Peace, prayer, protest

On new CD, Butch Hancock speaks out about war

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 09, 2006

TERLINGUA —

As lightning flashes in the western night sky, master songwriter Butch Hancock and his family tumble into their white pickup and rumble down an unpaved desert road toward town for a Saturday dinner. The memory of the turbulent summer sunset is still fresh — a rosy Big Bend twilight blown away by sudden wind and faint splatters of rain, followed by the appearance of storm clouds in a swollen mushroom cap, rising and then receding with last light.

Hancock hunches forward over the steering wheel, paying close attention to the bumpy road as the truck's headlights cast fractured, bouncy beams across the darkened desert. His wife, Adrienne, sits beside him. The three children in the rear bench seat — Hancock's 8-year-old son, Rory, and his two teenage stepdaughters, Katy and Helena — call out for their dad to load his new album, "War and Peace," into the CD player. It's a recent family ritual, evidently, to play these songs on every drive.

The opening cut is Hancock, singing a capella, in a voice that suggests a Texas Bob Dylan. The song's tone suggests a solemn prayer in an old church, or perhaps a shaman's cry to the desert starlight.

Come all ye mad and ragin' fearless friends of war and peace/ Come all ye sad self-righteous frightened friends down on your bended knees/ All beings on this earth . . . you must not harm them/ All weapons you hold deep within your hearts . . . you must disarm them.

Hancock's children know the words of these songs by heart. So in the cab, the girls begin to sing along — very gently, very delicately — with their father's recorded voice. All else is quiet in the desert tonight, except for the haphazard flash of lightning, the hum of the engine, and the squeaky springs of Hancock's pickup.

Go find someone who's hungry, and give them food to eat/ Go find someone who's homeless, and bring them in off of your street/ Every man you meet's your son . . . every woman is your daughter/ Go find someone who's thirsty. . . and give them water.

These words — sentiments from the song "Give Them Water" — are the lyrical overture to "War and Peace," one of the most powerful exhortations for peace made by an American musician in the aftermath of George W. Bush's declared war on terrorism. Although Hancock never mentions the president or Iraq except through allusion or metaphor, "War and Peace" is unapologetically political. It is by turn reflective and defiant, headstrong and hopeful, witty and provocative.

"If somebody says, hey, this is a political album, all I can say is, 'Oh. You noticed!' " says Hancock, 61, putting a frame around his first solo release in nine years. He suggests the sentiments on the record echo a larger cry that he's been sensing for quite some time now.

"Everybody's crying for freedom, all around the planet," he says. "You can listen to every sound as a cry for that — whether it's people or the wind, or war machinery, or church singing, or anything else. All of it is somehow a cry for freedom, though nine times out of 10 they may not know what they're crying for. Or: It's a cry that they think is for freedom that takes them in the exact opposite direction.

"Maybe I'm doing the same thing (with this album). We'll see."

___

Butch Hancock is an iconic figure in Texas music, renowned as a writer, architect, photographer and free-thinker, though he's not commonly perceived as a "political" artist. Butch's forte is wordplay, both as a solo artist and as a member of the eclectic band of Lubbock musicians known as the Flatlanders. He loves abstraction and acrobatics and imagination; even his most serious, transcendental music is rich with a sense of play. Hancock wrote his first songs in the cab of a tractor in Lubbock. He's the kind of guy who'll rhyme "circumstance" with "workin' pants."

Hancock by no means betrays those roots on "War and Peace." Yet this new music often evokes the activist spirit of Gandhi, or Guthrie, or Martin Luther King Jr. "If you send someone to kill someone, or to be killed to stop the killing . . . you are also killing," he sings on the album.

"I've never understood why it's so hard to see that aspect of war — that more killing is more killing," says Hancock, eager to discuss the ideas behind the music. "I think what allows (people) to do it is that they choose up sides. Our side against somebody else's side. That's ridiculous. We're all on this planet together. Whether we like it or not." ' And here, Hancock laughs, blue eyes flashing. "And some people don't like it, evidently.

"When Bush said let's roll (into war), I said at the time, 'Man, that's throwing us back 40 years.' And I corrected that later to say '400 years.' Seriously. There was not one voice I heard in the religious world (after the terrorist attacks) saying, 'Wait. Jesus said "forgive." ' "

Hancock insists he didn't set out to write an entire album of war and peace music. It all began three years ago with a single song, "Damage Done," its closing lines written in response to Sept. 11, 2001: "One day in hell, two towers fell/What's lost can never be won/By war on war adding terror to the damage done." He contributed that tune to "13 Ways to Live," an album on which 13 Texas artists ranging from Patty Griffin to Ian Moore to Eliza Gilkyson performed songs inspired by the outbreak of war in the Middle East.

That was supposed to be it. Yet Hancock felt compelled to keep writing. He mused about matters of God, oil, power, reason, religion, humility lost and found . . . and electronic voting machines. He had six or seven songs finished by 2004. In the spring of this year, he began laying down the first tracks for a full-scale "war and peace" album in his home studio at Terlingua. (As it turns out, he plays almost every instrument on this self-produced album: percussion, organ, guitar. . . .)

"Every day, even while I was recording the songs, I kept thinking, 'I hope I don't have to put all this on an album. I hope it all becomes moot,' " says Hancock, sitting on a porch outside his Terlingua home, a fanciful sun-bleached structure rich with curves and domes and wild angles, a monument to asymmetry that he's been building with his own hands for the past several years. "I was hoping that (the president) and his friends in Washington would have a huge change of heart and an opening of their eyes. But I don't think it's going to happen.

"(Rather), I think they all have their eyes open to what they want to have them open to, and it's going to remain that way. You know, (the musician) Paul Simon once said, 'Man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.' That's one of the great quotes of this century."

Hancock suggests the space of the desert helped him in the writing, that the broad skies gave the songs room to breathe on their own. (He's lived out here for almost eight years now, after basing in Austin for almost two decades.) Yet it's the breadth of Hancock's songs — not just the free, unrestrained voice of the singer — that sets "War and Peace" apart.

Take, for example, "Cast the Devils Out," a changing of the guard anthem that has the flavor of a Woody Guthrie sing-along. Set that against "Toast," a drinking song, with banjo and church organ, that invites both smiles and shivers as it examines a man's urge to self-medicate in the face of "what God hath wrought" on Earth. Finally, there's "Brother Won't You Shake My Hand?" in which Hancock champions nothing more revolutionary than the triumphant spirit of love and wisdom: "When fear and hatred come undone, war itself will cut and run."

"I have a special attachment to 'Give Them Water,' " says Hancock's friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, referring to the song Butch's daughters were singing in the pickup. "Butch sang that song at our house (near Austin) one night, late one night, and I was totally knocked out by I it. My wife, Janet, was in bed, but not quite asleep — so I got Butch to go into the bedroom to sing it for her. I've been in love with the song ever since. It's overpowering, a work of art.

"Butch has never been afraid of anything, you know— and the beauty of that song is that it's just so blatantly fearless. The melody is so archetypal. I don't think of it as a song I know. Yet it has the weight of something completely familiar."

___

In the forgiving light of a cool September afternoon in the desert, Butch Hancock looks toward the Christmas Mountains on the eastern horizon and considers the beautiful mystery of writing songs. Hancock was close friends with the late, legendary Townes Van Zandt — and it is the master's words that begin this conversation.

"Townes always said don't worry about the message; think about the tone," says Hancock, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, his face deeply tanned from a summer in the desert sun. "For years, I've looked at songwriting in the sense that you have this magnet, and you run stuff by it, and the magnet picks up things. You notice what's on there, and you start to piece things together from that.

". . . . Or maybe it's like a crystal that's been magnetized, and it brings in music that fits to that energy, lyrics that fit into that energy."

As Hancock talks about mystery and song, his son, Rory, spins around in a red hammock on the porch. The boy is all blond hair and energy. The father remarks that one of his son's favorite cuts on the new album is "Old Man, Old Man," a provocative rumination on the idea of who does — and does not — qualify as "a chosen people" in the eyes of a judging, old man God. "Old Man, Old Man" doesn't reference the war directly; but the song alludes to fundamentalists of any religion caught up in interpretations of good, evil, and God's will.

"I actually thought of subtitling this album 'What is Truth, Volume 7,' " says Hancock. "I think that's the most important verse in the Bible, and Jesus didn't even say it. I think it's in John 18: 36-37, when Jesus says my purpose here is to bear witness to the truth. And then Pilate says, 'What is truth?' And no answer came.

"On that question rests everything else in the Bible, and everywhere else, for that matter."

Hancock does not dare to answer that question himself. But the artist suggests that the path to truth is on the inside, not the outside. "All the great ones have said, it's all within. 'The kingdom is within,' " he says, tapping his chest for emphasis. "The real war is the one between your ears."

In that sense, the central themes of "War and Peace" echo those of so many notable Butch Hancock songs and albums over the past 30 years. Hancock hears whispers of truth in the "Wind's Dominion," atop the "Gift Horse of Mercy," inside fate's sacred circle in "Leo and Leona," within the existential calm of "Long Sunsets."

And where does that leave God?

"I don't think anybody has been able to explain to me about God," says Hancock, glancing out at a landscape that seems a million miles removed from war and suffering. "I mean, I believe God is love. But I still don't know. . . . God, love, truth: those three words get thrown around constantly, and beaten into a pulp, an unrecognizable pulp. And that's the problem we have, I think. We want to believe something so much that we take an image in order to hold onto a concept. But the thing is: It's still a concept.

"When one side starts saying my God is better than your God, or my God is more powerful than your God, the one thing that seems clear to me is that neither side is talking about (God). They're talking about an icon, an image, a concept. They're not talking about any reality whatsoever. I heard years ago of a tribal community in Africa that will not utter the word that means God to them. Because it's almost blasphemous to even talk about it. . . . No words can explain it."

What else is there to say? Butch Hancock reaches toward a cooler on the porch, squirts a blast of liquid into a small paper cup. You're supposed to drink six glasses a day, he says to Rory. Especially here in the desert. Then the father passes his cup to his son, and gives him water.