The Coming of Redneck Hip
(Page 2 of 3)
Armadillo opened in August 1970 to the anguish of establishment spokesmen who thought the flea-bitten menace had died with the Vulcan. Since then the Armadillo has grown, like its namesake, by rooting and foraging. First came the beer license, then a new stage, tables and chairs, heating, an improved sound system, and most recently, the beer garden that offers a measure of economic security. But most important, word has spread among performers that Armadillo’s audiences are perhaps the most spontaneous and appreciative in the country. The bellowing, stomping, cowboy-hatted mobs can scare a tough-assed lady like Bette Midler, but more often they win the affection of a John Prine, a Waylon Jennings, a Gram Parsons. As a result the national reputation-makers have been very kind to Eddie Wilson and his Armadillo, and he is now booking acts that he once could barely afford to phone.
The Armadillo has undoubtedly been the catalyst of Austin’s musical development, but other young music extrepreneurs have followed Eddie Wilson’s lead. Doug Moyes and Ric Schwartz offer smaller, quieter settings in their clubs—Castle Creek and the Saxon Pub respectively—to many of the same artists who play Armadillo. At 23, larry Watkins has seven years of managerial experience behind him and has landed recording contracts and major concert dates for a number of local musicians. A heavy-set disc jockey for KOKE-FM named Rusty Bell pioneered a “progressive country” format that mirrors the sound of Austin’s country-rock blend. A former rock musician, Jay Podolnick, is converting an old cleaning factory into one of the few 24-track recording studios in the country. Austin thus has all the accoutrements of a full-fledged music center, and it is by far the most music-oriented Texas city. Aspiring musicians form in, and though the pay for gigs varies, they need never worry about playing to an empty house. Musically at least, all roads in Texas lead to Austin.
A widening circle of poet/songwriters have in the last two years followed those roads to Austin. Steve Frumholz, Jerry Jeff Walker, B.W. Stevenson and Michael Murphey have led the flight from corporate songwriting factories, uptight New York streets, and cutthroat California clubs. These leaders of Austin’s musical rennaisance deserted the big-time’s career opportunities for a community of reasons. Murphey sought musical electicism, Stevenson sought a cross-sectional audience, Walker sought peace and quiet, Frumholtz sought country people for neighbors. In Austin they joined up with an “Interchangeable Band” of sidemen who work smoothly behind any of the major performers. The backup men come mainly from the rock copy bands of the sixties, and as folk-oriented Steven Frumholz observes, “Our sidemen have made us boogie a little bit more, but at the same time, they’re willing to play softer music, although they can still kick ass when it’s time to.” But more than music unites the four writers and their sidemen. Frumholz puts it this way: “Everybody loves it down here—they can sit and drink Lone Star and fall out if they want to. Nobody’s laying any trips on anybody else. There’s no ego hassle.”
Frumholz spent much of his boyhood in a bypassed little Brazos town called Kopperl, and as a result is the Larry McMurty of the Austin songwriters: His lyrics can be a little tedious, but he has a great eye and ear for detail, and many of his songs tell vivid stories about a Texas slowly dying out. When a crowd is rude Frumholz is capable of resorting to non-stop rum and sodas, turning his back, and plugging into a rock & roIl just as raucous and rude. But when they’re attentive, he reaches back for a lot in his music, and he is the most entertaining of the Austin country rockers, for he has the best sense of humor.
Frumholz is quoted on the liner notes of a friend’s album: “Jerry Jeff: Indecision may or may not be your problem.” Jerry Jeff Walker grew up on the fringes of a little town in upstate New York listening to Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers rockabilly, and the more he listened to pop music, the more he thought: “I met a girl at the hop/she left me at the soda shop—hell, 35-year-old men are retiring writing that.”
Jerry Jeff wrote songs and coped with New York for a few years, but after his marriage broke up he started practicing what he sings about: a drifting way of life. He hitched through Austin the first time in 1964, but his most fortunate overnight stay was in New Orleans, when he met an alcoholic minstrel dancer in a drunk tank who inspired the song “Mr. Bojangles.”
Walker could probably live off the royalties of that classic song, but he kept on writing and moving, looking for “a place to camp the wagons.” Walker remembered the clubs and musicians in Austin, and the charms of the bordering Hill Country—not just its green distances and soft summer rains, but its people, who in Walker’s thinking have realized their good fortune and turned their backs to the maddening tangle urban America is becoming. In 1972 he unhitched his team in front of a $50,000 home west of town.
Also in demand for club dates is B. W. “Buckwheat” Stevenson, though that wasn’t always the case. Stevenson remembers lean days on the West Coast: “It’s real hard to do anything in California unless you have somebody with a cigar in his mouth and a recording contract. You bring your tape to a clubowner, who says, ‘Yeah kid, that’s real nice, we’ll ta1k to you later.’ And you know he hasn’t even listened to the sonofabitch.” Ironically, however, Stevenson had to record an album in California before he could land a gig in Austin.
Short, rotund, with a Dan Blocker hat, holy moses beard, and elfin smile. Buckwheat is the “kid” of the Austin movers. He grew up in Dallas, and landed a scholarship to North Texas by virtue of a wide-ranging, almost perfectly textured voice. Booted out a year later, Stevenson joined the Air Force, and started writing songs only after a bitter love affair. At 25 B.W. now has three albums to his credit, but has learned that a recording contract can create as many problems as it solves.
“Everybody in the company thinks I need a hit record. But that’s not going to make me anything more than I am. What I really want is to grow in my songwriting ability and stability of person.” So far, Buckwheat has yet to release an album totally in his own concept. His most effective material is understated, but Hollywood producers insist on surrounding his great voice with horns and strings, sending it over hill and dale in search of a hit.
Michael Murphey delights in Buckwheat’s interpretations of his material, goes fishing with Jerry Jeff, and once formed a folk trio with Frumholtz, which broke up because “We both liked Patty, and she only liked one of us, and the one she liked wasn’t me—she married a football player, probably the smartest one of all.”
However, Murphrey stands a little apart from his colleagues, perhaps because intellectuals are always somewhat aloof. He went to North Texas because he wanted to be a Baptist preacher and needed to learn classical Greek in order to study the original texts; the lyrics for his most ambitious song—”South Canadian River”—derive from, of all things, the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer; in order to be sure he does not sit down to write a song one morning and have nothing to write about, Murphey files all turns of phrase which catch his ear and tabulates them to the very syllable, which means that an intelligent person can construct from his files a poetic, syntactically perfect sentence that makes no sense at all.
The classical poets in North Texas’ library diverted Murphey from his conservative Dallas direction, and after graduation he spent a half-dozen formative years in Los Angeles, turning out over 400 songs for Screen Gems from nine-to-five then hurrying across town in the evenings to play backup bass in obscure country bars. Screen Gems treated him fairly, but he got ripped off by several publishers along the way. By 1970 he had developed a tough business sense and word was spreading that he was perhaps the most gifted young lyricist in the country, but he got homesick for Texas, and home he and his family went.
Murphey’s producer, Bob Johnston, in the past produced Bob Dylan, the Band, and Leonard Cohen; with that credential Murphey can record anything he damn well wants to. His first two albums, Geronimo’s Cadillac and Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir, are laced with themes of fundamentalist country music, but Murphey recognizes that country is a self-limiting form and is moving toward a more complex and innovative music.
He tries to limit himself to about 20 performances a year, partly because he questions the rock ritual: “It’s not worth one overdose and it’s not worth one person getting hurt. If that’s what rock and roll is, then let’s not have it anymore.” But Murphey has decided he would rather write songs than epic poems or novels, and he hopes to write them in Austin.
By coming back to Austin within a few months of each other, by attracting attention to Texas’ better qualities with their music, Murphey, Stevenson, Walker, and Frumholz have set rolling an excitement that could permanently alter the face of their chosen city. A booming music industry would offer obvious advantages to local pickers: They could record close to home, travel less, and commune with like-minded musicians. On the other hand, Murphey warns that “scenes have destroyed an awful lot of places.” But others believe they can sustain an Austin music boom and still escape the inner city blues. “If the hype gets too bad,” Frumholz says, all the pickers I know will lay back and hide.” Stevenson agrees: “Too many of us who’ve already gone through that stuff wouldn’t let it happen in Austin.” Perhaps so. Certainly Murphey, Frumholz, Walker and Stevenson have had enough experience with music business rip-offs to be on guard. But Murphey fears for the innocent: “I’d hate to see people with guitars on their backs suddenly showing up by the thousands. Because they’re gonna starve.”
Some fine artists already are. Rusty Weir, 29, living in Austin, tries to make a living off club appearances from Michigan to Texas. After ten years of that tiring, noisy life, Weir recently reflected during a gig at an. Austin beer ‘n boogie bar: “Hell, I started out in a beer joint.”
And a recording contract is not necessarily a panacea. The best of the Austinite first albums is Willis Alan Ramsey released in mid-1972; but Ramsey asked the recording company not to promote the record: “I don’t like advertising. Let’s just float it out there and see what happens.” Good as it was, the album fizzled. Dissatisfied with his new songs, Ramsey failed to deliver his second album and his recording contract was cancelled. He now ekes out a living from last year’s royalties and the occasional sale of one of his songs to more commercial artists.
