This Date In Rock History: 17 September

On this date in 1923, Hiram King "Hank" Williams was born to Lon and Lillie Williams in a log cabin in Mount Olive, Alabama.

If you're going to think of yourself in this game, or in this tradition, and you start getting a swelled head about it, then you've really got to think about who you're talking about. You're not just talking about Randy Newman, who's fine, or Bob Dylan, who's sublime, you're talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you're talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don't think it's particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet. I really do feel the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write.

But I don't fool myself, I know the game I'm in. When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is.

-----Leonard Cohen, 1994 interview

I got a hot rod Ford
And a two dollar bill
And I know a spot
Right over the hill.

There’s soda pop
And the dancin’s free
If you want to have fun
Come along with me.

-----Hank Williams, "Hey Good Lookin'" (1951)

Rock Monuments - Chelsea Hotel, New York

[Ed. note: Our UK music correspondent Miles Gallagher recently filed this entry from New York City.]

"I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel" sang Leonard Cohen ("Chelsea Hotel No. 2"), ". . . in fact I'm tired of 23rd street, strung out like christmas lights, on these Chelsea Nights" sang former resident Ryan Adams ("Hotel Chelsea Nights"). In 1966, Warhol filmed "Chelsea Girls" there which served as the inspiration for Nico's album by nearly the same name. Janis Joplin had suite #411 (and a liason with Cohen who lived there for years). Bob Dylan had #2011. Of course, Sid and Nancy had #100. Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur Miller were residents there. It goes on and on. See Cohen's excellent summary. I recommend a stay there, its reasonable, clean, cosmopolitan, one of the closest hotels to the Village, there is a subway stop on the corner, and most importantly it has a creative energy at its core. Maybe its the winding stairwell (left as payment), maybe its the funk of the casement windows, the singing in the hall, but it does have an energy.

Take a tour. This intrepid filmmaker provides a walk through right up to my room, She ultimately takes the door to the left; mine was the one on the right.

Cheers,

MG