October 1974
Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic
The last, positively the last, word on rock festivals.
I don’t much like heat or dirt or loud noise or even being outdoors for long stretches at a time, but I do like picnics and special events and crowds and country music and Willie Nelson. So when Willie first announced he was organizing a three-day Fourth of July Picnic featuring 36 hours of traditional and progressive country music, and expected 50,000 people to be there, I made up my mind to go, and I went. I thought you might like to hear about it.
The picnic was held in the 160-acre infield of the Texas World Speedway south of College Station, an inhospitable site attractive to promoters because it is highly resistant to gate-crashers but as barren of trees or other shade as it has been of auto races. Yet as I joined the crowd walking through two long tunnels to the infield, I sensed that we had come because we knew the stark landscape and three days of searing heat would inflict great suffering, and since our lives are so easy and our chances to test ourselves against the elements so few, we grimly determined to pursue a happiness of discomfort on this our nation’s birthday.
At the top of the grade coming out of the tunnels, where we had felt the last coolness of the day, members of the volunteer medical staff handed out free salt tablets with the promise they would help us last two extra hours if we drank a lot of liquids. Most of the people walking in with me looked prepared to heed the advice on liquids, having estimated their needs at approximately one case of beer per person. I was impressed. Even at the American Legion picnics I went to when I was a boy, nobody would come close to drinking that much beer except oilfield workers and Catholics.
The crowd was not quite what I had expected. It was probably no larger than half the hoped-for 50,000, but what surprised me more was its composition. I had expected thousands of cosmic cowboys and assorted freaks, but I had also expected fairly large numbers of authentic rednecks, and I knew if I got uncomfortable with freaks I could go sit with the kickers. I am not trying to pretend I grew up a redneck, because I didn’t. We were town people. My daddy ran the feed store and was president of the school board, my mama was big in the PTA, and I knew when I was five years old that I was going to college. But I also knew a lot of rednecks and, if it came right down to it, I figured I might feel more at home with them than with long-haired hippie weirdos eating toadstools and smoking LSD.
There were some kickers there, all right. About six. The other 25,000 were freaks or freak-ish, all under 25. I began to realize that I stood out, because I was wearing an honest-to-goodness western shirt with pearl grippers and, at age 36, I was a Senior Citizen. Clearly, I was a stranger in a strange land. This was the case: the closest I had ever been to an event like this was watching the first half of the Woodstock movie. I found a spot to set my cooler down and spent most of the Fourth just paying attention.
For those interested in fashion, it can be reported that the Gatsby look has not taken over everywhere. It’s probably just as well, since white is not practical without a certain commitment to cleanliness. Still, observable regularities of dress indicated the young folk had indeed thought about what they were going to wear. The standard uniform for ”dudes”—a useful designation for someone no longer a boy but not quite a man—consisted of jeans and sleeveless shirts. With rare exceptions, “chicks” wore shorts and halters. A lot of the dudes walked around with jockey shorts sticking out of the waist of their Levis. I used to have nightmares about showing up in public places in my underwear, but it didn’t seem to bother them. Sometimes they had holes in their pants and you could tell they didn’t even have on any underwear or, if they did, that it was all worn out and torn. What if they were in an accident? The police would take one look at their underwear and send them to the charity hospital.
If there was sameness in Levis and shorts and sleeveless shirts and halters, there was marvelous variety in cap and hat. There were derbies and dapper Panamas, porkpies and pith helmets, hard hats and Hombergs, mountaineer hats and Scottish tams, Budweiser hats and Lone Star visors, golf hats and tennis hats and fishing hats, fatigue caps and baseballs caps and railroad caps, Dodge Truck and Yamaha Motorcycle and New York Air Conditioning caps, International Harvester caps and Caterpillar caps just like the man wore in the cafe in Easy Rider, lumberyard caps and polka-dot paint caps, and caps advertising Lone Star Feed and Fertilizer, Equidyne Horse Pellets, and the Athens Livestock Commission. Those who had neglected to bring hats fashioned substitutes from T-shirts and jockey shorts, or by jamming a six-pack carton on their heads, or by combining a Budvisor with a Holiday Inn towel to create the look of an ersatz Arab from the burning sands of Cairo, Illinois. Most common, of course, were beat-up western hats, with the brims flattened out or bent down in front to look mean. At kicker dance halls, skilled laborers try to look like ranchhands. Here, unemployed students were trying to look like rustlers. I understand the desire to dress up, but if I were picking a costume, I would choose a black and silver outfit and pretend I was a town tamer. My name would be Johnny Laredo.
After I got my bearings I began to pay closer attention to the music. I had been a bit apprehensive about how I would respond to three days of what has come to be called ”progressive country” or, more recently, “redneck rock.” I like country music because the tunes are easy to remember and I can understand the words. I don’t like most rock music because it is too loud and straining for the words seldom proves worth the effort. I just didn’t see how country music was going to gain much from crossbreeding. I do like some rock, of course. I’ve got two Carole King albums and a Neil Diamond tape and I really enjoy the Living Strings version of “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” on KYND (“All Music, All the Time”). I had liked a good bit of what I had heard of progressive country, especially Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Murphey and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and I had been told I would like Greezy Wheels and Freda and the Firedogs and several others, but I had never gone to hear them in person because they usually appear at places where people stand up and walk around and make a lot of noise. So, really, I was open, and I’m glad I was. I picked up some new enthusiasms.
One of the groups I enjoyed most was Jimmy Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band. Buffett started out with a song about wishing he had “a pencil-thin moustache, a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket, and an autographed picture of Andy Devine.” It made me think about thetime I got Lash LaRue’s autograph—for all you older people who have wondered whatever happened to Lash, he did a night-club act in Juarez for a while and is now a street preacher in Florida, bullwhipping for the Master. Buffett claimed the fellow who wrote “Pencil-thin Moustache” is named Marvin Gardens; I imagine he lives in a yellow house near the water works and pays $24 rent. When Jimmy rendered a lament for the fact that “They don’t dance like Carmen Miranda anymore,” I was about to decide I could come to like his work. Then he sang a number called “Why Don’t We All Get Drunk and Screw?” which I found not only a sharp break with nostalgic themes, but a rather more direct sentiment than I like in my love songs. I really prefer something a bit more sensitive and delicate, like Snooky Lanson and Dorothy Collins singing “Lavender Blue-Dilly Dilly.”
