In this lengthy interview with The Independent in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., hillbilly swing singer Wayne “The Train” Hancock again professes his love for the Mother Road.
Here are some excerpts:
“My thing is I try to stay off the interstates as much as I can. Each tour, I try to route us almost like a vacation. Going through any interesting spots or anything anybody wants to see, museums, whatnot. I take a lot of back roads so I get those good views.”
You said a few years ago you were taking tents along with you to camp out along the way. Do you still do that?
“Yeah, not tents, but we’d go out to campgrounds and cook steaks and stuff. Sometimes, they have cabins you can rent, or like the Wigwam Motel is a nice one to stay at because they have a grill, you can go out there and barbecue steaks in the summertime. It’s nice in that area out there, just make a vacation out of it. If you don’t do that, man, I would think after a while, if you don’t have a tour bus or something or really good drugs, it would probably drive you right out of your head. […]”
What about the bus don’t you like?
“Everything. I mainly don’t like it because it doesn’t seem to be people-friendly. How many times have you gone to see someone who actually had a tour bus and you went to see ’em after a show, walked right up to their bus and started talking to ’em?”
Kinda hard to get to.
“Yeah, because they’re on a tour bus. There’s other things about buses—you can’t take ’em down roads that aren’t made for buses. Like, I can do state parks. If I’m going south, going down 66, which is a fun drive for me, you can’t go thorough The Painted Desert in your tour bus. Lot of things you can’t do. […]”
I put out a record and I write a song about a town that I like, which is Tulsa. And I don’t want to say, “Take Me Back to Tulsa” [a Bob Wills hit], because that’s not my song. A lot of the old Route 66 runs through there. It’s just one of those towns that’s cool because of the history it’s got. It’s got cool people that live there and it’s a rockin’ town. When I go there, I have a great friggin’ time. I love Tulsa. And when we hit town, it swings hard. And so I was more or less writing about just being on the road.