When he gets around to writing it, the story Nathan Hamilton is telling me is going to make a great song. For now, the amusing tale of the Hare Krishnas who saved him when he was on the road flat broke a couple years ago is just another segment of the saga that the up-and-coming Texas singer/songwriter has trained himself to laugh at. He really doesn’t have any other option if he wants to keep winning fans one gig at a time, town after town after town.
"The first three weeks out, we didn’t make a dime," he mentions before his show a week ago Thursday at the Kendall CafŽ. "Nobody knew who we were and we were putting everything on my credit card." He’s talking about his first stab at touring with his crack three-piece band, No Deal (named after a Townes Van Zandt tune). "When we hit North Carolina, we had $1.75 between us. But just when we were walking around, stranded and bummed out at everything, we ran into these Krishnas who were giving out free food. That’s how we got dinner that night. And then we played another show. It is very much a struggle financially, but there are so many things that counterbalance that and make it worthwhile — experiences."
Hamilton is on the road supporting All for Love and Wages (Steppin’ Stone), his second self-released collection of country-hued songs about beautiful losers, hard-luck dreamers, and workaday stiffs looking for breaks that rarely come. The disc stomps a little harder and surer than ’99’s Tuscola (Steppin’ Stone), and the sparkling 45-minute set Hamilton and No Deal delivered before a sparse but receptive audience at the Kendall CafŽ underscored this edgier direction. The current tour also marks the first time the 34-year-old singer has cobbled together enough cash to venture to the East Coast (his old band, the Sharecroppers, managed one gig at New York’s Mercury Lounge before splitting up in ’98).
It’s no coincidence that Hamilton asked the sound man to get rid of all the reverb at the start of the set: the opening "Dry River" and the handful that followed evoked dust-choked lives and desiccated opportunities and were told through his earthy, unvarnished lyrics and lived-in twang of a voice. The images and impulses that drove the material — outlaws, whiskey, temptation — were drawn from the clay of classic country but were devoid of the bathos or shit-kicking posturing that can too often send outfits shooting for rootsy "authenticity" down the wrong path. Instead, tales chronicling the dehumanizing futility of workaday life ("Wages") and domestic dysfunction ("Bottle in the Bathroom") shared equal time with Johnny Cash–style murder ballads ("Roots") and a Waylon Jennings cover ("Waymore’s Blues").
Despite being constrained by the Kendall’s cramped, no-frills stage — or maybe because of it — lead-guitarist (and the able vocalist on "Waymore’s Blues") Billy Brent Malkus was an animated, scene-stealing foil for the amiable Hamilton, who seemed content to let his guitarist drop people’s jaws by making like a C&W Robert Quine. With a low-slung look lifted from Johnny Thunders and licks learned (I presume) from listening to Chet Atkins ad nauseam, Malkus played off every odd angle and hidden corner that Hamilton’s narratives and sturdy rhythm work on acoustic guitar seemed to suggest, embellishing a melodic detail here or furiously fingerpainting a whole Texas-sized landscape there. When you added to this the swinging, rock-solid backbone of drummer Rob Gaines and bass player Jake Blackwell, you had a songwriter and a band who sounded terrific — a band in business more for the love of it than for the meager wages.
