One evening in the late and turbulent 1960s, Ray Wylie Hubbard ducked out of his folk music club in Red River, N.M., to get more beer.
Wanting to hurry back to one of the great jam sessions that characterized the place, he didn’t take time to go to the “safe, long-haired bar” at the other end of town, he recalls. He rushed around the corner into an establishment of considerably more conservative orientation.
“There was this older woman and her son there,” remembers Hubbard, who is scheduled to bring his striking music to Schuba’s, 3159 N. Southport Ave., on Saturday, and initiate the club’s Americana music series.
“When I walked in she said, `I can’t believe you call yourself an American with hair like that.’ I said, `I don’t really remember calling myself an American. I remember saying I’d like a case of beer.’ “
That started a gutter-level political debate that ended with a few rancorous parting shots over the shoulder as Hubbard ran with his beer back to the jam session. There somebody handed him a guitar, and he started extemporaneously composing a song loosely based on the uncongenial mother and son he had just encountered.
His creation was memorable enough that at the “next couple of parties, people would go, `Sing that song again.’
“So I sang it,” Hubbard recalls in a telephone interview from his home near Dallas. “All I had was a verse and a chorus. After that, I’d just make it up. That’s what I still do.”
The song to which he refers is “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” which turned into one of the best-known irreverent anthems of 1970s Texas Outlaw music. The composition’s renown swiftly became such that Hubbard admirers “threw me out into the honkytonks, three chords and a cloud of dust.”
But the song he had written “just kind of fooling around” became the only one he was known for, and the young college English major who had wanted to become a serious songwriter staggered off into two decades of honkytonk heaven/hell, producing a meager catalog of obscure work that saw the light of day in just five albums that he himself describes as undercapitalized and “half-baked.”
A working musician
His once-promising reputation faded. Whereas circa-1980 encyclopedias of the noteworthy in country music profiled him at respectable length, his name is harder to find in more contemporary ones. He always managed to eke out a living playing music, he says, but he was mostly just a witty working musician writing the occasional song on the side while grinding out paydays in bands whose only performance requirements, he recalls, were that their venues had to have “electricity and beer.”
“I was living it pretty hard,” he says. “So the songs I was writing were written in kind of a fog. The temptations that are there when you go into a honkytonk kind of got in the way of what was important to me, which was the writing.”
Then something happened.
“About five or six years ago, I kind of made a conscious effort to become what I really had wanted to be when I was younger, before I got sidetracked,” he says. “I kind of started studying songwriting. I bought a dictionary and took my first-ever guitar lesson at the age of 43.
“I wrote these songs because I wanted to write. I didn’t have a record deal or anything. I got a record deal to record them.”
And the record deal wasn’t his own idea. He played some of his new songs on a live Austin celebration of the music of Woody Guthrie that was recorded by little Dejadisc Records of Austin, and Steve Wilkison of Dejadisc, a fan from Hubbard’s earlier days, was “really impressed.”
“It just knocked me out,” Wilkison says.
The result is “Loco Gringo’s Lament,” an extraordinary album that Wilkison says is on the threshold of becoming one of Dejadisc’s best sellers. It also is Hubbard’s first masterpiece. From the first line of its first song, “I come down from Oklahoma with a pistol in my boot,” to the last line of the last one, “I’m not looking for sex,” it is both searingly introspective and brilliantly creative.
Basically, it takes gritty elements from Hubbard’s lengthy honkytonk sojourn, mixes them with his uneasy thoughts thereon, and places them in a more fictional atmosphere.
“I didn’t want it to be just all these stories (from his life),” he says. Then he laughs. “It would be just boring and sordid. So I figured I’d take some of my experiences, but I kind of added a little twist to it.”
The title song concerns an old honkytonker’s observation of young rockers (and his own earlier self) who sing the Hank Williams anthem “The Lost Highway” without understanding the finality of its most important message: the thoroughfare’s one-way direction.
Horrors of this world-drug addiction, poor parenting, scamming preachers-are contemplated in “The Real Trick,” which also ponders how to make oneself believe in anything anymore. “Dust of the Chase” concerns a pretty good, or at least pretty soulful, bad man, and “After the Fall” is about how a person must keep getting back up in life and love.
The album’s most violent lyric, “Wanna Rock and Roll,” concerns a pathologically jealous lover who follows his cheating girlfriend into her last dive. This one, it should be added, didn’t come out of Hubbard’s personal experience.
Late-blooming seer
“The great thing about writing these songs is that you can kind of become the character for a little while,” Hubbard says, with a small smile in his voice. “You can do the crime without doing the time.”
Hubbard’s killer lines, no pun intended, are legion. The jealous lover in “Wanna Rock and Roll,” pushing the button on his switchblade knife, greets his old girlfriend and her ill-fated new guy with a chillingly cheery “Hello, boys and girls, have you enjoyed your life?”
The antihero of “Dust of the Chase” carries a Bible in his suit but reflects that “when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take along Samuel Colt.” “The Real Trick” contemplates a “sweet Melissa” who “turned her first trick at 17 for some backstage passes and some hashish in the back of a limousine” and five years later is left with just “what the boys down at the VA call the thousand-yard stare.”
The late-blooming seer of these grim visions was born in 1946 in Hugo, Okla., the son of an English teacher. By high school the son was in Dallas, attending the same school with latter-day cowboy singer Michael Martin Murphey, whose early compositions Hubbard performed often in the first days of his own career.
He and a couple of friends opened the folk club in Red River while he was still majoring in English-and loving the literature of Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor-at the University of Texas at Arlington and at North Texas State University. After “Redneck Mother” put him on the road, he says he enjoyed the honkytonk life until “I just had all the fun I could stand.
“Then all of a sudden it wasn’t fun anymore.”
That’s when Hubbard’s dramatic artistic and personal turnaround started. It was formalized a couple of years ago when Wilkison offered to let him make a record, and Hubbard, even though he had had a couple of nibbles from larger companies, decided on Dejadisc because, he says, Wilkison and his associates seemed to “really like music” instead of just making money.
Appropriately, Hubbard now resides in a Dallas-area exurban community called Poetry, which he says consists of “two little churches, a store, a graveyard, farming and horses.” He lives there with his wife, Judy, and their 2-year-old son on four acres. The reborn troubadour whose life has been so physically and spiritually nomadic says that he has finally settled, and that Poetry is his life’s last residential stop.
“I’d rather do anything than move,” he says. “So I’m here. We’ve got the Poetry Cemetery down the road about a mile, and that’s going to be it.”
At the moment, though, he’s still spending a lot of road time paying for their house and letting the rest of the country know about this album that Texas already has embraced.
“He’s a great performer, a really funny guy who charms a crowd,” says Wilkison, who speaks with the authority of one of the charmed. “People who aren’t familiar with Ray-if they like singer-songwriter music or country music or Texas music at all-once they hear this record, they’re sold.
“Over and over again, we keep hearing people who do have a familiarity with his music say, `This is the album we always knew Ray had in him. He has finally done it.”‘
