I say, "Just speak your mind, Hank-3. Don't let me stop you."

Me and the grandson of Hank Williams are sitting in some honky-tonk dive in downtown Nashville, listening to some mediocre band churn through some weepy old set of country-music standards. The grandson of Hank Williams bears the Christian name Shelton Hank Williams, but he is better known around these parts as Hank-3, so that's why I call him that. Me and everyone else in this bar. Who have all recognized him on sight. Hank-3 is a little hard to miss, mind you. He's the only six-foot-two-inch, 144-pound, twangy-voiced, heavily tattooed, longhaired skeleton walking around Nashville these days who looks exactly like Hank Williams. And you cannot hide the face of Hank Williams in this town. It would be like if Elvis Presley had a dead-ringer grandson who someday tried to walk around Memphis without getting any attention. Not a chance. Heads would turn, jaws drop.

Tonight the grandson of Hank Williams is perched on barstool, balancing on his bony ass, smoking cigarettes as if there were some kind of contest for it and drinking whiskey just as competitively. And he's bitching about his recording label, Curb Records. He's griping about what a hard time he had getting Curb to put even a measly three of his own songs on his debut album (which is a very impressive and totally rocking country production called Risin' Outlaw—and the three original cuts are the very best part of it, thank you very much). Hank-3 seemes to have never heard that tenet about not telling journalists every single little thing you think, do or want, which is why he's saying, "These people at Curb are all fucking assholes. The next album I'm doing, it's all gonna be filled with all my own songs, or fuck them and I'll see you in court. Because this is fucking bullshit. They tried to make my album commercial and radio-friendly, and that is not what I am all about, man. And now the radio doesn't even play my shit anyhow. So what was the fucking point?"

I say, "Just speak your mind, Hank-3. Don't let me stop you."

Hank-3 is very fidgety with his ponytail tonight. He's very flinchy, very dodgy. It's six o'clock in the evening and he just woke up. This is a perfectly typical timetable for his vampiric existence. His stomach kills from the flu, an ailment he gets, according to his calculations, "once every five fucking weeks." His complexion? Consumptive. His demeanor? Exhausted. And here's why: Hank-3 has been on the road nonstop for five years now, swilling booze, smoking drugs, reconceiving American country music, sleeping on a bus with five other guys and singing his guts out in low-down bars where redneck spend their evenings kicking each other's dumb redneck asses. And now he's dog-tired. Dog-tired and 27 years of age.

The grandson of Hank Williams continues, "I got this new song I just wrote. It's about how much I hate the modern Nashville establishment. It's called 'I Put the Dick in Dixie and the Cunt in Country,' but my label hates that shit. They'll never let me record it. So fuck them. Fuck them all. They can all go fucking fuck themselves."

I say, "Don't sugarcoat things for my benefit, Hank-3."

"Yeaaahhhh," he drawls. "I know I should shut my fucking mouth. My producers hate it when I talk in public like this. They keep trying to get me to shut up. They tried to send me to media school six fucking times."

Media school?

"Yeaaahhhh…that's where all the big Nashville stars go these days, to learn how to turn questions around and act like they love that family-values shit and deflect subjects about drugs and whoring, but I can't do that. I can't play those games. I'll tell you what, man. I am not a motherfucker who does fucking lunch."