How Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley
Attained Intravenous Enlightenment

It is an interesting coincidence that the respective coroners’ reports for Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley place both of their deaths on April 5, and that they were born within six months of each other just before the Summer of Love.  Yet these two Seattle icons made dramatically different exits.  Kurt went out with a bang in 1994, while Layne slowly faded away, finally disappearing completely in 2002.

They were suffering saints in my formative, pube-sprouting years, and I enshrined their brooding images in my superstar iconography. Inspired by rock n’ roll fantasies, I steeled my will against the Christ to whom eunuchs bow, tasted 31 flavors of fucked up, and my grandmother even gave me an old maroon cardigan to match my long blond hair. Monkey see, monkey do.  The result was the long-awaited loss of my virginity to an avid Hole fan and constant harassment from rednecks at school. Thanks, Grandma.

Then my heroes killed themselves. I never had to really miss Kurt or Layne, though, because the cd-player kept their souls spinning and drowned out the noise of the outside world. Those songs still bring back memories from my childhood.

^

Kurt

© Brandt Hardin at DREGstudios.com

Kurt Cobain was a lonesome, sensitive child. His parents always bickered with each other when he needed attention, leaving him to his only friends—an imaginary specter named “Boddah” and his gay pal from school, Myer Loftin. Naturally, he was bullied by local yokels for maintaining the latter relationship, setting him squarely against the surly sons of loggers and their masculine redneck values.

Kurt faced a cruel, predatory cosmos throughout those early years in Aberdeen, WA. It was a world populated with judgemental adults and their ruthless, piranha-like spawn, where harsh criticism and bathroom bitch-slappings lurked around every corner—a world which Cobain would never make peace with.

“I wouldn’t have been surprised if they voted me Most Likely to Kill Everyone at a High School Dance[,]” he mused years later.  “[B]ut I’m sure I would opt to kill myself first.”

Nothing seemed to satisfy the young man, so he left the comfort of home to seek enlightenment in the gutter. He bummed change like a wandering mendicant, did cheap drugs, surfed couches, and occasionally slept underneath the bridge. This bitter taste set him apart from the flavorless middle-class and their wealthy overlords.

Legend has it that Kurt bought his first amplifier with his father’s guns. His mother had tossed them into the river after a vicious domestic dispute, and Kurt fished them out to take them to the pawn shop. After a brief spell with a punk band called Skid Row, Cobain formed Nirvana with bassist Chris Novoselic, playing a particularly angsty variation of quirky garage rock which resonated with the wayward youth of Seattle.

In 1989 Nirvana was signed to the Sub Pop label, where they enjoyed moderate underground success. Kurt wrote in his journal, “Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. Nirvana means freedom from pain and suffering in the external world and thats [sic] close to my definition of punk rock.”

Cobain’s choice of band names is compelling.  The original Sanskrit term simply means “to extinguish the flame,” as in the flames of desire. The Buddha used the word “nirvana” to describe the state of Enlightenment which frees the soul from this miserable karmic cycle of endless reincarnation.

The Buddha taught four Noble Truths, which come off to many Westerners as being extremely emo:

  • Everything is suffering.
  • Suffering is caused by desire, which chains every being to fleeting pleasures—and the subsequent sorrow of loss.
    Food? Fighting? Fucking? Friendship? Family? Freedom? Feelings? Fuggedaboutit!
  • The only way to end suffering is to end desire—to extinguish the flame.
  • To end desire, one must obtain Enlightenment through the Eightfold Path:

Right Understanding
Right Intention
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

According to the Buddha, there are no Absolutes to cling to—no heaven, no soul, no God. The Universe is plagued by eternal Entropy, and the only hope is to escape.  For Cobain, there was only one way out.

In 1991 Nirvana released Nevermind, and the teenage universe was suddenly cloaked in lumberjack flannel. The album—featuring an infant swimming toward a fishing hook baited with a pistol—eventually sold over 25 million copies worldwide, knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous into the Abyss of Not-Number 1. When not completely obtuse, the lyrics were sorrowful, paranoid, and incurably cynical.

Immediately, MTV cameras revolved around Kurt’s face like black-eyed cherubs. Rolling Stone indulged every painful memory and complaint. Teenagers across the globe were inspired to lament their own pathetic lives before they even graduated highschool. They were goaded to buck the fascist trends of corporate America by buying alternative commodities, and a few were even moved to blow their own heads off after Cobain’s suicide.

Kurt wasn’t trying to be a trend-setter, though. He surveyed the sea of Cobain-clones before him, and it made him sick to his stomach. Literally. The waifish, chain-smoking singer suffered from chronic gastroenteritis, which he medicated with heroin until his dying day. Burning guts. Nausea. Loss of appetite. Vomiting. Constipation. Mud-butt. All was suffering for poor Kurt, and the grunge crowd doted over his every tummy ache.

Kurt despised their sympathy, and claimed to hate the fame. He didn’t want “to be a fucking spokesman” for MTV’s alternative marketing scheme. Like the black-clad anarchists gathering in the Pacific Northwest in the 90s, he wanted to break the constraints of “evil corporate Oppressors” with Universal Enlightenment. In his wildest fantasies, Kurt was ready to start a Revolution, even if that meant breaking a few eggs.

One of the drawings in Cobain’s posthumously published journals shows a camoflage-clad soldier wearing a football helmet dangling from a noose. In one passage, he states (with grammatical errors left unedited):

“I am in absolute and total support of: homosexuality, drug use, in experimentation (although I am living proof of harmful results from over indulgence) Anti oppression, ie (religion, racism, sexism, censorship and patriotism) creativity thru music, art, journalism, Love, friendship, family, animals and full scale violently organized, terrorist-fueled revolution.

“You cannot de-program the Glutton.

“It would be nice to see the gluttons become so commonly hunted down that eventually they will either submit to the oppposite of their ways or be scared shitless to ever leave their homes[...]

“Arm yourself, find a representative of Gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers head off.”

In a letter to Tobi Vail (drummer for Bikini Kill) composed just after the recording of Nevermind, Kurt wrote (without corrections):

“Yeah, all Isms feed off one another, but at the top of the food chain is still the white, corporate, macho, strong ox male. Not redeemable as far as im concerned[...]

“But there are thousands of green minds, young gullable 15 year old Boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what theyve been told of what man is supposed to be, and there are plenty of tools to use. The most effective tool is entertainment[...]

“We can pose as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system to start its rot from the inside[...] And the hairy, sweaty, macho, sexist dickheads will soon drown in a pool of razorblades and semen, stemmed from the uprising of their children[...]

“Homophobe vaccectomy[...]

“The revolution will be televised[...]

“As you may have guessed by now Ive been taking a lot of drugs lately It might be time for the Betty Ford Clinic or the Richard Nixon library to save me from abusing my enemic, rodent-like body any longer.”

Drug addiction would take precedence over any of Cobain’s revolutionary aims.  As with the Buddha, the world hit Kurt like a hot kiss on a raw nerve, and he was eager to subsume all earthly desires under one.

In February 1992 Kurt married Courtney Love, the brash, bitchy frontwoman for the feminist fatale rock band, Hole—which was a much more appropriate title than her own surname. Love was also a junky, happy to slave over a hot spoon for her husband. It is telling that Kurt seemed to intentionally misspell the drug’s name in his journals, calling it “heroine.”

During one of the Buddha’s sermons, an earnest seeker asked the Awakened One, “What is Enlightenment?” The Buddha simply smiled and held up a flower. It must have been a red poppy.

The junky’s pursuit of Nirvana is like an opioid variation on the Eightfold Path.

  • Right Understanding: Opiates can kill the pain of desire, if only for a moment.
  • Right Intention: Seek a fix to annihilate one’s Self.

Not long after Kurt and Courtney’s daughter, Francis Bean, was born, an interviewer for Vanity Fair reported that Courtney had shot heroin while pregnant. The public reacted with disgust, and Francis Bean was soon taken into state custody for a short time. Unable to stem the tide of media criticism, Kurt and Courtney resorted to leaving violent threats on journalists’ answering machines. Despite the couple’s erratic behavior, they were awarded custody of their daughter in early 1993.

While he was disgusted with the world, Kurt was fascinated by childbirth. His last album, released in 1993, was called In Utero (though he originally intended to call it I Hate Myself and Want to Die.) He was obsessed with the ability of male seahorses to bear children, and famously said: “Holding my baby is the best drug in the world. I don’t want my daughter to grow up with people telling her that her parents were junkies.”

The situation quickly deteriorated from there.  Police were called to the Cobains’ Seattle home a number of times in 1993. On one visit they confiscated an arsenal of Kurt’s guns, which he claimed were for personal protection. On another occasion he was arrested for assaulting Courtney—who had quite a reputation for beating the shit out of her lovers as well. The Cobains’ nanny and various others close to the couple have claimed that Kurt was making plans to cut Courtney out of his will and file for divorce.

Nirvana embarked on a tour later that year, which ended abruptly in March 1994, after Kurt overdosed on Roofies and childrens’ sleeping pills in Italy. He was promptly flown back to America and checked into an LA rehab facility—from which he escaped over the fence. For days, Kurt Cobain was missing. Courtney Love even hired a private investigator, Tom Grant, to look for her husband.

Kurt was finally found by a maintenance man on April 8, 1994, behind the locked door of “the greenhouse” above the garage of the singer’s home in Seattle. A 20-gauge Remington shotgun was cradled in his arms, and a hole was blown through his head. There were syringes, baggies, and enough heroin to kill a small horse in his veins. No fingerprints were found on the gun or the bullets. A farewell letter addressed to his imaginary friend “Boddah” was placed beside his body.

Like Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Pete Ham, and Seattle riot grrrl Mia Zapata, Kurt Cobain was 27 when he died.

Conspiracy theories abound.  Some see an assassination by greedy record industry executives, who sold Nirvana albums at a rate of 50,000 a day in the wake of Cobain’s death. Tom Grant, P.I. believes that his former employer, Courtney Love, had her husband killed to secure her inheritance. Curiously, Hole’s new album was released two weeks later, entitled Live Through This.

On April 10 a crowd estimated at up to 10,000 gathered in Seattle’s Space Needle Park to pay homage to their newly christened rock star martyr. A recording of Courtney Love was played over a sound system, in which she alternately read portions of Kurt’s alleged suicide note, wept, and incited the crowd to deride her late husband for being so selfish. The devout followers burnt their flannel shirts, called their fallen angel an “asshole” in unison, and at least sixty-eight copycat suicides were recorded worldwide.

The last lines of Kurt’s letter to “Boddah” are particularly insightful:

I’m too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don’t have the passion anymore and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

peace, love, Empathy,
Kurt Cobain

^

Layne

© Brandt Hardin

Like Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley came to be portrayed as a Seattle-spawned Opiate Icon.  But unlike Cobain—about whom many millions of words have been composed—Staley’s life languished in obscurity. Many argue that Layne’s exacting musicianship far outpaced Cobain’s sloppy style, and that he did not receive the commemoration he deserved. Perhaps if Layne had gone out in an equally dramatic fashion, he would have become a celebrated dead rock star like Kurt. But whereas Cobain talked about hating the media while occupying the spotlight, Staley actually preferred to remain in the shadows, where he slowly slipped out of existence.

Like many of the kids who came to worship him, Layne had a sorry start in life, growing up in Kirkland, WA.  As with Cobain, his father left when he was only seven, an abandonment that would haunt the boy into adulthood. When Layne finally did reconnect with his estranged father—after the old man saw his son in a magazine—Layne encountered a withered junky who used his now-famous son to stay high.

Layne was attracted to the sex and drugs in rock n’ roll from the start. “I wanted to do blow, and I wanted to have those babes under my arms,” he said candidly during his last interview with Rolling Stone in 1996. “I didn’t know what blow was, and I didn’t know what sex was, but it looked impressive to me because it was written in [a rock music] magazine.”

He wasted no time pursuing his dream. After high school, Layne began playing in various glam bands before meeting guitarist Jerry Cantrell in 1987. They worked on a few different projects together, eventually moving away from the 80s metal sound with Alice in Chains’ first album, appropriately entitled We Die Young, in 1990. This was followed by the release of Facelift later that year—which would go double platinum.

Their second LP, Dirt, is generally considered to be Staley’s brooding masterpiece, even though most of the lyrics were written by Jerry Cantrell.  The album sold over six million copies, and remains one of the most influential albums of the 90s—after which every frontman began singing out of his tonsils.  It was soon followed by the sorrowful Jar of Flies, which was actually the first EP to go platinum in the US.  Staley contributed most of the lyrics on that album.  The meloncholy songs lull the listener into a contemplative stillness, and paint a desperate picture of a man whose innocence and joy has all but dried up.

It was Layne’s work with Mad Season in 1995, however, that yields the most insight into his state of mind.  Even the cover art was his own illustration.  You might call the mellow music ”crackhead blues”: songs about addiction, depression, and the disappointment that accompanies false religion.  It was a surprising success, selling more than a million copies.

Unfortunately, success was not as kind to Staley’s soul as it was his bank account.  It didn’t take long for the excess to wear him down. ”If I ever got a gold record, I was going to do my first line of coke on that. I had a great time riding around in limos and eating lobster and gettin’ laid[...] But I can’t physically or mentally live in that lifestyle constantly.”

Layne even claimed to have had a couple of near-death experiences which he thought might turn his life around.  “I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of where I was going to go if I did not follow through with [sobriety.]  That makes me sad for my friends who have taken their own lives, because I know that if your time is not finished here, and you end it yourself, then you gotta finish it somewhere else.”

This was to be Staley’s last magazine interview before dwindling into obscurity. He would lose his long-time girlfriend, Demri Parrott, to a drug-related bacterial infection later that year. After this, he simply withered away.

By 2002 he was living in Seattle’s notoriously drug-saturated U District. He became a complete shut-in, flushed with cash, and his only visitors were basically his drug dealers. His body was shattered, and his teeth had rotted down to black gums.  With one foot in the grave, he denied his body according to the Eightfold Path of the Junky.

  • Right Speech: Gets you the right amount for the right price.
  • Right Action: Keeps your dealers from thinking you are a narc.
  • Right Livelihood: Brings in enough income to get you to the next fix.

“My liver is not functioning and I’m throwing up and shitting my pants,” he told biographer Adriana Rubio, about three months before succumbing.  “I know I’m near death.  I did crack and heroin for years.  I know I have no chance.  It’s too late.”

On April 20 the police kicked in his door after neighbors complained of a horrible smell. They found Staley surrounded in drug paraphernalia, having been dead for at least two weeks. He was 34. Like so many before and after, he had turned his back on the world in pursuit of liberation. His family and friends were devastated. Incidentally, Layne’s last visitor, former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr, died about a month ago from a methadone overdose on March 8.

“I believe there’s a wonderful place to go after this life,” Layne had said back in ’96, ”and I don’t believe there’s eternal damnation for anyone.  I’m not into religion, but I have a good grasp of my spirituality.”

  • Right Effort: Measure out the perfect amount for a good hit.
  • Right Mindfulness: Cook the goods slowly so you lose the cut but not the rush.
  • Right Concentration: Tie off, plunge the needle, and lay back in eager anticipation as the flames of desire flicker out.

© 2011 Joseph Allen

NirvanaLake of Fire
1993

Mad SeasonRiver of Deceit
1995

*[4-6-11 Ed. note: Some minor editing has occured since the original post.]

February 19: The Death Day of
Bon Scott

Courtesy of Brandt Hardin at DREGstudios.com

A man’s testes are many things to many people. They are objects of affection to be delicately caressed, vulnerable targets for an enemy’s swift boot, or bulging fashion statements in designer briefs. These throbbing organs generate a man’s ultimate purpose—they fuel aggression, propel the pleasure principle, and bestow a masculine pronoun. If his aim is true, future generations will revere his potent orbs as the very wellspring of Life itself.

AC/DC’s greatest frontman, Bon Scott, was extremely proud of his balls. He wore high-waisted skinny jeans to accentuate their curvature, and described them to his wife-to-be as “two hard-boiled eggs and a sausage.” He even wrote a song about them, tastefully entitled, “Big Balls.”

That’s just how Australians are, mate. It isn’t hard to find a bourbon-swilling brawler ready to prove his pair in the land down under. How fitting, then, that after drinking himself to death on February 19, 1980, Bon Scott would be exalted as the patron saint of Australia. He was their true-to-life working class hero, dead at 33.

It was a rough road to glorification. Bon bounced from job to job and band to band for over a decade before fulfilling his destiny in AC/DC. His work ethic was relentless. Never afraid to get his hands dirty, he scraped by laboring on fishing boats, driving tractors, and loading trucks at a fertilizer plant. But his struggle wasn’t just about grit and grime.

Though Bon’s first gigs were behind the drums with the bluesy Spektors, he soon found himself getting dolled up for the utterly unoriginal pop band, The Valentines. Those groovy years from ’66 to ’70 found Scott wearing Shakespearean bangs, poofy sleeves, and ball-shriveling bell-bottoms, all while singing backup to covers of “She Said” and “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Getting girly seems to be a rite of passage for hyper-masculine rockers. I guess it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock n’ roll.

During his four year run with the fuzz-faced folk band, Fraternity, Bon began to retune his energies to the Y chromosome. It was probably a surge of testosterone that fueled his brutal bike wreck in May of 1974. Estranged from his wife, wasted on Jack Daniels, and fired up on irrational fury, Bon hopped onto his motorcycle and crashed into an oncoming car, which landed him in a three-day coma with his teeth smashed out. This mishap shook him up, but it was only a rest stop on the highway to Hell.

Bon was still recovering when he saw the Young brothers—Angus and Malcolm—play their ferocious blues licks in an Adelaide club. They were introduced by mutual friends backstage. When it was suggested that Bon sit in on an AC/DC rehearsal, the fresh-faced Angus Young accused Bon—now in his late 20s—of being too old to rock n’ roll. Bon was quick to show the wee Scottish sprout what cock rock is all about. He tore his shirt off, screeched his heart out, and they offered him the vocalist gig on the spot. Bon told them he would think about it. His commitments to Fraternity and his love for his wife were still tugging at him, but ultimately, there was only one path to take. After all, he hadn’t grown that curly mullet to become a docile family man or play the recorder in some fucking hippie band.

AC/DC are often accused of being repetitive and two-dimensional, generally by those who lack sufficient levels of testosterone to feel the power. Their music celebrates the infernal joy of boyhood, and during their heyday, the riffs vibrated between the legs of a hundred million loose-living lassies. Three themes appear consistently in Bon Scott’s lyrics: rock n’ roll, Hell, and the testicular impulse. For example, he preached the devil’s gospel on “Let There Be Rock,” and “Rock n’ Roll Damnation,” and thumbed his nose at moralists—who consistently banned AC/DC from performing during their early days in Australia—with “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be” and “Highway to Hell.” I am certain that if Bon had survived to make one more album, it would have been called My Rock n’ Roll Balls Are Hotter Than Hell.

Millions of eager, pubescent boys were prepared for the mysteries of sexual union by tracks like “Love at First Feel,” “Squealer” (an ode to taking virginity), “The Jack” (a euphemism for venereal disease), and “Night Prowler.” The latter—which describes the erotic desires of a nocturnal murderer—achieved tabloid infamy after Satan-worshipping serial killer Richard Ramirez was reported to be obsessed with it. And of course, there is my personal favorite, “Whole Lotta Rosie,” which is about making sweet love to a grossly obese woman, conjuring visions of “Mama” Cass wearing nothing but a dozen jelly donuts.

One may suspect this rock star bravado to be a campy pose, but Bon Scott lived every bit of his image. The man got more tail than Davy Crockett on a coon hunt. Life backstage was a whirlwind of groupies and booze, and Bon was never one to let an opportunity go to waste. Aside from reefer and the occasional snort to keep the party going, he wasn’t much of a drug user. In fact, you could say he was just a social drinker. The thing is, he couldn’t stand to be alone. Toward the end, he was guzzling Scotch like a desert nomad at a water fountain. “It keeps you fit,” he once quipped, “the alcohol, nasty women, sweat on stage, bad food—it’s all very good for you!” Maybe so, but Bon was as well-known for STDs at the urology clinic as he was for hits in the hard rock scene, and his diligent, if rapidly deteriorating liver became the subject of scientific curiosity. How fitting that his last televised performance was “Touch Too Much” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops (according to biographer Clinton Walker.)

Of course, there was more to Bon than the rock n’ roll caricature that eventually consumed him. He was steadfastly loyal to his family and friends, and sent hundreds of letters from the lonesome road. At the height of his international success—after the 1979 release of Highway to Hell—he regularly confided to those close to him that he longed for a stable home, a good woman by his side, and children to carry on his name. Behind that cunning leer was a deeply sentimental soul in search of solid ground to stand on. His last weeks were spent with Anna Baba, a Japanese woman he’d moved into his London flat. She barely spoke a word of English, but would cook him traditional meals and mother him through constant benders. He worked diligently on an upcoming album down to the final gulp. With a touching stroke of sincerity, his last recording was “Ride On,” a lament to the weariness of the endless highway.

As dawn broke on February 19, 1980, Bon flopped into the passenger seat of his friend Alistair Kinnear’s car after downing rows of whiskey doubles at the Music Machine in London. Unable to carry Bon up to his flat, Kinnear reclined the passenger seat, covered Bon with a blanket, and left him in the car to sleep it off. By the time Kinnear returned that evening, Bon was blue, having choked on his own puke. The certificate reads: “Death by Misadventure.”

Australia let out a collective cry of mourning. Breasts were beaten, whiskey shots were poured into the soil, and Highway to Hell echoed through the Outback with eerie poignancy. Bon’s ashes were interred in a Freemantle cemetery. Like Jim Morrison’s tag-covered grave in Paris or the syringe-and-cigarette-strewn park bench near the site of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Bon Scott’s grave has become an international destination for mullet-sporting pilgrims. A statue was erected in his honor, and an arch above the entrance bears his name. Hordes of fans converged at his gravesite for last year’s 30th deathday, blaring bagpipes and strumming guitars to invoke his spirit.

Sketchy conspiracy theories cast suspicion upon AC/DC’s next album, Back in Black, which was hastily released a mere five months after Scott’s death. Some questions are compelling: Who were the “two big men” that Anna Baba claims rifled through Bon’s flat the day after he died? And what happened to the notebooks that Bon had been filling with lyrics? His parents never received them. Some claim that Scott’s final lyrics were used for the album dedicated to him. I personally believe that his notebooks are being held in a subterranean laboratory beneath Graceland, along with the extraterrestrial corpses recovered at Roswell.

It is striking, though, that Brian Johnson was chosen to be the new frontman within a month of the funeral. Many fans were appalled by this swift replacement—but not enough to hurt record sales. Back in Black became the second best-selling album in the world behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Brian Johnson became Paul of Taursus to Bon Scott’s Jesus Christ.

And lo, the Evil One said, “Let there be Rock…”

© 2011 Joseph Allen

January 1: The Death Day of
Hank Williams

Courtesy of Brandt Hardin at DREGstudios.com

It’s that time of year again, when self-deluded pretenders swear off deadly vices, and morbid rubberneckers tally up the annual rock n’ roll body count. 2010 saw the passing of Ari Up of The Slits, garage rocker Jay Reatard, Ronnie James Dio (who brought the devil-horns hand gesture to heavy metal,) Malcolm McLaren (the media manipulator responsible for the Sex Pistols’ public personas,) and R&B’s paraplegic panty-drencher, Teddy Pendergrass.

Today also marks the 48th anniversary of Hank Williams’ tragic death. Found cold and blue in his ’52 Cadillac at the age of 29, sodden with morphine, chloral hydrate, and Pabst Blue Ribbon, he became the seminal celebrity martyr.

Dubbed the “Hillbilly Shakespeare,” Hank Williams blazed like a backwoods bonfire, enthralling honky-tonk hayseeds from coast to coast. He recorded 66 songs in 6 years, not counting the posthumous releases or spoken-word tracks as his alter-ego, Luke the Drifter. Hank infused the typical country themes of tragic love, unbearable solitude, copious carousing, and looming death with an ominous sincerity—the voice of a tortured lunatic hellbent on living out the songs that he wrote. When he sang “I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive,” he fucking meant it.

Born to a physically broken father and a tough, overbearing mother in the sticks of Alabama, he was only six when his father was committed to a V.A. sanitorium. His mother, Lillie, ran a flophouse, where Hank grew up in the company of various roughnecks and ne’er-do-wells. The boy was a frail loner from the get-go. Due to damning genetics, rural malnutrition, or just plain ol’ hard luck, Hank showed symptoms of spina bifida occulta early on. His malformed vertebrae slowly pried apart under the weight of his body, allowing the spinal chord to protrude from the protective column. The physical agony of this birth defect would intensify over the course of his short life like a biological reminder of original sin. God clothed Adam and Eve in garments of skin, and the stitches were busting apart by the time they were handed down to Hank.

Lillie encouraged Hank to sing the Lord’s praises as a child, which surfaced in the gospel themes of his early recordings. His favorite childhood hymn was, appropriately, “Death is Only a Dream.” But Hank would also be inspired by more worldly influences. His adolescent fantasies were painted by early Western films, and townsfolk recalled the boy moseying about town in a cowboy hat with two pea-shooters strapped to his waist. As with many budding rednecks before and after, Hank took his first swig of hooch at age eleven. Most importantly, young Hank received guitar lessons from a local black street musician, the humpbacked Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne. As with Brian Jones, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughn after him, the incisive soul of black blues reverberated in Hank Williams’ falsetto twang and crack rhythms.

In 1937 Lillie moved her children to Alabama’s capital, Montgomery, when Hank was thirteen. Under the heavy-handed management of his mother, Hank landed gigs with local radio stations, toured small hillbilly venues with his new band, The Cowboy Drifters, and guzzled booze as if it were good for him. While traveling with a medicine show in the summer of ’43, Hank encountered the sharp-tongued, aristocratic muse whose cold, cold heart would light him on fire.

Rural medicine shows were the post-Depression equivalent of today’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival. After performing, the musicians would meander through the crowd selling snake oil and herbs. As he peddled elixirs among the folk, Hank laid eyes on a lovely blonde belle and suddenly lightning struck. A few days later—shirtless and drunk—he proposed on their second date. Audrey Mae must have seen something special in his mischievous smirk and dark eyes, because they were married the next year after her divorce was finalized. Two years later, in 1946, the couple hopped off the train in Nashville, where Hank would record the bulk of his chart-topping material under the guidance of his mentor and confidant, Fred Rose.

Post-WWII Nashville was not the cornpone tourist trap one finds today. It had no mega-churches, no strip clubs, no amusement parks, and very few recording studios. In those days, high society Nashvillians proudly proclaimed their city as the Athens of the South, a thriving center of higher learning and aristocratic refinement. As such, they regarded the incoming hordes of git-tar wielding dreamers as whiskey-bent white trash. Still, the city boasted the most widely syndicated—and advertisement saturated—hillbilly radio show in the nation, WSM’s Grand Ole Opry. Not long after his premiere on the coveted Prince Albert Tobacco segment in mid-1949, Hank Williams became the star of the show.

The importance of Fred Rose’s role in Hank’s meteoric rise to stardom cannot be stressed enough. From the early Sterling Records cuts like “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul” to the seemingly endless string of MGM hits (37 in all,) Fred Rose was right there in the studio with Hank, sifting gold from the sandy depths of the country boy’s sorrow. Hank’s lyrics are a string of timeless gems, ranging from cynical humor to calloused despair, and rendered in Zen-like simplicity through clever rhymes. “People don’t write music,” he once claimed. “It’s given to you.”

Fred was also an industry insider who knew the right buttons to push. Always loyal to Hank, Rose was shrewd but never greedy. The same could not be said of Hank—at least in the beginning—and certainly not of Audrey. After years of nickel-and-diming it in Montgomery and Shreveport, LA, Hank and Audrey were ready for a break. Little Hank Jr. was on the way in early 1949 when “Lovesick Blues” made it to number one. That’s when the cash started pouring in, and soon they moved back to Nashville. Hank bought a house on Franklin Road—on what’s now known as Music Row—which Audrey set about renovating.

The flood of money provided for fur coats, crystal china, plush furniture, and fancy guitars—much of which was smashed to pieces in true rock n’ roll fashion. Hank and Audrey were known to beat the living damn-it out of each other on a regular basis, particularly when Hank was on one of his sloppy benders. Upon learning that Audrey had aborted another man’s child, he was inspired to write one of his greatest hits, “Cold, Cold Heart.” Though he grew weary of the constant touring, it must have provided some relief from a house without love. Certainly, he was never known to say no to a groupie—no matter what her age might be.

In 1950, Hank headlined the Hadacol Caravan, “the last and greatest medicine show.” Promoted by the always shady Senator Dudley LeBlanc of Louisiana, and featuring comedians, clowns, and West Coast show girls, the tour was a sort of product initiation ritual for Hadacol—LeBlanc’s 24-proof vitamin tonic, assured to induce instant whiskey shits. Though LeBlanc’s checks bounced repeatedly, the nationwide exposure blasted the “King of the Hillbillies” into the national mainstream. Soon Hank was signing Hollywood movie contracts and performing on the new electric church: network television. The irons were hot and Hank was banging away, but the suffocating culture of seedy opportunists and fat cat executives was crushing the life out of him. He had been transformed into a cartoonish commodity, when all he wanted to do was hunt squirrels and fish by a quiet river.

By 1951 Hank was pulling in over $100,000 a year, an inconceivable fortune in those days. His personal life, however, descended into a sorry shitstorm of pills, booze, screaming back pain, and unraveling relationships. He couldn’t buy enough toys to keep his son close to him. Audrey filed for divorce in January of 1952, citing Hank’s “continued misconduct,” and demanded a king’s ransom in settlements. Hank just continued falling apart. He continued to tour, but often showed up too drunk to play. Frequent stints in rehab were of no avail. The Opry canned him after repeated no-shows—though Hank insisted that he quit—and the Cowboy Drifters began moving on one by one. And yet, during this downward spiral ol’ Hank continued to record hit songs, such as “Jambalaya” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and even took one last stab at true love.

On October 19, 1952, the stunning Billie Jean Jones became Mrs. Hank Williams at the tender age of twenty, before a crowd of 14,000 people in New Orleans. Their wedding photo was to be Hank’s last. He wore a white hat and the purple bruises of a recent ass-whipping, and it was a matter of minutes before the bloom had blown off of the rose. Not yet thirty, Hank was reduced to a slobbering shell of his former glory—his appearance regularly fluctuated between withered and puffy, his scalp resembled a shiny coconut, he frequently puked and pissed on himself, and his cock stayed as limp as a leather tassel. He began to suffer wrenching chest pains, shortness of breath, and of course, his twisted back was wracked with excruciating spasms. His spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. He told Billie Jean, “Every time I close my eyes, I see Jesus coming down the road.” So it is understandable that he would turn to “Dr.” Toby Marshall for relief. This ex-con huckster, who’d bought his diploma in a gas station parking lot, provided unconditional understanding, prescriptions for morphine injections, and an unlimited supply of the potent barbiturate, chloral hydrate. Finally, a friend that Hank could rely on.

In the winter of ’52, Hank was booked for a New Year’s gig in Canton, OH—an uncommon occurrence at this point, given his notorious unreliability. He departed his mother’s boardinghouse in late December, left a note and a box of chocolates on his father’s doorstep, said goodbye to Billie Jean, and stepped into his powder blue Cadillac for one last road trip. His driver, Charles Carr, claims that Hank was in good spirits most of the way. He sang songs, beat a rhythm on the dashboard, and washed down chloral hydrates with cans of PBR. There are conflicting accounts from there—here’s one of them.

Snow fell in heavy blankets as the Caddy passed through Knoxville on New Year’s Eve. The pair wound up taking a room in the Andrew Johnson Hotel. Hank began hiccupping uncontrollably, so Carr phoned for a doctor. Dr. P.H. Cardwell arrived promptly, and booted Hank up with two shots of morphine mixed with vitamin B12—sure to knock out a hard case of the hiccups. Two porters carried Hank’s limp body to the car later that night. Carr gunned it for Canton, but when he stopped for gas in West Virginia, he found Hank stiff as a board. Autopsy reports revealed that Hank had bruises and contusions all over his body, but the final verdict was that he “died of severe heart condition and hemorrhage” on January 1, 1953.

From there, the preliminary blueprint for the dead rock star motif was drawn up and splashed across the newspapers. The vultures descended without hesitation. Hank’s funeral in Montgomery attracted close to 20,000 people—the largest U.S. crowd since the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. His white-clad body was buried with a white Bible beneath tons of concrete and hysterical tears, and his countless sins were publicly forgiven.

Immediately, his records began flying off the shelves, and every object he had touched became a holy hillbilly relic. From backwoods honky-tonks to trendy dive bars, “The Angel of Death” is now the official soundtrack for suicidal alcoholics and future opioid casualties, and shamelessly depraved writers [the author shifts in his seat nervously] rehash this sordid tale year after year. At 29, Hank Williams was canonized as a martyr in the church of excess, and so long as the Digital Machine keeps chugging along, his voice will echo for all eternity.

For further reading, see Colin Escott’s Hank Williams: The Biography.

© 2011 Joseph Allen