By Mike McGuirk

HANK WILLIAMS JR . has always been this weird figure to me. For a long time I thought he and the wrestler from the Slim Jim commercials were the same person. I certainly never gave a rat's ass about his music growing up, never gave him the time of day. In my mind, Hank Jr. was the country equivalent of "Take the Money and Run"-era Steve Miller. Just bad music. I mean, when I became interested in country music, the guy was singing the theme to Monday Night Football. Today that actually sounds pretty cool. But I was stupider then. I think I only cared about "good" music in those days.

This summer I heard this song "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound" on a jukebox and really kind of dug it. Then, like, two weeks later, I was playing the song on jukeboxes myself, and then I was buying Hank Jr. records and reading about his totally fucked-up life, and I decided that Hank Jr. rules and that he doesn't get any respect from so-called country purists, which may or may not be true. Who knows? I feel like it's true. Anyway, it was that quick. One day I'm making fun of the guy, and the next day I'm telling people about how he was cool because he fell about 600 feet off a mountain and survived and his face got all fucked-up so he has a beard and maybe even no eyeballs behind the ever present sunglasses.

Maybe the coolest thing of all is that in the early '70s he told all the Hank Sr. fans to eat shit when he got sick of playing crappy Nashville country pop and he started playing some kind of Southern rock-country hybrid with Dickie Betts that spoke to millions of drunk people across the country. It even seems like the outlaw country scene he's a part of is kind of embarrassed by him, or its fans are, anyway. The thing is, when you put up a lot of Hank Jr.'s music next to Kris Kristofferson's, the differences are pretty glaring. Hank's music is less heavy, it isn't real poetic, and it just seems more geared to pop audiences than the Rhodes scholar's stuff. It's also less self-conscious.

Geek-worthy?

The thing about "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound" is that it comes from a 1979 Warner Bros. record of the same name that is really good. Besides a couple annoying "Johnny Reb" moments, Hank Jr. cuts the shit and sings about being kind of a fucked-up person in a really direct and honest way. On both the title cut and this other song about ODing on cocaine, called "OD'd in Denver," he really nails the whole doomed drug/alcohol abuser thing. Anyway, I guess this is what jumped out at me. The guy's father died in the back of a car of an overdose, and he had his own demons to wrestle. So when he sings about this stuff that is totally real and personal, I want to hear it. I don't understand how I didn't know this was one of those '70s country records you had to have, because it is. With the amount of conversations I've had with one record geek or another over the years, how come nobody was like, "Yeah, Honky Tonk Heroes is a must, but you wanna check out Hank Jr., dude."

It's because the dude doesn't really get any recognition. I think the Monday Night Football thing and his staunch refusal to become unrowdy have kind of stuck in the craw of "discerning" country fans. Whatever – I used to be like that. The point is, I think it's time Hank Jr. got revisited, reevaluated.

Break from the norm

Incidentally, Hank Jr.'s son Hank Williams III is playing a show at Slim's. I also know nothing about him, only that he covered "Cocaine Blues" and that his records aren't alternative country, new country, or anything. They're some weird cross between the two. It's not that Hank III's music is at all alternative, or has any ties to the crap orgy of lameness that alt-country is. It's more the fact that the guy played on some songs with the Melvins and he played in a kinda bad stoner metal band, Superjoint Ritual. As far as superstar kids go, Hank III is doing way better than that robot Bob Dylan spawned. Shit, Elvis's kid had scary alien sex with Michael Jackson.

Hank III's father made a similar break from the norm. Because he went from performing in the sacred style Hank Sr. pioneered to performing what on the surface sounds like Ford truck commercial music, Hank Jr. was seen as a traitor or something. He went from a ready-made career as a Vegas act to his own admittedly lowbrow manifestation of hard-living and bad decision-making. He's survived, and, as I found out this summer, he put out some music that is way beyond simple and deserves the widespread success he enjoyed into the '80s.

Hank III seems uninterested in making anyone happy in the same way. He's working under much less scrutiny and almost avoiding it, it seems. He plays what he wants to play and with whom he wants to play. His two records are good, solid albums. But they're not changing the world. That doesn't matter anyway, and the feeling I get from them is that Hank III is someone whose music should be experienced live, where all his fucked-up energy and innate love for country music, or whatever, can come to life. Hank Williams III and his band, Assjack, perform with Hazard County Girls Fri/11, 9 p.m., Slim's, 333 11th St., S.F. $17. (415) 255-0333.