The Coming of Redneck Hip
Rock and Country music met in Austin. That friendship may make the state.
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The Austin players in worst financial shape are those who buck the country trend and continue to play straight rock and roll. Even the poorest new country bands can find gigs (Austinites seem to have forgotten that the noise of an unskilled country band is just godawful, regardless of the length of the steel player’s hair) but rockers have to struggle to make themselves heard. Clubs like the Soap Creek Saloon and Bevo’s provide them with occasional gigs, old stalwarts like Conqueroo and the Elevator are trying to make a go of it again, but there is an air of diminished expectations in Austin rock music.
Several bigger, more financially secure performers stand on the periphery of Austin music. Doug Sahm, the bluesey voice of the old Sir Douglas Quintet who resurfaced recently with country trappings and the aid of some superstar sidemen on a critically-praised album, drifts in and out of Austin, as does Kinky Friedman, a good country rocker with an unfortunate knack of offending people. Marc Benno of Leon Russell’s Asylum Choir fame has also moved in, and rumors float by, a dime a dozen, about more big-name immigrants. However, none of the big names has had much influence on Austin music as yet, with the exception of one.
A 37-year-old small-town Texan, Willie Nelson has a smile that would make Buddha nervous. It spreads across a face that bears lines of age and experience but still contains the warmth that makes Nelson so impressive onstage. For a couple of decades the Nashville music business kept Nelson writing when he wasn’t on the road pursuing an on-again, off-again career as a singing star, but in 1971 he decided his career could weather a move to Austin. He still plays the country bars and hangs out with Darrell Royal. But suddenly there’s a new, infrequently barbered Willie Nelson with a seasonal beard, drinking beer in the Armadillo beer garden and performing at McGovern rallies.
At a time when city-slickers envy country roots, this metamorphosis boosted Nelson’s career rather than hurt it. Atlantic signed Nelson earlier this year, promoting his Shotgun Willie album with a double-barrelled photo of the man in his most hirsute hippie splendor. They’ve switched his arrangements from Ray Price to Ray Charles—the result: a revitalized music. He’s the same old Willie, but veteran producer Jerry Wexler finally captured on wax the energy Nelson projects in person. Nelson plays Max’s Kansas City while in New York, and a Village Voice critic calls him the “best country artist in the land.” Willie Nelson is Austin’s first nationally-certified, Billboard-proclaimed superstar. This time, it seems, the prodigal son brought the fatted calf home with him.
If anyone is qualified to serve as high priest of Austin’s movement toward the big time, it’s the grinning, gentle rebel who made the music industry come to him on his own terms yet somehow remained the almost universally admired nice guy and artist. Willie Nelson has thus become a symbolic figure, the one man whose approach to life and music makes sense of Austin’s curious mix of freaks and rednecks, trepidation and ambition, naivete and striving professionalism. And where symbolic heroes move, cults often follow.
But in the music business reputations are gauged in dollars and cents. In March 1972, with their eyes on Nashville, several Texans staged a counry music festival on a ranch west of Austin. Poor promotion made that event a financial disaster, but the few who attended enjoyed themselves immensely. A year later, the site near Dripping Springs was still available, and Nelson and a group of his more business-oriented friends decided to try it again on a manageable, one-day basis, running it professionally, charging reasonable prices, lining up the best of the new country breed—Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, John Prine—along with good local performers. Just to keep things symbolic, Willie’s drummer Paul would get married onstage as the sun sank into the blue Texas hills. Business and pleasure combined.
Nelson hired Eddie Wilson’s Armadillos to promote the event. Wilson had his doubts, predicting “either a big success or a big mess,” but as the festival neared it became apparent Nelson had guessed right: Texans were primed for the honky tonk of their lives. Word got around that Bob Dyland and Leon Russell were on their way. Some attribute the rumor to Doug Sahm, who did not show. Bob Dylan did not show. Leon Russell did show, after a fashion: He spent the day sampling various labels of beer, grinning a lot, emceeing a little, and warding off starstruck groupies and journalists.
A beautiful Fourth of July dawn found Nelson onstage along with a blinking, greybearded drummer named Leon. But by noon the Texas sun turned into a persistent bitch, torturing 30,000 incoming automobile travellers logjammed on two converted cowpaths. Braver souls started hitching, walking, and cursing in hopes of hurrying things along. Hikers and drivers arrived anywhere from one to three hours after hitting the traffic jam-and all arrived thickly coated with white caliche dust from the un-oiled roads.
The crowd sprawled out of the natural canyon which faced the bandstand onto barely more shaded hillsides. They stood in long lines before moveable privies, waited for ice that never arrived. The organizers neglected health provisions too, and Austin Free Clinic personnel coped unthanked with everything from wine prostration to heat exhaustion. Meanwhile, everybody backstage had a pretty good time for a while. The best picking of the day reportedly went on inside the air-conditioned mobile homes of the privileged. But minute by minute, the backstage compound got uglier. A shouting, shoving brawl erupted between the music industry’s two most obnoxious elements: the flunkies and the hangers-on.
The longhaired security guards, lacking a foreman, were soon power-tripping, casually shoving females into the dirt. And both in the compound and on-stage, hangers-on resisted pleas to vacate by the sheer force of their numbers.
Security hands finally cleared most of the stage during Charlie Rich’s set, and with the sun getting lower and the day cooling off, things began to look better. And at last, as Kristofferson prepared to play, the sun went down.
Showco Productions of Dallas had contracted to provide the lighting, but it was a bad day for everyone. When a UPI cameraman protested that the stage lights were insufficient for filming, a Showco employee yelled, “In one minute I’m going to knock your eyes out with two super troopers.” In one minute the lighting improved all right, but when a Kristofferson protege fed two strong bass notes through the amplifiers, every transformer in that part of Hays County blew, and Willie’s Picnic plunged into total darkness.
Hangers-on began to lurk like hyenas back onstage. When somebody finally produced a gasoline generator, an emcee pleaded for patience and a drunk deputy sheriff suggested that everybody get naked. As a large portion of the audience groped toward the parking lot somebody thought of plugging into a Winnebago, and the show, not so loud and much dimmer, got pathetically under way again. Tom T. Hall broke a guitar string, and following the lead of his Woodstock predecessors, threw his $300 instrument to the crowd. A fist-fight ensued. One artist or another played until 2:30 in the morning, and dawn found a panorama of garbage that would have filled Armadillo World Headquarters wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Nobody had thought to retain a refuse collector either. The adolescent Austin music industry had reached for maturity and fallen flat on its face.
Adolescent debacles are rarely fatal, and they’re usually instructional. The day after the Dripping Springs fiasco Eddie Wilson slammed his fist against a wall in anguish and humiliation, but he was already formulating thoughts on how to do it next time. He is no stranger to learning from experience. Skeptical observers pointed out that music industry professionals from New York, Nashville, and L.A. could have run the picnic more efficiently, but Wilson doesn’t want the pros around. He knows that with them will come the industry’s major pollutant: carpetbaggers. Already he has seen all kinds of hustlers floating through, “looking for a shuck and a jive.”
Wilson and his music business colleagues stress that any Austin music boom must remain localized. The creation of a music center in Austin would bring millions of dollars into the local economy, millions that would wind up in the pockets of Austin musicians, technicians, artists and publicists struggling to get by now. Even the environment would benefit. According to Wilson the music industry, unlike others that a growing Austin might attract, “doesn’t pollute and it doesn’t get in the way visually; about 50 million dollars could be put into the Austin music business and remain invisible.” The stage has been set very nicely, so why not continue? Thus the music businessmen proceed, caution thrown to the winds.
Within a week after Dripping Springs, Eddie Wilson returned to the Armadillo’s stage to emcee Texas’ first locally conceived, locally produced rock simulcast, speaking emotionally about the unique character and sparkling future of Austin’s music scene. As Wilson said, longhairs and goat ropers can co-exist at the Armadillo; but they also shot each other the finger at Dripping Springs. As Wilson said, Nashville is watching what’s happening in Austin; but the music business wears chameleon colors, and the “country-rock” boom may soon go the way of sitars and moogs. Hope springs eternal, but Billboard rules the air waves.
The rock & roll musician has replaced the cinematic actor as America’s number-one star. He is at the mercy of a mass-marketed culture which forces him to think like a businessman and throws him into the clutches of a possessive but fickle audience. The performers who forced Austin music to relax came to the hill country to save themselves and their art from such a culture. If Austin becomes the sort of music scene America has known previously, they will have to compromise some of their integrity or pull up stakes again. In late June, Mike Murphey took his shirt off and entertained another of those fine Armadillo crowds. At night’s end Murphey was beaming at the frantic crowd milling beneath him, and he left with the words, “I don’t know how long this can last, but I’m with you as long as it does.” We don’t know either. We hope Austin’s laid-back pickers can hold their unique fort, but that may be like wishing the boys of the Alamo luck against Santa Anna’s dusty legions.
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