by Matt AshareThe Burg, February 8
It's not exactly difficult to suss out Paul Waggener's particular musical affiliation. Long, flowing black hair. Check. Torn and frayed black jeans. Check. Skull patches: Check. Full-sleeve runic tattoo's. Double check. So yeah, he's into metal. Or, as he puts it when we sit down over coffee and beer at the White Hart, "heavy, heavy metal," with a distinct emphasis on heavy.
But there's more than meets the eye with Waggener, whose extreme metal trio Hunter's Ground are playing February 17th at the Coffin House in Roanoke and are gearing up to self-release a six-track CD titled No God But the Wild. Put an acoustic guitar in his hands, and you'll quickly discover that his affinity for outlaws extends well beyond Pantera and Motörhead, back to a cadre of characters who, in their day, infused classic country music with a real element of danger, from Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, to Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and one-time death-row inmate David Allan Coe. Indeed, he'll be delivering a heavy dose of Hank Sr. and the the Man in Black, as well as his own similarly styled songs and a few choice countrified metal numbers, when he plays solo this Friday, February 10, at Rivermont Pizza.
Waggener was born and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, home to "Frontier Days," the largest rodeo in the world, and a mecca for country artists of all persuasions. "All of the biggest country acts would show up for Frontier Days," Waggener recalls. "The town would double in size. Otherwise, it's 50 thousand people, it's flat, it's depressing, and all there is to do is drink, do drugs, and play music, which is what I did until I left."
By the time Waggener departed Cheyenne for Lynchburg six years ago, he'd already gravitated toward the more intense fringes of the metal spectrum. And, while thrash-and-bang remains a primary passion, he's since discovered a parallel, and equally primal fondness for classic country. Just don't confuse the roots music in Waggener's songbook with the kinder, gentler, commercial fare Nashville's Music Row has been pumping out for the past few decades. Waggener views that brand of country with the same scorn those ranch hands in the Pace Picante ad have for the poor fella who gets his salsa from New York City. "It's mostly just guys from California with fake Southern accents," Waggener says with obvious contempt. "And, they're singing about stuff they've never seen or done."
Q: So, is the headline here "Anarchist metal dude plays country music"?
That's pretty close. When I was a kid, we used to listen to all kinds of country music. Then, as I got older, I wanted something more extreme, so I started playing really, really heavy metal. And then you start to realize that a lot of the themes are pretty much the same in black metal and country — it's all outlaw stuff, and it's all really grim, really dark. It's about death and murder… And about relationships gone horribly horribly wrong, usually ending in murder. Hank Williams and Johnny Cash are two perfect examples of that, and those are the two guys I cover the most because of the content of the songs. Hank Sr. is by far my favorite, because it just doesn't get any grimmer than that. Even my originals tend to sound a lot like Hank Sr. I mean, with country, it's like why try to reinvent the wheel. It's already been done as well as it's ever going to be done. So I try to make my originals sound as authentic as possible. A lot of those classic songs draw on a lifestyle that I've completely lived and that I'm intimately familiar with. So it's easy to draw on my own experiences when I'm writing songs.
Q: What are some of your songs, and what kind of experiences are you drawing on?
"Black Magic and Moonshine" is one of my new ones. And I've got one called "Sorry To Let You Down." You know, real upbeat themes. It's the same topics and subject matter as the classic outlaw guys. I just put my own personal twist on the lyrics. Some of my songs have heavy devilry and occult overtones. But it's all done in the that old-school country music fashion. And, I have a song about meth, because that was big around where I grew up in Cheyenne. I mean, I watched people completely ruin their lives on meth. Just growing up there and seeing a lot of crazy, crazy situations…that's where a lot of my writing and music comes from. It's pure country gold. People may not pick up on it because what they hear is this really twangy old-school kind of country. It's just got lyrics that shouldn't be in there because you could never have gotten away with that back when Hank Sr. was alive.
Q: Hank's grandson, Hank III, does straight county and metal live and he's also done albums that are half and half. Have you ever considered doing something along those lines?
The problem is that the places that I play the country stuff, you really can't do metal. And at the places the metal band plays, the kids don't really want to hear country music. But I think Hank III really has opened up a lot of metal kids to country. So I am going to record a five-track country demo and then a full-length that I want to call "Apocalypse County and Armageddon Blues." It's going to be ambient reverb-soaked country with big doomy electric guitars. I want it to be different and little bit original. But the great thing about that real classic kind of country music is there's a venue for it everywhere. I can walk into just about any bar in any city, set up and play a two hour set for $200. I'm going to try to do a lot of that this summer — just set up a mini tour circuit for myself. I'd love to be a point where I can just play like one show a week... and not have to have a day job.
http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/08/country-mettle-lynchburgs-paul-waggener-ar-1673278/
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