't know why. I have no problem with Springsteen -- he's good, I like him. But they made me tack that song onto the end, there."

Hank III says he has enough new material to begin recording a third album. A metal disc that Curb won't release has been languishing in the can for months.

He's rapidly approaching the New Year's Eve of his 29th year, the milestone on which his grandfather famously passed. But quirks of genetics and a curious twist of music history are all that link them -- that and an insatiable need to write fiercely independent songs.