Ray Wylie Hubbard

"If you listen to it again," Ray Wylie says of the Twinkies fiasco, "there's two records--there's the one we made and the one they made after we did it. When we got the tape of it, we actually cried when we heard it. And we couldn't go out and tour to support it, so that's why we didn't do any other records for a long period of time. It was pretty rough." In short, the two things for which Hubbard was best known by the mid-'70s were both so misrepresentative of his talent and artistic direction that they were almost counterproductive to his career. Such, as they say, is the stuff of Legend...

Still, Hubbard emphasizes, "We hung in there, and I've always been able to make a living as a working musician. So I played honky-tonks and had different bands, but I got into drugs and alcohol and abused that, and then I never really could get anything together. I finally got clean and sober eleven years ago with some help. I quit on my 41st birthday and I haven't done any of it since. "About a year after all that," he remembers, "I just couldn't figure out what was goin' on. I was still playin' bad joints and scufflin' and really couldn't get it goin'--even after a year or two of being sober." His self-taught guitar playing, which had served him well enough in his blurry roadhouse days, had become a block to unlocking his full songwriting potential, yet he was embarrassed to take lessons at age 43.

Two diverse books then collided with Hubbard, intersecting at one burning point--Fear. "One of the books was [As A Man Thinketh] by James Allen, and it had a line that said, 'Fear and doubt are the things that limit us.' The other was Rainer Maria Rilke's [Letters To A Young Poet], with a line that goes, 'Our fears are like dragons guarding our most precious treasures.'

"That line just hit me in the head; that I had this fear and embarrassment, and if I could just ask this guy to help me fingerpick, there were these treasures on the other side of that fear. And at 43, I really learned how to play the guitar, and then I started to really learn about writing songs. That was the Big Four--I got sober, read those two books and took guitar lessons. Those things were really more influential in whatever status I have as a songwriter rather than who influenced me. I've always like and admired Townes, Guy, Billy Joe, Michael Murphy and Willie Nelson--all those Texas writers--but they didn't really influence my writing. Those four things were what flipped it around for me."

Shortly after completing guitar lessons with Dallas fingerpicker Sam Swank, Ray Wylie Hubbard's daunting songwriting dam just burst. With his hands at last able to realize and deliver the songs churning in his head, Hubbard began cranking out a stream of some of finest and most varied songs anywhere. Incorporating folk, blues, country and rock with such care and craft that the seams rarely show, Ray Wylie Hubbard has spent the '90s giving life, blood, flesh and substance to the nebulous legend he'd always been.

Produced by Hubbard and the remarkable Lloyd Maines, [Crusades Of The Restless Nights] contains ten startling Ray Wylie compositions ("After The Harvest" is co-written by vocal foil Lisa Mednick) which erase the line between waking and dreaming to explore a broad spectrum of human behaviors and motivators. Hubbard's gruff, full-bodied voice is as unvarnished and nakedly honest as they come, and the exemplary roots band of guitarists Stephen Bruton and Terry Ware, bassist Glenn Fukunaga and drummer Paul Pearcy support Ray Wylie's elegant acoustic with a deep, dynamic cushion. Esteemed songbird Patty Griffin graces several tracks with her gorgous harmonies and Eamon McGlocklin's haunting fiddle squirms through "The River Bed."

Ray Wylie Hubbard oozes the contentment of a man who's faced down big challenges, lost a few battles along the way and yet emerged on top. Neither the future nor days gone by seem to interest him much--he is clearly a man who is living and writing in the here and now, and doing both with depth and style. "My past is not too interesting to me. I feel comfortable where I am, and am very grateful for what I'm doing now, and this deal with Rounder. I take my songwriting very seriously, but I try to take myself lightly and have fun with it."