Ray Wylie Hubbard – Bad Trick

You can’t fix a broken heart with a bobby pin
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

CB and I get into some interesting musical conversations…he sent me a track from Ray Wylie Hubbard. I knew I remembered him somewhere and of course, when I searched I found what I remembered. It was this song called Bad Trick. The song he sent me was Snake Farm…and I have it in here also.

It was made I’m sure during the lockdown. It features Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ringo Starr, Joe Walsh, Chris Robinson and was produced by Don Was.

Let’s look at Ray Wylie Hubbard. In the early seventies, Hubbard joined Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson as part of the progressive country vanguard on the Texas music scene…known as the Outlaws. These weren’t your crew-cut guys from Nashville with a sweet sound. They were earthy and down-to-earth music for the common people to be honest. Rough about the edges and a little too close to rock for some of the established country fans.

He started to get known when Jerry Jeff Walker cover his song “Up against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” in 1973. He has released 19 albums since 1975. Lately, he wrote a song that Eric Church covered called Desperate Man.

Bad Trick was released on the album Co-Starring. The artists that wanted to play with him were incredible. They included Ringo Starr, Joe Walsh, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Ronnie Dunn, Don Was, Larkin Poe, Pam Tillis, and The Cadillac Three. You are well respected when these players are backing you.

I want to cover one more song on this post. The song is called Snake Farm and it’s on the album of the same name…Snake Farm was released in 2006. It sounds so nasty with the licks from the guitar he plays.

Ray Wylie Hubbard: I had burned a lot of bridges and didn’t have a career. But I wanted to be a real songwriter. Someone gave me Letters to a Young Poet, and there was this line about our fears being like dragons guarding our most precious treasures. I decided to overcome my fear of embarrassment and take guitar lessons at age 41 to learn how to fingerpick, and that opened all sorts of doors.

On Snake Farm Hubbard said: “There’s an old snake farm in New Braunfels, Texas between Austin and San Antonio. It’s been there about 40 years. And there’s a rumor that it was something more than a snake farm but I don’t know about that. Doesn’t make any difference. I’ve driven by it probably 10,000 times. So one day I’m driving by and all of a sudden I see the snake farm… I see the snake farm there and I’m driving along and all of a sudden I go, ‘Ooh, just sounds nasty.’ I said, ‘Well, it is. It’s not a church or a hospital, it’s a reptile house.’

I’m like, ‘God, snake farm, just sounds nasty. Snake farm, well it pretty much is. Snake farm, it’s a reptile house. Snake farm, eww.’ I kept singing that in my head for some strange reason, and then I said, ‘Well, what am I gonna do with this?’Well, I’ll make it a love song. I’ll make it about a man who doesn’t like snakes, but he’s in love with a woman that works at the snake farm.”

Snake Farm

Bad Trick

Don’t get any on you if you go to Nashville
Don’t operate machinery if you on Benadryl
Got to have some faith when you in the lion’s den
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

Club soda don’t always remove ketchup stains
Ain’t nothing you can take gonna cure a migraine
Broken dreams is a premise in “of mice and men”
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

You got to have some scars if you wanna be a poet
To get weeds out of a garden, you got to hoe it
Possession with intent will get you 5 to 10
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

Most gamblers know they’ll never break even
There’s 5 stages to go through when you’re grieving
The sword is always bloodier than the pen
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

Dancing is promiscuous after midnight
It’s better to be content than have to always be right
You can’t fix a broken heart with a bobby pin
And everybody turns a bad trick now and then

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

26 thoughts on “Ray Wylie Hubbard – Bad Trick”

  1. Man I love this guy! I’ve mentioned him a few times in past posts and I think he’s the real deal. Walsh and Star bring out the best of RWH on Bad Trick. I didn’t know that Snake Farm story, pretty funny stuff.

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    1. I thought you did and I believe we talked about him as well. I couldn’t decide on what song to do…I thought the Walsh-Starr would get people to watch more and learn about him….so I had my cake and ate it also…and included both.

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  2. Thanks for reminding me of Ray Wylie Hubbard. I included “Bad Trick” in a new music review around the time the “Co-Starring” album had come out. And then I forgot again about Hubbard. I hate to sound like a broken record – it’s the story of my new music exploration. Many of the artists I feature are new to me, so unless I do something else, I tend to forget about most of them.

    I’m currently listening to “Co-Starring” as I’m writing this and love what I’m hearing and will definitely earmark this album and Hubbard. I think he’d be great for a Sunday Six!

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  4. Don’t know the name but obviously a lot of great musicians did! Cool seeing Ringo & Joe Walsh in there…’Bad Trick’ sounds to me like it would have been perfect for Tom Petty had it come around a few years earlier.

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  5. Ray Wylie stole my look. The sing a long on Snake Farm gets me. Cant get any more laid back, maybe Cale, Greg Brown or Bo Ramsey. The second song is greasy. Loves Joes work. Didnt recognize the young fella on Drums. Yeah I like this stuff a lot..

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    1. Both of them really got to me. I didn’t realize all of the others were on there backing him….that is called respect…it was awesome.
      I want to do an older one next time….these two have a great vibe to them.

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  7. The man is a fixture around DFW and has been since the late sixties. There was a coffee house on Mckinney Ave in Dallas, The Rubiyat. It was around from the mid sixties to maybe the early 80s. Ray Wylie and BW Stevenson got their start there. Ray was part of a trio called Three Faces West, an acoustic act that did some off kilter folk music and cosmic country, Texas style. BW was often sitting at a table in the corner with a bottle of Jack digging on the boys. I knew Ray back then, we weren’t hang out buddies, but friends through music. He left Dallas for Austin in the early 70s; hell, everyone left for Austin at that time, even myself. That’s where he hitched up with JJW, Gary P Nunn and the longhaird hippie cowboys. In the late 70s, I was playing with a progressive country band in Dallas, the Trinity River Band, and we were on a show with Freddy Fender and Johnny Paycheck and David Allen Coe. Ray came on stage with us and did two tunes, one of them being Redneck Mother. The entire crowd sang the song with him, so I guess at the time, it was the new Texas anthem. There is a video on YouTube of Ray and Jerry Jeff waxing about the inspiration for Redneck Mother, check it out, it’s a gut-buster.

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    1. That is really cool Phil that you knew and played with him. I’m starting to find a lot of those Texas guys like Jerry Jeff, Rodney Crowell, Joe Ely, Robert Earl King…ect. A lot of talent there.
      Thanks for that story Phil I really appreciate it. BW Stevenson…he had My Maria right? Also…Fender I believe ended up in the Texas Tornados….

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      1. Yeah, BW was a great talent that started here in DFW then of course, on to Austin where the scene was supposedly happening, but it was hotter in Dallas and Fort Worth, but the hip folks down there wouldn’t have any of it. Fender did wind up in the Texas Tornados with Dough Sahm and Augie Myers, which was sort of a super duper group back then. Give “The Flatlanders” album a listen, that’s some great Texas stuff.

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    2. Very cool Phil. You Texas guys are everywhere in my music pile. When I first started getting into Jerry Jeff i was surprised he was a Texas transplant. Were you familiar with him in Circus Maximus? A bit of a jump from them to his solo work.

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      1. No, I only met him after he relocated to Austin and formed the Lost Gonzo Band with Gary P. Nunn. It was my friend Mickey Rafael, the harmonica player for St. Willie that introduced us. It seems then, that everyone in the music biz knew each other in some way. We called it friends through music, sort of a secret brotherhood late night type of thing. My time in Austin was brief, but serious. I was not a good fit with what was going on down there, so it was back to Dallas and Port A. I’m working on a story covering some of those times.

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