For the Love of Music 
Trigger That 70’s Show
In 1972 the Austin music scene exploded with a new, rootsy form of country that turned its back on Nashville and embraced the counterculture. Forty years later, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, and a host of other cosmic cowboys and redneck rockers remember the first Dripping Springs Reunion, the time Waylon Jennings almost got busted, and the birth of outlaw country.
Willie Nelson at the 1973 Fourth of July Picnic, in Dripping Springs.
© Jim Marshall Photography LLC
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What it was, was a generational shift, and not one that Music Row wanted. In the late sixties, Nashville country music was defined by the string-swelling, countrypolitan gloss of Tammy Wynette and Glen Campbell. RCA executive Chet Atkins was a chief architect of the Nashville sound, and when people asked him to define it, he liked to jingle the change in his pockets and say, “It’s the sound of money.” No tweaks to the formula were tolerated. Even Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, two Texas boys with ideas of their own, were forced to fit the mold. They recorded for RCA, and their records sounded exactly the way Atkins wanted.
The rest of the nation had less success maintaining the old order. In cities like San Francisco, the counterculture was popular culture. Hair was long, love was free, and dope smoking was considered tame. The music ranged from the psychedelic extremes of Jefferson Airplane to the rootsier jangle of Creedence Clearwater Revival, with acts like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead straddling the two. Nashville, with its pompadours, whiskey, and quiet reliance on truck-driver amphetamines, had no use for any of it. When Los Angeles bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers started playing country rock, winking at Nashville in Nudie suits festooned with rhinestone pot leaves, Music Row responded with disgust.
Halfway between the coasts sat Texas, where hundreds of honky-tonks functioned as Nashville’s farm system. But that music belonged to the old guard. Texas kids were more interested in the state’s thriving folkie circuit. The hub was a Dallas listening room called the Rubaiyat, from which young singer-songwriters like Steve Fromholz and B. W. Stevenson sallied forth to coffeehouses around the state. The music they played was distinct from the protest songs of Greenwich Village. Texas folk was rooted in cowboy, Tejano, and Cajun songs, in Czech dance halls and East Texas blues joints. It was dance music. And when the Texas folkies started gigging with their rock-minded peers, they found a truer sound than the L.A. country rockers. There was nothing ironic about the fiddle on Fromholz’s epic “Texas Trilogy.”
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when that sound and scene coalesced into something cohesive enough to merit a name, but then again none of the labels people came up with—cosmic cowboy, progressive country, redneck rock, and, ultimately, outlaw country—made everyone happy. Still, the pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin. Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song “Mr. Bojangles.” In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.
To say that Nashville eventually got hip to what was happening would be too kind. Rather, the industry identified a chance to make money and came up with the “outlaw” label, which now applies to one more subset of the Nashville establishment. While it rightly conjures images of Willie, Waylon, and the boys, other stars who made careers off it, like Hank Williams Jr., couldn’t have had less in common with hippie poets like Murphey and Fromholz. But something more than marketing persists in the label. It was coined to describe country songwriters who wouldn’t conform to traditional strictures, who insisted on making music that sounded right to them. What follows are their stories of how they pulled that off.
Country Stars and Folkies
As the seventies began, there were two major schisms bearing down on Austin’s budding country music scene. The first was political. The cultural upheaval of the sixties was still going full force, particularly in Texas, even in a city that considered itself as forward thinking as Austin did. The second related more narrowly to the music. The only route to success for young Texas country songwriters went through Nashville, a stubbornly conservative industry town considered every bit as reactionary as the Nixon administration. Even Kris Kristofferson, a Brownsville-born Rhodes Scholar who followed the traditional path—he worked as a janitor at a Nashville recording studio before he started collecting number ones in 1970—failed to fit in. His writing was considered too esoteric. More to the point, his hair was too long.
BILL BENTLEY wrote for the Austin Sun, a biweekly newspaper. I was in school in Georgetown in ’68 and would come down to the Vulcan Gas Company [Austin’s preeminent counterculture nightclub] to see shows, then walk over to I-35 at two in the morning and hitchhike home. One time I got picked up by these rednecks, and, man, they drove me out into the country and said they were gonna kill me. It scared the shit out of me. I started leaving the club early enough to catch the last Greyhound back.
ALVIN CROW led a western swing band in Amarillo. We had long hair in my band, and a couple of the guys got pulled over in a little town called Ralls. The cops kept them for three days, then shaved their heads. It was even that way around Austin. If you were driving in from Lubbock or Amarillo with long hair, you had to get down on the floorboard in places like Oak Hill because you’d get pulled over.
RAY BENSON moved his western swing band Asleep at the Wheel from Berkeley to Austin in 1973. Music separated people. Country music fans were for the Vietnam War, like Merle Haggard and “Okie from Muskogee.” The hippies—and the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones—were against it. And never the twain shall meet. If you walked in the Broken Spoke with long hair in 1969, you’d get your ass kicked and your hair cut.
MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY was a songwriter, known then as Michael Murphey. I went to do Ralph Emery’s Nashville radio show, and taped on the studio door was a Flying Burrito Brothers album with “This is NOT country music” written on it in red and X’s through the faces of the Brothers.
ROGER SOVINE was an executive at BMI Nashville. The guys who made the records in Nashville were people like Owen Bradley. He had an orchestra that played high school proms on the weekend, but during the week they played on Webb Pierce and Brenda Lee records. They had a round sound, no edge. In Texas you’d hear people like Billy Joe Shaver. They had an edge.
DAVE HICKEY was a cultural critic who occasionally wrote songs in Nashville. You have to understand the way Nashville worked. The “talent” were basically slaves of the record company. They’d come off the road once every three months, go into the studio, get handed lyric sheets, sing to prerecorded songs, and then go back on the road.
WILLIE NELSON was a Nashville songwriter. I recently found a bunch of my demos from 1961 to ’64, and I like the sound I was getting. But then the record companies overproduced it. They’d have had a real good record if they’d just released the demos.
RICHIE ALBRIGHT played drums for Waylon Jennings. Chet Atkins signed Waylon to RCA in 1965 and produced his first few albums. But then Chet cut back on producing and passed Waylon around to guys we didn’t feel we had a whole lot in common with.
DAVE HICKEY You couldn’t even cut a song Chet didn’t like, and it produced a war of cultures. In Nashville everybody acquiesced to the class structure. They’d think, “We may be poor, but we don’t want to be destitute, so we won’t make waves.” The temperament of Texas is more optimistic. People in Texas may be poor, but they keep thinking they’re going to win the football pool. There was a cultural optimism running through Waylon, Willie, and Billy Joe.
BILLY JOE SHAVER was a songwriter from Corsicana. I had a borrowed motorcycle that I ran up on [legendary Nashville songwriter] Harlan Howard’s porch. I was a little bit inebriated. So I kinda knocked on his door with my front wheel, and he comes to the door, and I said, “God dang, are you Harlan
Howard?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I am Billy Joe Shaver, and I’m the greatest songwriter that ever lived.”
STEVE EARLE was a songwriter living in Houston. We were all essentially folkies who followed Kristofferson to Nashville, rather than Willie or Roger Miller. No offense, but they were traditional writers who happened to be incredibly good. Transcendent. But Kristofferson was post-Dylan.
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