Wayne "The Train" Hancock | Photo courtesy Jerry Lukas/Bloodshot Records

There’s an old Sci-Fi story I had to read in high school. I can’t remember the name, but the premise was that dudes got in a time machine and went back to the dinosaur days, where they were supposed to avoid making any contact with anything. Of course, things went awry, so when they returned to their own time and place, everything was a little bit off, in a bad way.

Let’s imagine then that we honky-tonk roadhouse music fans went back in time to the Hank Williams era, and we stepped all over everything. And when we came back, things were a little off, but in a good way. If it were so, Wayne “The Train” Hancock would rule the country charts.

He sounds and phrases a lot like the original Hank, but his songs deal with his own craziness. He does covers, too, and I’m sure he gave his new bandmates nightmares by calling out stuff they didn’t know. But it was a lot of fun watching those quality sidemen work their way through some stuff on a Sunday night at Martin’s Downtown.

Here, the band plays a new Hancock song — I’m calling it “Ride, Ride, Ride,” and too bad if that’s not the name of it. They follow it up with “Viper,” one of Hancock’s more recent releases. The sound is pure roadhouse country — Bob Wills with no frills — though a couple folks and I did agree the band could use a drummer. But I’m biased in that regard.

Wayne “The Train” — long may he reign in my made-up, space/time-traveling, stepped-on-a-crack world.