Ray Wylie Hubbard
General Admission - $26 (plus fees)
Gold Section - $36 (plus fees)
WIMBERLEY, Texas —Whether or not you subscribe to the adage that the devil always has the best music, you can takeit on faith that anytime he pops up for a cameo in a Ray Wylie Hubbard song, the results are gonna be pretty damned entertaining. And as any fan of the Hubbard cannon knows, Old Scratch pops up in his songs a lot —nearly as often as all of Hubbard’s wise-cracking black birds, lyrical and musical nods to Lightnin’ Hopkins, bad-ass women (usually Hubbard’s own wife, Judy), andamyriad ofother grifters, ruffians, and scrappy cats of the gnarly and general lowdown variety. Somewhere or other on just about every Ray Wylie Hubbard album, the devil always gets his due —and he’s now even worked his way up to top billing on the acclaimed songwriter’s latest, Tell the Devil I’m Getting There as Fast as I Can(due August 18,2017 on Bordello Recordsthrough Thirty Tigers).Now, don’t get the wrong idea here. Hubbard’s not some faddish heavy metal occultist on an Aleister Crowley kick; “I don’t really go thatfar or study it or anything,” he says with a chuckle. Nor is he under the spell of any liquid, powder, or other chemical that a tee-totaling churchgoer might flag as the devil’s influence: Hubbard shook off all of that stuff 30-some-odd years ago, when the wayward ’70s progressive country refugee stumbled out of his honky-tonk fog and discovered that both his life and art were a helluva lot greener on the sober side of the fence. What it really comes down to is the fact that there’s just something about the cut of the fallen angel’s jib that’s tickled Hubbard’s muse eversince 1999’s uproarious“Conversation Withthe Devil.” And much like his sheepish excuse in that song that “I never used the cocaine to get high, I just liked the way it smelled,” Hubbard just gets a kick out of hearing —or rather, making—the wily (Wylie?) fiend talk.“You kind of give him a personality, you know?” offers the 70-year-old Oklahoma-born troubadour from his log-cabin Shangri-la in Wimberley, a Texas Hill Country hamlet just outside of Austin. “Like in [the new album’s]‘Lucifer and the Fallen Angels,’ you pick up this guy hitchhiking to Mobile, Alabama, and he’s just this colorful kind of smart-ass, funky cat. It reminds me of A Streetcar Named Desire, where you’ve got Marlon Brando as this brute in a torn T-shirt, but what he’s saying is brilliant, because his words are from Tennessee Williams. I always enjoy that.”
Gold Section - $36 (plus fees)
WIMBERLEY, Texas —Whether or not you subscribe to the adage that the devil always has the best music, you can takeit on faith that anytime he pops up for a cameo in a Ray Wylie Hubbard song, the results are gonna be pretty damned entertaining. And as any fan of the Hubbard cannon knows, Old Scratch pops up in his songs a lot —nearly as often as all of Hubbard’s wise-cracking black birds, lyrical and musical nods to Lightnin’ Hopkins, bad-ass women (usually Hubbard’s own wife, Judy), andamyriad ofother grifters, ruffians, and scrappy cats of the gnarly and general lowdown variety. Somewhere or other on just about every Ray Wylie Hubbard album, the devil always gets his due —and he’s now even worked his way up to top billing on the acclaimed songwriter’s latest, Tell the Devil I’m Getting There as Fast as I Can(due August 18,2017 on Bordello Recordsthrough Thirty Tigers).Now, don’t get the wrong idea here. Hubbard’s not some faddish heavy metal occultist on an Aleister Crowley kick; “I don’t really go thatfar or study it or anything,” he says with a chuckle. Nor is he under the spell of any liquid, powder, or other chemical that a tee-totaling churchgoer might flag as the devil’s influence: Hubbard shook off all of that stuff 30-some-odd years ago, when the wayward ’70s progressive country refugee stumbled out of his honky-tonk fog and discovered that both his life and art were a helluva lot greener on the sober side of the fence. What it really comes down to is the fact that there’s just something about the cut of the fallen angel’s jib that’s tickled Hubbard’s muse eversince 1999’s uproarious“Conversation Withthe Devil.” And much like his sheepish excuse in that song that “I never used the cocaine to get high, I just liked the way it smelled,” Hubbard just gets a kick out of hearing —or rather, making—the wily (Wylie?) fiend talk.“You kind of give him a personality, you know?” offers the 70-year-old Oklahoma-born troubadour from his log-cabin Shangri-la in Wimberley, a Texas Hill Country hamlet just outside of Austin. “Like in [the new album’s]‘Lucifer and the Fallen Angels,’ you pick up this guy hitchhiking to Mobile, Alabama, and he’s just this colorful kind of smart-ass, funky cat. It reminds me of A Streetcar Named Desire, where you’ve got Marlon Brando as this brute in a torn T-shirt, but what he’s saying is brilliant, because his words are from Tennessee Williams. I always enjoy that.”
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