Wayne Hancock
Interview by Ben Lybarger
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RRP: I heard you got the name “The Train” from riding the railways? WH: Oh, no, no. Some people lie so much and just make up stories. That’s a good one, though. RRP: So how did you get the name? WH: I got the name, “The Train,” from a friend of mine who was pretty drunk in a bar. This was years ago; I was about 25 years old at the time. He insisted that for my show I should wear an engineer’s cap and have these railroad crossing things there and when show was over they would come down. Of course they were just makin’ a big joke, you know. I was playin’ for drinks and tips at this hole called the Broken Spoke down there in Texas at the time, and people started rememberin’ that name. You know how nicknames are; you don’t usually like them. There is something about every nickname that nobody likes, but I started liking it when people started remembering it, you know? So I just kept the name and over the years people began to make up stories about how I got it. One is that the way I play guitar is like the wheels on a train, you know how the wheels look when they move? Another is that I am like a train, I don’t stop, I just keep going and going. Two or three hours a night I’m playin’ usually. At least two. But I have been pulling back on that this tour. RRP: Why is that? WH: Because I am coming up on 40, that’s why! I ain’t 25 anymore! [laughs] Five nights a week, three hours a night that’s 15 hours a week to be standin’ up on stage yelling at people. RRP: How many days a year do you tour? WH: Well, I don’t know, but it’s a hell of a lot more than 200. During a light year, maybe 175 days, but lately it’s more. With playing and touring it’s probably 250 days a year. That’s a lot of touring. RRP: So you were in the Marines? WH: Yep, four active and two reserve. Two reserve inactive, which meant I didn’t have to cut my hair and all I had to do was once a year report and say "no I don’t want to join." There wasn’t no reason to stay in when I was in. It was peace-time, and everybody was downsizing the military. I was gonna re-enlist but at that time you couldn’t re-enlist and keep your same MOS, which is what your job is. I was an infantry man, so I couldn’t stay in the infantry. I’d have to go over there and be a barracks marine for two years, and I wasn’t into that. I wanted to blow stuff up and shoot people, or shoot objects or whatever. [laughs] So I got out: there wasn’t nothin’ going on. By the time something started goin’ on, I was already 29. Your considered too old by the time you’re 29, which that’s a hoot. Especially when people are referring to you as a kid and you’re like “I’m 29!” So I got out, man. They wouldn’t take me now. If they do take me now you better start prayin’ because that means somethin’s really gone wrong if they call me. RRP: So where did you grow up? WH: I was born in Texas. My dad was kinda like me. He wasn’t as good a musician, he didn’t play for a livin’ he played for pleasure, but my father would work one job two or three years. Maybe mathematical engineering, he’d design things, then he’d get tired of that and move somewhere else. We’d usually move a thousand miles at a time. So we moved all the way to Tahoe, and in ’71 my dad got tired of engineering or whatever, I’m not into that so the terms might not come out right, but he designed a lot of bridges and tunnels. He was a jack of all trades and a master of just about every damn one of ‘em I ever saw him do. So he could go from one job at the extreme one end of the country to the other. He was a forest ranger for two years until he got sick of it and we moved back to Texas. We must’ve crisscrossed the country probably four times, north to south. I moved back to Texas in ’78. Finished out in East Texas at Killroy High School. RRP: So touring all the time wasn’t much of an adjustment. WH: Oh no. In fact the adjustment was sittin’ at home and working a day job, not goin’ anywhere and being happy with my $5.50 and hour, which was good money man, in 80, what the fuck was it? 1988. So long long ago. [laughs] The last century. That’ll make you feel old. Anyway, I’m probably one of the few people you’ll ever meet that enjoys driving. I really like driving. I flipped my damn van last year. Somethin' went wrong is all I have to say. I wasn't loaded; I don’t drink anymore. Certainly wasn’t that, and I never smoked any weed that made me that damn high where I flipped my car. I had a short in my turn indicator, you know, the blinker, and the thing started goin’ into cruise control because everything is housed in that module. We had rigged a wire to go from A to B so I could have headlights, and that would turn on my cruise control, so I lost control of my van and flipped it. RRP: Did you get injured when you flipped it? WH: Hell yeah I got injured. I broke my tailbone. RRP: So you’re in the Country Music Hall Of Fame? WH: I’m in there. I not quite sure how I pulled that one off, but I did pull it off. Somebody told me I was in the Hall of Fame, and I was like “no I’m not,” and he showed me. It was even in the book; I’m a Hall of Famer, man. [laughs] RRP: Have you ever gone there to check it out? WH: I’ve never seen it. I’m not one of those guys who has to go over his own press. It sort of almost embarrasses me. I’m not really old enough to be in there, you know. At least not to my knowledge. RRP: So what old-timers do you like? WH: Of course I was into Hank Williams. I like Frank Sinatra and all those Big Band guys. RRP: How do you feel getting a strong endorsement from Hank III, who covers some of your songs? WH: It’s great. He’s one of my best friends; we’re pretty tight. 
RRP: In other interviews you’ve stressed that you didn’t get into music to make a million bucks, that you’re more driven by a sense of integrity... WH: [laughs] Well, it’s a good thing too, because there ain’t a million bucks [to be made in this music]. RRP: Do you ever get discouraged, like when you’re on the road barely makin’ it: lonely, broke, and tired? WH: All the time. This tour is no different, man. This tour is down to the wire too. A lot of it is record company, the economy, and stuff like that. You see, I’m not really their pick to be the winner because I do what I wanna do; nobody tells me nothin’. I’m deemed snakebit and unmanageable (although I do have a manager now, I picked him myself - he’s one of my best friends). I’m not really interested in how it all works [the music industry], and getting in the game to be a big radio star. I think the game is kind of over with, and if you’re as good as you think you are, maybe you’ll get there anyway, right? It doesn’t really matter because all my fans don’t listen to the radio, so it’s not actually that bad a thing, not being played on the radio. RRP: Except where I grew in sort of rural Ohio, people think of country music as mainly Ford truck commercials. They have no connection to artists like yourself that they’d probably love if K-105 actually played real country music. WH: Except now there’s satellite radio. They got the Rebel Radio, or whatever it is. I’m all over Rebel Radio. It’s just a weird world. It’s a cool time to be alive right now to be doin’ music, but it’s very uncertain I would think for anybody who was in that part of the business. RRP: Do you even think that if you ever did become a big star that you wouldn’t be able to write the way you do? Can someone write a good country song when they are living an easy life, eatin’ caviar off the breasts of supermodels? WH: Well, if you’ve been down that road before, you never forget it. And if you’ve been down that road and you walked it, you’re never gonna be that way because that’s a myth, brother. All that stuff, it’s not real. The only guys who get into that business are the ones who can’t make it here on the outside – that’s where they go. If you got the kind of mentality to do that, and it’s just me sayin’ this, if you’ve got that kind of mentality then you could never be like me anyway. I’m like this, brother, because I got burned so many fuckin’ times that I finally just flipped out and went over the edge and said fuck it, I don’t care anymore. I’ll play anyway. That’s different. Now watch me get famous anyway... that’ll fuck everything up. [laughs] RRP: I read somewhere that you were doing a video from your tour of the Northeast, is that true? WH: Yeah, in fact the video has already has already been cut. It almost didn’t happen. I didn’t like the sons of bitches, and I didn’t like the way they was treatin’ me and my guys. We were supposed to do this thing at a club in Duluth, where these guys are convinced that nobody knows us. These guys are fuckin’ idiots, you know what I mean? It’s just this total lack of knowledge. My record company even thinks I’m not well-known out east, and I’m like “are you kidding me? I’ve been out here for years.” My problem is not filling dancehalls, my problem is getting dancehalls big enough to take the crowds so they have enough room to dance. The production company was the same way. I told that guy up there in Duluth, I was like “these streets look really familiar.” Well, I used to play up there all the time, you know. So we took a gig which otherwise wouldn’t have paid no money for anybody except for them, and it turned into a $1500 venture for me. But if I let those guys do what they wanted to, I’d have no money or nothin’ and would’ve still had to go on tour. So, it’s really a dog-eat-dog situation out here. RRP: What is the video of? WH: It’s for Thunderstorms and Neon Signs. I told the guy all I wanted was motels and driving and rain. That’s ALL I want. That song is only about what I say it’s about. I don’t want no cute kids and their daddies. I don’t give a shit about that. All I want is the song portrayed the way I want it, and if it’s not gonna be portrayed, then I ain’t gonna fuckin’ do it. Besides that, they were payin’ for it. It was free. Every time I say somethin’ it happens to me. I told the press I’ll do a video when they pay for it. Well, six weeks later these guys jump up. RRP: So how did it end up? Have you seen the final cut? WH: I haven’t seen the final cut, but I liked what I saw. Like I said man, I’m a son of a bitch for sittin’ there and doin’ that kind of stuff. To me, if you’ve gotta have pictures with your music, then maybe you’re listenin’ to it wrong. It’s a real simple thing, you don’t need pictures to understand it. RRP: People need a certain image to latch on to… WH: Yeah, the guy was sayin’ the “younger generation” might like the… well fuck the younger generation. I AM the younger generation, okay? MTV and CMJ and all that stuff, it all went commercial on us. The music’s still there after all that goes away. RRP: That’s kind of leads in to what I was gonna ask about the “retro” scene and the trendy, image conscious aspect of it. WH: I do hate that word too. I don’t know much about it; I’m not much a part of it. Hell, callin’ somethin’ retro is the same thing as using a racial epithet to me. It’s almost means that you really don’t know what you are talkin’ about. Retro would be the style, but I wouldn’t call the music retro. If people are looking for the kind of music which they used to adhere to their hearts, wouldn’t that be going forward perhaps? Because retro to me is 70’s, 80’s, 90’s country. That’s retro. We’ve already been there. I don’t want to go back there. The stuff that I play hasn’t been allowed on the radio for many years because I don’t have drums. It used to be in the 40’s if you HAD drums you couldn’t play on the radio, then it switched. RRP: So why do you prefer to not have a drummer? WH: Just don’t need one. RRP: You had a drummer at one time, didn’t you? WH: I did for a while, but it was only for certain things that I wanted. I was using some horns and stuff and a six-piece band on a couple of my cuts, and I had some guest drummers. But if you’ve got a beat, if you’ve got the rhythm, you’ve got a doghouse bass, and you got this guy bangin’ on a guitar, then the drums are there. They’re as percussive as a drum. I’m not against the drums at all, but there’s too many cats out there doing the drums. I’ve found favor in this kind of music, so I stayed with it. When I DO use drums, the motherfucker better be bad. I mean super-bad like Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa, because if he ain’t, then I’m gonna make him look bad. If you come up on my stage, we play. If you can’t play, get off of my stage. I’m an asshole about that, but that’s the way it is. People pay money to see a show. They’re not paying to see us stand up there and fuck around and not get a damn song right. They won’t be entertained, and we’re here to entertain you. RRP: So what’s the longest time it has ever taken you to record an album? WH: Probably three days was the longest I ever spend recording an album, but that was my first one. I never had recorded in my life. I did three six-hour shifts, so about 18 hours… not even a day. RRP: So it is basically just live in the studio. WH: Right. You just go in there, everybody plugs in and records. Then we go back and fix stuff because you’ve got about 5 or 10 minutes between takes. Sometimes guys want to diddle around and do different things, but I don’t like to spend more than a half-hour working on a song. It is a waste of my time and theirs. RRP: So a lot of the soloing is just off the cuff, just like every night on the road? WH: Pretty much. RRP: With you studio stuff being pretty close to live, why did you decide to go ahead and put out a live album? What is different between live in the studio and live on-stage? WH: Well, because the audience is part of the equation. You have music, that’s just part of it too. You have the audience and us: that’s a triangle. We play music and send it out to you. You react and throw it back at us, and it goes back and forth as pure energy. In the studio you get no feedback. Plus, if you know it’s live, you know that guy played that solo. He didn’t go over here and punch it in note by note like these jackasses do in these studios. You know it’s real. Even a lot of the so-called “live” albums these bands put are all fixed up in the studio. That’s why I’m not involved in the studio, brother, it’s all bullshit. If their live albums are bullshit, what’s that tell you about the rest of it? I tried to tell those guys about this shit [speaking about a popular band, whose name had to be omitted]. They just blew it off. They ain’t gonna listen to me. What do I know? As far as they’re concerned I’m just some guy who couldn’t handle the big time. He’s over here. I can handle the big time; I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. I was on the radio when I was a kid. The big time’s always been out there, but it’s just a big fuck time. Nobody needs that shit. 
RRP: How old where you when you started in music? WH: 14. I wasn’t gonna do it for a living, man. I was just gonna do it for fun, then it just became my livin’. I started making more on the weekend than I was making on the weekdays. RRP: I read that you’re a non-practicing alcoholic. Has giving up the drink helped you to survive longer on the road? WH: Certainly helps. [laughs] I do like smoking my reefer. RRP: So why did you quit drinking? WH: I got a real problem with it, man. I like doing everything in excess. You can’t smoke in excess, though, you just smoke up all your weed and you got nothin’ the next day. You can drink enough to kill yourself, but can’t smoke that much. It might take you over 40 years if you wanna do it like that, but you ain’t gonna do it overnight. At least I’ve never known of anyone OD-ing. I have to have it, man, because AA wasn’t working for me. A lot of guys’d be coming out there bitchin’ about not being able to drink and I was like “I don’t want to hear about this,” you know. I am trying to stay sober and these people come in whining about the fact that their doctor gave them whatever the hell pill it was he gave them. RRP: You’re in bars every night, though. Is that pretty tough? WH: Doesn’t even phase me. As long as I got my left hand and Lucky’s, I’m alright. I can hit that cigarette and it makes my shaking go away. It does for me what nothing else did. I was on Depakote, Zoloft and all that shit for years and years trying to get out of it because I’m manic. A hundred miles an hour or nothing. Finally I started medicating with weed. Works for me. I’ve been accused of cocaine and herion and it’s like, man, [laughs] show me the tracks on my fucking arms. I don’t do that. I certainly tried my share of shit, brother, but I don’t understand how you can do cocaine on a daily basis and do this for a living… let alone herion. You gotta have a pretty fucked up job to be able to come do your job like that. RRP: I read that you were also on Prairie Home Companion. How was that? When was that? WH: That was a long time ago… I want to say ’98. Maybe ’99. Shit, I can’t remember it was so long ago. I was interesting. Garrison Keiler comes out and just starts calling parts, just like I do, and everybody starts freaking out. He liked us a lot. I thought it was a lot of fun. RRP: I also read somewhere that you have some sort if rivalry with Junior Brown. WH: I got no rivalry with that guy. That guy thinks he’s the best, and I AM the best. [awkward pause] Just kidding! [laughs] I’m really not the best… couldn’t say that without laughin’ about it. It’s a really asinine thing to say to somebody. I told [Hank] Three to tell that to Kid Rock one time. Now, I never met the guy, but he certainly looks like he could be bad about that. That’s all he brags about: how much money he made and how much money he made. First of all, you ain’t the fuckin’ best, and you ain’t the richest either. That star can come down as fast as it went up, man, especially out here. I’ll tell you what, I do like his singin’ a lot better than what he was doin’, though. RRP: What was he doing before? WH: Horrible, horrible rap or hip hop or whatever. I wish him the best of luck. [shrugs] Yeah, Three doesn’t like him; I found that kind of interesting. It’s too bad; I thought maybe he’d be all right. All that money went to his head, not Three, the other kid. Three’s cool. RRP: Yeah, it seems a lot of performers are more concerned with making cash and patting their own backs than making the music that means anything. WH: No shit. All you gotta do is come close to not being around this world a few times and that shit, you get over it. I got real sick last year and damn near died on the road. RRP: I remember that. You had to cancel your Cleveland show. What happened? WH: I got a staph infection. I believe it started from a spider bite or something happened here on my thumb. I went the doctor the next day and he said “oh that’s a staph infection” and gave me antibiotics, and of course those didn’t kill it. A week later while we were in Virginia I started having hallucinations. I’d hear my father talkin’ to me, and my father has been gone for years. My father told me one night when I was asleep to get up and go to the hospital. Well, when you wake up in the morning and you’re that foggy that you dreamt of your dead father tellin’ you to go to the hospital, you don’t fuck around: you go to the hospital! [laughs] So, I get to the hospital, and I must’ve been pretty close because first of all: they took me on a Sunday. That’s number one. You gotta be in critical condition for them to take you on a Sunday. Number two: I was embarrassed about everything that I had done, and thought I hadn’t done enough. That’s how I knew I was a goner: I started thinking about all the shit I’d done, and man, I hadn’t done very much. RRP: So what were you thinking that you still wanted to do? WH: Well, I really didn’t give a shit about it after a point. First of all, my record company was calling me up while I was in critical condition, wanting me to do a free fucking show in New York City. You know, calling up my surgeon while I have a breather thing attached to me and all those heart things, and I had a priest in my room asking me if I want to make out my last will. Fuck that shit. It was a bad deal, brother; it was really close. So at that point I really didn’t give a shit. I put a lot of hard work into getting’ here, and I had been out for exactly ten years at that time, so I figured it was a good end to a good story. I didn’t really care if I died or not. I was just tired. Then I started getting all these e-mails from people. I had a stack of e-mails an inch think, and that helped me get turned around. But I figured right then if I ever lived through this, I wouldn’t want to do it for money any more. Money’s important, don’t get me wrong, you gotta live, but Christ Almighty, after that all I wanted to do was pay my bills, pay my band, and keep my head above water. I make more than enough to keep my head above water when I make it, but there are days when you don’t always make it. I had to pay a ten thousand dollar thing to the IRS just last month… back taxes from a bad booking agent, man. RRP: Damn. Well, that’s all the questions I have right now. Is there anything else that you want to put out there? WH: Just that I ain’t ever givin’ up. Anybody who don’t like me can fuck themselves. I don’t know if you want to write that. RRP: Oh yeah, I’m gonna use that. |
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