Hank Williams Jr. - Almeria Club

(Curb Records, 2002)

Reviewed by Kloghole

Yes, I have been fucking negligent. It has been far too long since my last post. Since I have just a few moments respite from my never-ending demands, I thought I would chip in a few words on recent developments swirled in with a review.

Right now is a very fucking bizarre time to be alive. Up is down, war is peace, and wrong is right. But, we are seeing cracks in the veneer. People flooded the streets after Walker’s wholesale assault on working people. Glen Beck lost his Faux News program, and tea-bagging is losing its astroturfed luster. How did we get here? What in the fuck were working people thinking when they supported these goddamn working class-hating vampires? Well, the public seems to vacillate from blind patriotic self-injurious behavior to a momentary questioning of elite self-enrichment (sometimes in the same sentence). These cycles tend to be enmeshed in the contemporary social circumstances and are documented in the music of the time. For an example, let’s take a look at country artist, Hank Williams Jr.

With the album, Almeria Club, we can see a shift in his backwoods redneck rhetoric from earlier albums, especially in his reworking of the song, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” The album, overall, had such potential. The music on most of the songs is gritty and backed by a rowdy slide guitar driven by hooky rhythms. Unfortunately, Jr.’s choice of lyrical content leaves me cringing, complete with facial distortion and full-on shoulder twitching. Driving down the road, I look like I’m having a fucking seizure when I listen to this album.

The first song to grace the listener’s ear starts with Jr.’s ridiculous intro based on his penchant to claim different personalities – “Rockin’ Randall,” “Bocephus,” and, in this case, “Thunderhead Hawkins.” Immediately following Jr.’s unnecessary intro, a bluesy riff leads us into a groovy little tune, but then the misogyny overwhelms the slide hooks and delicious noodling. So goes most of the album. Solid musicianship is lost under a slimy lather of poor lyrical choices and outright buffoonery. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, this is not a significant departure.

Hank Jr. ends the album with a rewrite of his hit “A Country Boy Can Survive.” The original focused on the vigilante ethic prevalent at the time. The growing popularity of vigilantism was the subject of the Charlie Bronson film, “Death Wish,” in 1974. The ethic of the vigilante grew and was a theme within Hank Jr.’s work. “I’ve Got Rights” was an explicit tale of vigilante justice, released in 1979. Later, vigilantism was incorporated into “A Country Boy Can Survive,” released in 1981. The second “Death Wish” movie was released in 1982, and Bernhard Goetz fulfilled his fantasy of vigilantism in 1984. Within this cultural milieu, Jr.’s song brooded about revenge for the death of his friend. “I’d love to spit some beechnut in that dude’s eye and shoot him with my old 45.”

Despite the vigilante themes, there were still some remnants of class issues in society, largely due to Reagan’s assault on workers, but also because we were well on our way to the deindustrialization of the US. In 1982, Hank Jr. included “I’ve Been Down” on the album, High Notes. Whether Jr. knew what the song was about is unclear to me, but it does reflect a slightly different sentiment at the time. “Reaganomics and plastic people make good luck hard to find. All this stuff that’s goin’ down, really got me down this time.” This song provided a more structural approach to the problem of poverty and crime. Instead of taking the vigilante route, the song focuses on the lack of opportunity that drives a man to rob a liquor store, with tragic consequences. Instead of wanting to spit some beechnut in some dude’s eye, we sympathize with man pushed to the edge by “Reaganomics and plastic people.”

Moving forward to 2002’s Almeria Club, Hank Jr. rewrites “A Country Boy Can Survive” and calls the new version, “America Will Survive.” We find that the events of September 11 allow Jr. to find a new venue for vigilantism. The targets of his wrath are no longer the dispossessed, but an unspecified group responsible for the attack when “our people went down.” What follows is a rash of nationalistic chanting, “America can survive,” mixed with blood revenge, “I read ‘a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye’ and that’s an old slogan we’re gonna revive.”

This red, white and blue-shit was pouring out all over, facilitating those who wished to wrap their war crimes in patriotic garb. Once fully immersed in the rhetoric of war, it was not too far of a leap to continue to justify attacks on working folks as the redistribution of the wealth to the wealthy continued to hollow out the economy. The nation swallowed two wars with little more than a whimper, stood by as corporations were handed fistfuls of cash, and then elected the same fuckstains that perpetrated these crimes because “change” did not happen fast enough.

So, how did an artist who sang about the evils of Reaganomics and working class tribulations end up waving a flag for those who champion accelerating Reaganomics? Well, the same way many working class folks did. They took a big old bite out of an economic shit-sandwich that was wrapped in greasy patriotic paper. Without a solid grounding in economics, politics or history, these folks all blow whichever what the flag is blowing. Fuck.

This is where the story takes a small turn. These right-wing fuckstains, full of themselves from their recent victory, began instituting changes they had long salivated over. Once it was finally clear that, “oh yeah, these fuckers are really fucking the little guy,” people started to question the whole paradigm. Now, do not get too optimistic because the public’s memory is short, but the reaction to this right-wing horseshit developed because the right-wing fucksticks drank their own kool-aid and thought that working people actually hate themselves.

Songs like “America Can Survive” helped facilitate the movement for suicidal electoral politics, while an understanding of economic forces withered in artists like Hank Jr. and others. However, he dip pop out “Red, White & Pink Slip Blues” in 2009. While this song laments the economic conditions, it does not identify the problem. Typically, this one song is overshadowed by the flag waving nonsense on the others. It is hard to listen to music that is so completely off the mark and out of touch with reality. Almeria Club tends to have this grating lyrical tone. As a result, I give Almeria Club one sweet sticky ball for the musicianship and two turd nuggets for lyrical content.

Sweet Dreams Motherfuckers