Well, it’s T for Texas . . .
The whole thing might have happened anyway, even if Willie Nelson’s house hadn’t burned, but probably not in the same way. For as the flames licked into the autumn Nashville night back in 1971, it was the low point in a decade of frustration for Nelson, a highly successful songwriter who always thought he could make it as a performer but could never persuade the bigwigs down on Music Row.
So as the flames crackled around him, he darted into the house, salvaged a pound of top-grade Colombian marijuana, and pointed his car in the direction of Texas. He had been born there back in 1933, in a little wind-swept town called Abbott. And like most expatriates from the dusty reaches of the Lone Star State, he had never quite gotten it out of his system—even when things were going well and he was writing classic country songs such as “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away.”
Nashville and Willie just hadn’t been meant for each other somehow, and when he got back to Texas and began sorting things out, he caught the Lone Star fever again and decided to stay. Within a year of that decision, he found himself a kind of godfather figure in one of the most important developments, both musically and socially, in the latter-day evolution of rock and country music.
This development is the emergence in Texas of a musical form that goes by a variety of labels, “progressive country” and “redneck rock” among others. But whatever you choose to call it, it is essentially a fusion of rock and country sounds—and, more important, of rock and country audiences—that comes after a decade of polarization over everything from length of hair, to the color of skin, to the ardor of competing ideologies.
Slowly, in the last few years, the fusion presided over by Nelson and a handful of others has begun to spread, riding an impulse toward reconciliation and rippling westward in the direction of the Coast, then eastward toward cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, and Philadelphia. The most tangible manifestations of the spread have been Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Michael Murphey’s “Wildfire,” a pair of hit singles that succeeded in both pop and country markets and between them have sold well over a million records.
But there are other manifestations as well: the rabid, packed-house followings of a hard-core country-rocker named Jerry Jeff Walker; the critical acclaim for the country-flavored big-band innovations of a group called Asleep At the Wheel; and the cult popularity of a new public television series, Austin City Limits, featuring the cream of the Texas crop and, beginning in 1975, shown in one hundred and sixteen markets from coast to coast.
There is a kind of metaphorical logic in the fact that Austin, a bubbling college town and capital city of 300,000 people, would find itself at the center of the ripple. For Austin, says Michael Murphey, the gentle spirit and respected intellectual of the city’s musical community, has always been a place of natural fusions. It lies atop a geological imperfection called Balcone’s Fault, which, according to the prevailing lay theorists in the area, is responsible for the area’s peculiar topographical character.
Austin is the point at which the countryside begins to change dramatically no matter which way you go—quickly evolving into treeless, cattle-producing prairieland as you move north or west, drying up into rocky hills and cactus-covered desert as you move south toward San Antonio and Mexico, and tangling itself into thick pinewoods and murky pockets of swampland as you move east toward Louisiana.
“And,” says Murphey, “there is a social and musical analogy. You have the Chicano influence coming up from around San Antonio. You have a lot of blues and even some Cajun music spilling over from Louisiana, a pretty large jazz following associated with the university, and north of here country music is incredibly popular. Culturally, you have blacks, Chicanos, and a variety of European heritages. And overlaid across all of this, you have the cowboy culture.
“Austin,” he concludes, “is the hub. It has a feeling of vitality that’s pretty hard to match.”
For the last forty years there have been people around Austin who felt that way, who appreciated talent for what it was and had the breadth of taste to revel in diversity. Chief among those people in the early years was a kindly old gentleman named Kenneth Threadgill, who transformed a filling station into a beer joint in 1933, and featured live entertainment once a week. Threadgill himself performed with the house band, a hard-country backup group that blended well with his Jimmie Rodgers style of yodeling.
But he also opened his stage to anyone who wanted to play there, and by the time the sixties rolled around, it was an exciting place indeed. One of the people who got her start there, for example, was an ex-coed from the University of Texas, a troubled, dynamic young woman named Janis Joplin, who went on to become one of the genuine, hard-living heroines of the West Coast rock culture.
Despite the efforts of people like Threadgill, however, things began to go a little sour in Austin, as they did nearly everywhere else in the late sixties and early seventies. In the wake of Cambodia, Vietnam, and the killing of students at Kent and Jackson State universities, the nation’s mood began to darken, and Austin suffered as much as any place. More than some, in fact, for diverse and pluralistic cultures can become a hodgepodge of armed camps if you strip away the veneer of tolerance that prevails in happier times.
One of the people in Austin who understood all this, and had become deeply troubled by it during the early months of the seventies, was a bearded young lawyer and soft-spoken music buff named Mike Tolleson. Tolleson had become involved with a group of people who had opened a club and community center in August of 1970—a watering hole for local long-hairs that he called the Armadillo World Headquarters—located in a spacious auditorium a few hundred yards from the Colorado River.
The Armadillo had blossomed out of a search for a congenial headquarters for the struggling but talented rock musicians who abounded in the Austin area and were resisting the usual migration to the West Coast. Eddie Wilson, manager of a group called Shiva’s Headband, had happened to notice a vacant auditorium next door to a skating rink, and within a fairly short time he and some friends had transformed it into the Armadillo.
The beat of hard rock soon flourished inside its two-story walls, and young people poured in by the droves. The Armadillo people also developed a craft shop and practice room for musicians, and the stature of the place began to grow. But there was a disturbing thought in the back of their minds, a realization that, for the most part, only one type of person was apt to come to hear their music; and so they began to experiment a little. Among other things, they brought in the inventor of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, and some country-flavored freak rockers called the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Then, in the summer of 1972, they held their breath and took the biggest plunge yet—a leap back into the hard-core, honky-tonking past, with the west Texas beat of Willie Nelson.
“We thought if we could sell Willie to our audience, and bring in his old audience,” remembers Mike Tolleson, draping his feet across the corner of his desk, “we could cross sectors and integrate these scenes culturally. That was something we really wanted to do because there had been a real sense of segregation in Austin, a pretty strong feeling of antagonism.
“We thought we could promote a kind of fusion and see different types of people come together so that Austin could be a total community. We also brought in Waylon, Tom T. Hall, and several others; and what emerged was a pretty different image. People became something more than just hippies, or just rednecks, and it was a very satisfying thing to see it happen.”
Few people shared in the satisfaction any more emphatically than Nelson himself. For he is a rare figure in the country music scene—one of a handful of people (Kris Kristofferson is another) who produces more awe among those who know him well than among those who see him at a distance.
“It’s really been an incredible thing,” he said recently, thinking back over the last several years as he crumbled a pair of saltine crackers into a bowl of vegetable soup. Weary from a week on the road, Nelson had slipped away for a few minutes of conversation in the motel room of his longtime friend and drummer, Paul English. He seemed to savor the reflective minutes before the record company hangers-on and the giggling groupies with their pre-faded jeans and pointy-toed cowboy boots found out where he was and descended like flies.
“Yeah,” he continued in the relaxed baritone voice that comes out with a twang when he puts it to music, “it was certainly a good thing. You had all these people who were afraid of each other, or thought they were, though I never quite saw it that way. I had played to enough different kinds of crowds to know they had more in common than they thought.
“But it’s fun now. You can make a list of all kinds of people that come together at our shows, especially in Texas. Maybe if we keep putting on the shows, and if the same kind of crowds keep showing up, the time will come when nobody will have to make the lists anymore.”
He smiles when he says it, and the smile does not go away altogether when his door bursts open and a record company secretary with a high-pitched voice and jeans that fit like a layer of skin asks if she and her friends can come in. The word has apparently spread, for the room quickly fills up with the faithful, and the serious conversation begins to dissipate.
Nelson is used to it, and accepts the inevitable with the kind of beatific resignation that has become his trademark. People say the serenity has always been a part of him, though that seems hard to believe if you look back on the early days when there were marriages that fell apart, and albums that didn’t sell, and when the Music Row producers were telling him he was so good at writing songs that there was really no reason for him to try to sing them.
Now, of course, everything is different—especially in Texas, where the groupies, hippies, cowboys, and old people will travel for hundreds of miles and gather by the tens of thousands just to mingle in his presence. His Fourth of July musical picnics have become a semiofficial institution in Texas, with the 1976 outing drawing upwards of seventy thousand people.
“Down in Texas,” concluded Waylon Jennings in gruff and sincere expression of admiration, “they think that when they die they go to Willie’s house.”
To some observers, especially the rock-oriented journalists who are not yet hip to the sound of his music, Willie is a phenomenon that defies explanation. They point out—correctly—that his abilities as a picker, singer, and even a songwriter are not markedly more impressive than those of Texas colleagues whose names are less than legend. The question, then, is: Why Willie?
For starters, there’s the fact that fads are contagious, and so is the excitement of a crowd that borders on being a mob. But still, there had to be a beginning point, and people like his drummer, Paul English, believe that Willie’s meteoric rise is explained at least partially (and maybe even primarily) by the grinning serenity of his presence.
It’s hard to say whether or not that’s true, but there was certainly no evidence to the contrary one wintry evening not long ago when a fairly typical Willie Nelson crowd had assembled in frantic anticipation of his arrival. They endured the warm-up acts, then erupted into routine frenzy when he padded onto the stage wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes, and carrying his battered Martin guitar.
He began to strum and then realized to his mild embarrassment that the guitar was out of tune. As he began the frustrating twang-twang process of trying to synchronize the strings, he leaned toward the microphone and asked good-naturedly, “How do you like me so far?” They cheered like maniacs.
Backstage when the show was over, Nelson, like any reasonable person, shied away from talking about auras—realizing that they are not much subject to precise dissection. But if serenity is the key intangible that combines with his music, he will let drop some hints about where it comes from. The hints, he says, are contained in his songs—which certainly seems to be the case.
Most of his tear-jerking jukebox ballads are distinctly autobiographical, as are the cuts from an obscure album called Yesterday’s Wine, which came out in 1971 and can now be found in the two-dollar bins of sophisticated record stores. But if the album didn’t sell very well, in Nelson’s mind it is nevertheless the most potent and personal record he’s ever produced.
It’s an opera in a way, a sort of rough country equivalent of Jesus Christ Superstar—not so much in its content as in the originality of its approach. It’s a concept album, tracing with unabashed theological overtones the ups and downs of a typical life, and revealing in the process a crucial fact about Willie Nelson—that despite his honky-tonking history and fast-paced present, he is about as deeply religious as anyone around.
The revelation is scattered throughout the album but probably is found most clearly in an uncomplicated song called “It’s Not for Me To Understand.” This gospel tune tells the story of a man walking past a yard full of children, one of whom is a little blind boy and standing alone and off to one side. The man, who is Nelson, is moved by the scene and demands to know how God could permit such a heart-breaking turn of events. The answer turns out to be this: It’s not for you to reason why/You, too, are blind without my eyes.
It’s a frankly sentimental song, but the humility it contains—the awe at the inscrutable power of God—is the profound and universal variety that comes, Nelson says, when religion sinks in deep. And it can provide, he adds, some pretty stout emotional armor against the vagaries and absurdities of everyday life.
In any event, whatever it was that gave Nelson his powers of endurance, his eventual stardom has proved an understandable inspiration to a host of Texas pickers whose day has not yet arrived. And so he became the catalyst, the momentum began to grow, and almost overnight Austin filled up with a remarkably talented array of poets and musicians of every stripe.
The supply had been around for some time in the form of people like Rusty Wier, but the legions were beefed up considerably in the early seventies when Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Steve Fromholz, Doug Sahm, Townes Van Zandt, Bill Callery, and quite a few others moved in to stay.
Of all those mentioned, one of the most significant has turned out to be Sahm, who made it pretty big in the mid-to-late sixties as the lead singer for a British-style rock group called the Sir Douglas Quintet. What the teenyboppers didn’t know, however, and probably didn’t want to know, was that Sahm and the quintet were products of the very un-English city of San Antonio, Texas.
He had grown up there in the forties and fifties—a fiddle-playing prodigy in the redneck honky-tonks, who also had a habit of wandering crosstown to the blues clubs, to share a stage with the likes of T-Bone Walker. But it was rock ’n’ roll that finally took hold of Sahm’s life during his high-school years, and after graduation he gathered together a quintet of rockers and headed for the Coast.
There was a string of mid-sixties hits, including “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendicino,” both of which were written by Sahm. But things grew quieter after that, until Sahm resurfaced in 1972 with a slap-happy solo album featuring a whole bunch of country songs and some able backup work by a musical compatriot named Bob Dylan.
Sahm had moved back to Texas by that time, settling in comfortably on the rock side of the country-rock spectrum, but getting countrier and countrier as time went by. He was living in a cabin on the outskirts of Austin, nestled in among the scrub oaks a few hundred yards from a music hall hangout called the Soap Creek Saloon.
He agrees with little hesitation to talk about his curious musical odyssey (he prefers to call it a trip) and generally suggests the club as the site for discussion. It’s an excellent choice, for the Soap Creek is a delightful place, congenial and easygoing with low ceilings, pool tables, and an adjacent three hundred seat concert room that boasts a double-size fireplace.
The interview is set for late afternoon, and the club is inhabited only by a waitress and a couple of good ole boys who have been there long enough for the Lone Star beer to give way to a round of Tequila Sunrises. Against the wall an early-vintage Wurlitzer jukebox is standing idle, but next to it a more modern version loaded with Doug Sahm records is blaring forth with “Groover’s Paradise,” the title cut from a recent album.
The man himself strolls in after a few minutes, looking for all the world like the ageless Mr. Hippie. He’s thirty-four years old, but you’d never be able to tell that by his T-shirt uniform, angular face, and shoulder-length hair, which is straight and getting on toward being unkempt.
He plops his slender frame into a chair near the bar and offers to let a pair of Eastern visitors finish their game of eight-ball before the conversation gets underway. But he seems obviously antsy and ready to get on with it, so the cue sticks are temporarily laid to rest and the pitcher of Lone Star is transported to his table.
It soon becomes apparent that interviewing Sahm without a tape recorder is a definite mistake. Asking a question is like flicking a switch, and the ideas spew out like champagne from a shook-up bottle—the syntax askew, the transitions nonexistent, but somewhere in there a nugget of understanding that holds your attention.
There was a point early in the conversation when he was asked, obviously enough, what brought him back to Austin. The answer came out something like this:
“Well, I was out there on that whole West Coast scene, man, you know, in San Francisco, that whole Grateful Dead trip, you know; it was getting pretty heavy, I don’t know, it just kinda burned itself out, you know what I mean, like big cities, like what’s happening in New York today, you know, so I just came back to Austin. People are still there, there are still jobs; and we got into the country thing, and our music now is countrier than ever. I can’t ’splain it.” Or words to that effect.
The odd thing is that after a while it all seems to make sense, and what emerges is this: in Sahm’s mind the big-city scene has basically turned bad, and there is some kind of analogy or connection between the bummed-out craziness of the Haight-Ashbury drug culture, the proliferating concrete of urban Los Angeles, and the teetering financial problems of New York City. In the face of those things, Sahm believes, a lot of people are heading back to less complicated places, and more specifically, in many cases they are heading home—back to the roots. That reality, he says, is one of the key energizing forces of the Austin musical movement.
Sahm runs through all of this, and once he has explained it to his satisfaction if not everyone else’s, he sniffs and belches, slaps both hands on his thighs, and says abruptly: “Well, is that about it?” It turns out that it is, and he rises, shakes hands, and reaffirms his earlier declaration that he wants to do some gigs back east in places like North Carolina.
In back of him, the waitress, wearing a friendly smile and a Doug Sahm T-shirt, shakes her head in the perpetual amazement that Sahm seems to generate. “He’s something else, isn’t he?” she says with a laugh, and then launches into a monologue on the crowds that pour into the Soap Creek when Sir Doug performs.
“It’s really weird,” she says. “You get a little bit of everybody here. For a long time, it was a young, kinda freaky crowd. The older folks were a little scared of the place. The first year or so, there were some people who came out here that were into dealing drugs, but we’ve got that cleared up, and now it’s a real mixture. The freaky ones still come, but so do some older, you know, straighter people. And there are a lot of people like in their twenties—late twenties—and thirties.”
That in-between crowd is hard to define. They are not exactly hippies, and they don’t look like rednecks. In fact, they seem to include a little bit of everybody.
Some are thirtyish onetime collegiate radicals who grew up as comfortable conservatives in places like Dallas or the dust-bowl towns farther west, then went away to school and found themselves temporarily alienated and radicalized by the war in Vietnam and all the upheavals of the previous decade.
They may have no more intention of giving up their politics than Sahm has of backing away entirely from rock ’n’ roll. But over pitchers of beer in the country music clubs in downtown Austin, they will tell you they are fed up with the alienation and have come back to Texas because it’s home.
They form part of the crowd, but there are also other types represented. There are the rednecks and good ole boys who are young enough to have been influenced by the turmoil of the sixties—not only the war, but the ethnic awakenings and the mind-numbing string of cultural fads from Beatlemania onward. Their hair may be a little bit longer, and their ideas a little bit different, but they are, as an up-and-coming singer named Milton Carroll put it, “your basic country audience.”
“It’s really a hell of a thing, man,” says Carroll, who records for Willie Nelson’s Lone Star label. “It’s roots, you know what I mean? There ain’t no way to change where you’re from.”
And if you can’t change it, you may as well flaunt it, and they do a lot of that at places like the Castle Creek Club in downtown Austin. When Friday night rolls around, they will pour from the woodwork with their cowboy hats and faded denims—clapping and whooping like crazy people, while up on the stage Jerry Jeff Walker is leading a cast of his buddies through “Goodnight Irene” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
The applause and rebel yells will sometimes linger for a full five minutes after he is through, and he will return to the microphone, lurching forward with a grin, and say, “These are hongry people. They’ll clap for anything.”
But those scenes are not limited to Texas. Roughly the same thing happens, for example, when Jerry Jeff visits places like Charlotte, North Carolina, and it’s a peculiar sight in a part of the country where the nearest real cowboy is a thousand miles away. There are excesses in there someplace, and they can be disturbing to the grizzled Texans whose identity has never been much in doubt, and who are a little put off by the prospect of having their culture turned into something it isn’t. And indeed if the dusty-boots trappings were all there were to it, the Austin sound would no doubt melt into the past as quickly as hula hoops, bomb shelters, and blue suede shoes.
But it’s been a durable addition to the country music scene, and there is a reason for that expanding popularity. Beneath the shit-kicking exterior, there is a celebration of the humaneness that has always resided in the Texas culture, and nowhere is that fact illustrated more graphically than in the music of Guy Clark.
Clark is a decent, Sleepy-John type of fellow, who grew up in the western flatlands town of Monahans and then wound up in Nashville a few years back with a promising contract to write some songs. Although he no longer lives in Texas, he still performs there and writes from his boyhood there—from the days during World War II and afterward, when he was raised by an oil-drilling drifter named Jack Prigg.
Prigg was, as Clark puts it, “my grandmother’s boyfriend,” a tobacco-chewing, domino-playing old man whose life and death and friendship heightened in Clark an instinctive understanding that you find in the most poetic songwriters—a realization that there are often hopeful, and even inspiring qualities in the saddest and most tawdry of circumstances. Clark wrote a haunting tribute to the wisdom of Prigg, a song called “Desperados Waiting for a Train” that most people say is one of his best. But he has also written about all sorts of other people, from winos, to hitchhikers, to prostitutes, and his music as a result is shot through with a kind of rough-hewn sympathy and sensitivity.
Although the scenery most often comes from Texas, the feelings and stories are too universal to be confined to one region. The same is true of much of the other music coming out of Austin—especially, of course, the songs of Willie Nelson—and as a result the fans are multiplying throughout the country. A lot of them are young, like the five thousand or so Vanderbilt University students who turned out for Clark and Nelson not long ago and grabbed hold of country music as if it had been invented especially for them.
There were people around Nashville who grumbled, after that, that Willie had turned his back on country music’s traditional fans, and Roy Acuff even said as much on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But the theory came tumbling down a few weeks later when Nelson was invited to appear at the Midnight Jamboree at Ernest Tubb Record Shop. As it turned out, it was a performance that underscored as clearly as any other the symbolism of the Texas movement.
For Ernest Tubb is a funky place. Its Jamborees every Saturday night now draw the stalwarts who have never quite adjusted to the fact that the Grand Ole Opry has gone uptown. They are the hard-core folk who still pour in from the hinterlands in their pickups and workday khakis to revel in the music of white man’s soul.
But when Nelson appeared on a night in mid-October, the crowd was a little bit different. It contained, in addition to its regulars, a smattering of Nelson’s newer and shaggier fans, and there were discreet murmurs in various parts of the room about why the hippies were there. Some of the murmurs, in fact, were directed toward Nelson himself, as he made his way through the throng, prominently displaying his flaming red beard and a blue-checkered bandanna looped around his shoulder-length hair. But when he finally made it to the stage and began to sing, the audience’s mood changed abruptly: they whooped and screamed and wouldn’t let him leave.
In the back of the crowd, the whole event was summed up pretty eloquently by an ole boy with close-cropped hair and a round, perpetually flushed face.
“Yep,” he said, rocking back and forth from heel to toe, as his voice took on an air of authority, “I guess ole Willie’ll be all right.”