It's a good thing I

Was born Gemini,

Cause I'm living for more than one man.

WILLIAMS FINISHED the album and cleared up a messy divorce last August. In an effort to recuperate from both, he embarked on a near-fatal hunting trip to Montana, where he fell 500 feet down a cliff side. He was in critical condition for six days, spent three months after that in the hospital and still faces more surgery. With this in mind, the album's songs take on an eerie, almost morbid quality in places. For example, on "Can't See You," which closes side one, Williams sings:

I'm going to the highest mountain and throw myself off...

Oh honey, can't you see what you're doing to me.

The same eeriness pervades "Montana Song," in which Williams longs to make love to a lady on the Great Divide. He fights down an urge to call her, and ends the song hoping that he can find another woman to "help me sing my Montana song."

The five Williams songs on side two are the strongest part of the album. Sandwiched between "Montana Song" and "Living Proof" are "Clovis, New Mexico," an adventure song about two drifters, and "Brothers of the Road," an up-tempo song about staying out on two-month tours:

You bring $50,000 home and they say you're overdrawn

It'll just about get you down.

The overall tone of the album is near despair, and its saddest song is "Stoned at the Jukebox." When Williams sings of "loving that hurtin' music, 'cause I been hurting too," it seems to come from the heart-wrenching realization that Hank Williams, Jr. can never be entirely accepted for his own music, no matter how good that music is.

WILLIAMS IS ON less solid ground when he does other people's songs on side one. "Losing You," with Pete Carr's pulsating electric guitar and Charlie Caniel's soaring fiddle, is very fine musically, but the mood of this basically sad song is spoiled by the uptempo beat they provide. "On Susan's Floor" is a pleasant ballad, which seems out of place on this album. The best song on the side is again one of Williams's own, "(Baby I Loved You) I Really Did," which details a break-up as bitter as it is timely.

The album consists of only nine songs, scarcely any of which run more than four minutes. There is no dead wood--it seems Williams was out to achieve the tightest set possible. His back-up band is superb, especially Carr's electric guitar. Williams recruited Charlie Daniels's fiddle and the Allman Brothers' Chuck Leavell to play keyboards, and the influence of these rockers blends with Williams's own country background to make the musical part of this album first-rate. Williams's vocals are always on target, ranging from a hurting, plaintive whine on "Living Proof" to a rocking shout on "Brothers of the Road."

The old cliche about country music is that if you listen to it long enough, your story will come up on the jukebox. This album, by telling Hank Williams, Jr.'s story in very real and poignant terms, marks the emergence of a man who could become a major force in country music. Hank Williams, Jr. has spent most of his life searching for a father, to find only legend. There is no need for him to search any longer; at 26, Hank Williams, Jr. has come of age.