Hard Listening

by Raoul Hernandez

Butch Hancock’s winter tour of Texas equaled exactly two concerts this past weekend. Which is probably for the best. As I told the Lubbock raconteur in La Grange on Friday night, winter treks have been a bad idea since Buddy Holly.

Rainy roadways stretching an hour east of Austin beginning at rush hour on TGIF ended on the main square of La Grange (pop. 4,923) in Bistro 108. Hancock joining our party before his soundcheck that night proved as delectable as my bacon-wrapped quail. He was gone before the buttermilk pie arrived.

Seating 84, the Bugle Boy, which Hancock had never played, felt as intimately high-tech and tony as Bee Caves villa/venue the One World Theatre. The difference was clientele. In recounting how he perfected his wry songcraft in tractor cabs on the flatlands of his hometown (“second gear is in the key of G”), Hancock asked the half-full house who among them drove tractors. Half the room raised a hand. Artist and audience: perfect match.

Opening with Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” Hancock multi-purposed his two 45-minute sets, putting a fine studio polish on new tunes that peppered his five-night No Two Alike stand at the Cactus Cafe last summer and prepping his annual TVZ tribute at the same venue this coming March. “Pine Cone,” “Danglin’ Diamond,” “What a World This Mess is In,” and a cappella encore “Owl” – a highlight here as well as last August – represented the former, while his late comrade’s “No Place to Fall” and “Buckskin Stallion Blues” served the latter. Sandwiched in-between, the singer's newly minted musical genre, “hard listening,” counted some of Hancock’s greatest hits: “Naked Light of Day,” “Split & Slide,” Woody Guthrie cover “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Flatlanders’ set staple “Julia,” “You Coulda Walked Around the World,” “Box Cars,” and the stirring “If You Were a Bluebird.” Surely the Bugle Boy will blow more choruses of Butch Hancock in the future.

Saturday night at Austin’s Acoustical Cafe, located in Austin Parks & Recreation’s Senior Activity Center on Lamar, the Wimberley-bound troubadour reappeared sans beard in a black cowboy hat, the previous evening’s “incognito” Jimmy Lafave look washed away with another day’s downpour. The full house of a 100 and change in the lodge-like assembly room were treated to another pair of 45-minute hootenannies, the local performance easily edging out the one in La Grange.

Material mostly overlapped, as did the stage patter – almost no hands went up here in Cowtown when asked who drove a John Deere – but the differences were notable. Besides vintage Hancock like Joe Ely’s “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me” and “Leo y Leona” from the vinyl version of Hancock's The Wind’s Dominion, the headliner delivered an absolutely breathtaking rendition of TVZ’s signature tune “Pancho & Lefty.” Hancock Hall of Famer “Row of Dominoes” fell perfectly afterward. Bookending the show, with assistance from Hancock’s Wimberley crony and opener Butch Morgan on red, heart-shaped electric guitar, “Just a Wave, Not the Water,” “Dallas,” and the ever-rousing “West Texas Waltz” closed the second set ahead of encores “Long Sunsets” and “Box Cars.”

The second standing ovation of the weekend was pointedly deserved.