Hank Topless
Plush, Monday, Sept. 6
With the majority of Tucsonans having already purged the contents of their wallets, and seeking to give their livers a respite after the long holiday weekend of CD release parties, benefit shows and barbecues, it wasn’t much of a surprise to find a solo acoustic gig by Topless Opry’s headmaster, Hank Topless (aka Tim Gallagher), sparsely attended, even though admission was free.
The relaxed atmosphere and lengthy sets of front-lounge shows at the recently expanded and renovated Plush seem to inspire a certain looseness in performers, who tend to mine the depths of their catalog to keep the audience’s attention during the course of two or more hours. Thankfully, with a healthy number of originals and covers (including Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown”–a holdover from Topless Opry’s set at last year’s Great Cover-Up–and songs by Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings), not to mention his myth-spinning, witty between-song banter (“I gotta get up early tomorrow to chop up freshly-cut tobacco leaves and pick cotton. We don’t have a cotton gin where I live, so I gotta do it all by hand”), Gallagher was more than up to the task.
Nattily dressed in Tucson formal–a suit and a cowboy hat–Gallagher provided those in attendance with a performance of dark country songs spiked with his typical deadpan humor, perfectly suited to a post-long weekend wind-down, a fine diversion from the fact that the return to work or school was just around the corner. Highlights included an as-yet unrecorded Gallagher original loaded with pathos (“She spends every Friday night in sensible shoes / She’s a waitress with the blues”) and a Carter Family cover that was followed by the comment, “It’s good to do dead people’s songs ’cause that way they can’t get mad at ya.” He needn’t have worried.
This article appears in Sep 9-15, 2004.