BUTCH HANCOCK: HIS TALENTS SHOW

“I was always advised not to spread myself too thin,” said singer-songwriter-photographer-TV producer Butch Hancock with a laugh. “So naturally, that’s what I’ve done.”

A few of Hancock’s talents will be on display here this week, as the Texan makes a rare series of local appearances. On Friday he’ll play his rousing country-folk songs at the Lingerie with his eight-piece band; Saturday he’ll head to McCabe’s for a special acoustic set with longtime collaborator Marce Lacoutre. And all weekend, his artwork will be on display on the walls of Rhino Records in Westwood.

When he gets back home to Austin, Hancock will return to writing and recording songs, and producing a weekly cable-TV music show, and taking photographs, and making architectural drawings, and experimenting with computer graphics, and doing whatever else strikes his fancy.

“I’ve had some of those 27-hour-a-day weeks,” he said during a phone interview from his home. “So I’ve actually backed off a little bit to concentrate on the things that need to be done.”

Still, he has his hand in lots of pies. “I can’t resist that, for some reason,” said Hancock. “And things have a way of balancing out. When I take a trip, I usually end up takin’ a lot of photographs, and at the same time pickin’ some and pushin’ my albums some, and visitin’ folks and just takin’ it all in.

“All of those things tend to feed the songs, and at the same time the songs and those other kinds of things feed the artwork.”

Songwriting was how Hancock made his name, particularly through his tunes on the sparkling early albums that Joe Ely recorded when he and Hancock were based in Lubbock, Tex.

His own folky albums were softer and quirkier, marked by a wind-swept, dry-plains prairie mysticism. On last year’s “Yella Rose,” he and Lacoutre made a record with the loose-limbed communal spirit of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

All six of Hancock’s albums are on his own Rainlight label. “If anybody wants to talk to me about any great big record deals,” he said, “I’d sure like to talk to them. But I’ve never really sought a record company. I don’t know if any of them’d have me. But dad-gummit, I’m gonna keep puttin’ out records.”

Hancock is one of the few country artists left in Austin, once a progressive country stronghold, but his records add folkier, bluesier elements to create an elusive mixture that he figures is simply part of the Austin sound.

“There’s a lot of air in it, and a certain live sound to Austin music,” he said, groping for words. “Townes Van Zandt told me that the West Texas sound was sorta a high whine you get from all that dry air out there on the plains, and that’s some of the Austin sound.

“Then there’s the Louisiana sound that’s come up, and Chicago and Memphis blues, and a whole lotta stuff. It all has to filter through some of the trees and plains as it gets to Austin, and then it comes up with a different kind of edge on it.

“It’s a little bit of the rough edge, you know? There’s a certain crudeness in Texas, the crudeness of people who don’t know any better. They haven’t been told what they can’t do, so they do pretty amazing things sometimes.”

Hancock’s television show--segments of which are called “Dixie’s Bar and Bus Stop”--has a low-rent look and anything-goes booking policy. He expects soon to hitch it to a satellite and start broadcasting outside Austin. Some of his art work, meanwhile, is in an exhibit making the rounds of Texas museums.

For a long time, he supervised it all from the bowels of an odd building in Austin’s warehouse district, where his living quarters were down the hall from recording and television studios whose design--odd angles, lots of curves, a weird yellow bus in the corner--he’d supervised himself.

Recently, though, he moved to more routine quarters, and spread his pursuits across three studios and an office. “I have finally moved out from the underground to the real world,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve even got windows in my house now.”

And despite the Texas crudeness--or maybe because of it--Hancock intends to keep everything centered in Austin. “I’ve had a good run here,” he said. “Folks have been real good to me. Ain’t got rich, but certainly haven’t starved either. Man, I sure can’t complain. So I’m plannin’ on stickin’ around.

“Besides,” he added with notable understatement, “I’ve still got a lot of unfinished business lyin’ around.”