ARMADILLO TV, OR WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Armadillo moves from one extravaganza to another. Sunday night they are taping a television concert to be simulcast over KLRN-TV, KEXL (San Antonio), and Krum-ha [KRMH] in Austin. The performers for the session include Mike Murphey, Willie Nelson, Billie Joe Shaver, Diamond Rio, Greezy Wheels, and D. K. Little.1

Despite the friction between Willie’s camp and the Armadillo gang, we continued working together for a while, including one last big gig for the Armadillo Country Music Review. The show was on July 8, 1973, just four days after the picnic in Dripping Springs, and as Joe Gracey wrote in the Statesman, it was taped for broadcast on KLRN (the Austin/San Antonio PBS affiliate, now known as KLRU in Austin) and other PBS affiliates in the state. Willie got top billing, followed by Michael Murphey, Billy Joe Shaver, Greezy Wheels, D. K. Little, and Diamond Rio.²

We envisioned the TV show as a chance to prove that an exciting music performance program could be produced in a real music venue here in Austin. We’d been spitballing and pitching a live music television series for some time. From the very beginning of the Armadillo, Mike Tolleson and Bill Narum had been working to get Austin musicians and their music on televisions in homes everywhere.

Woody Roberts helped us get the show simulcast on FM radio, which was really important, since the sound on regular television was pretty awful in those days. Although the first show was billed as the Armadillo Country Music Review (ACMR), we thought of the words “Armadillo Country” as representing a place bubbling over with great music of all kinds, not just country. When we proposed the show as a series, we called it Live from Armadillo World Headquarters, although Armadillo Music Television might have been even catchier. If the thing had gone on to become an annual music festival, there were many great possibilities for a name: AWHQ Fest, Dillo Fest, Dillopalooza, Armadillostock, etc.

Leading up to the ACMR broadcast, we’d been doing live radio broadcasts on KOKE-FM. Bill Narum and the Taylorvision commune were cablecasting videos of shows at the Armadillo within a few hours of the performances. In The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, Jan Reid made several mentions of our video obsession (“The Armadillos were always taping everything”).3 We’d been taping our shows on half-inch black-and-white video, but the ACMR show would be the first color, broadcast-quality taping, and the radio/TV simulcast on Austin and San Antonio FM stations would be the first of its kind.

Naturally, Mike Tolleson assumed responsibility for coordinating the shoot. Rounding up the equipment to produce a high-quality, multiple-camera shoot was a tall order. At the time, KLRN had a very modest studio facility, but they did have a mobile video van. Tolleson called his friend Bill Arhos, a producer at KLRN, and talked him into taping the show at the Armadillo. KLRN also took on the task of editing the concert down to two one-hour shows, to be broadcast on successive weekends. Bruce Scafe received credit as director; Mike Tolleson, Bill Arhos, and Charles Vaughan were credited as producers.⁴

The first segment of the Armadillo Country Music Review was to air on Friday night, July 20, 1973, but the schedule was shifted around at the last minute due to breaking news from Washington. The Watergate hearings were in session, and the committee investigating the White House had been informed just days earlier that President Nixon had secretly recorded conversations with his henchmen in the Watergate affair. Townsend Miller expressed his frustration in his column the next day.

I tuned in to KLRN-TV Friday night to hear the videotape of the Armadillo show, as originally scheduled. All I got was the significant but ridiculous Watergate hearings. Sunday night I tuned in to KLRN-TV to hear Doc Watson and the Dillards. I heard the Armadillo show! Then they tell me Part II was slated for 10:30 p.m. Sunday, July 29. I wondered when Doc Watson and the Dillards would appear. I thought I’d watch when the Watergate hearings were scheduled. Who knew?5

The ratings were not encouraging, but that didn’t mean the Austin music series was a dead idea. Leon Russell didn’t think so. Our friends at Lone Star entertained the idea of sponsoring such a series, with Leon and Sheltervision handling the production.

Bill Arhos still thought it was a good idea, too, and so did some of his associates. Later, in 1974, Arhos applied to PBS for a funding grant to produce a music concert series and was awarded $13,000 for development. His timing was good. A massive building boom was underway at UT, and one of the projects completed in 1974 was a new, state-of-the-art KLRN studio on campus, designated Studio 6A.

Mike Tolleson was enlisted as a consultant. “Bill Arhos called me to say they wanted to produce a pilot for a music series in their new studio and wanted my suggestions for talent,” said Mike. “So I told him that Willie was the obvious choice for a headline act, and with his agreement, I called Willie and booked him. B. W. Stevenson was also booked for the pilot. And Bill also wanted help rounding up other musicians for future episodes, and with that in mind, we began to make a list.”

The pilot was shot at KLRN’s Studio 6A on October 14, 1974. B. W. Stevenson’s set suffered technical glitches, and his part of the program had to be scrapped. Willie’s performance, however, was sufficiently impressive.

During a PBS pledge drive in early 1975, a sufficient number of PBS stations pledged a portion of their budgets for the purpose of extending the series, which was to be called Austin City Limits (ACL).

After more than forty years on the air, ACL has piled up so many accolades it almost seems to wear a Kevlar vest against criticism, yet, as Mike Tolleson puts it, “[Their] version of an Austin-based music show became as good as can be done in a studio environment, but it was not the down-home rock ’n’ roll lifestyle variety show we wanted to present from the Armadillo.”

On the show’s website you can read the official history of the series, with heavy emphasis on awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and so on, with a dramatic conjunction linking its years of success with an ostensibly unscripted and unlikely beginning:

But no one knew it would be any of those things back in 1974. That was the year KLRU program director Bill Arhos, producer Paul Bosner and director Bruce Scafe hatched the idea in response to PBS’s call for original programming from its member stations.6

The three of them were not exactly big names in the world of live music television, but to be fair, that world did not yet exist. Bosner, who was living in Dallas, said he was a dedicated fan of the so-called cosmic cowboy scene in Austin, and Scafe had directed a music program in Illinois.⁷ Next, according to the official ACL history:

After [Bosner] turned Arhos on to Jan Reid’s book The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, the trio came up with the idea of a TV program to showcase Austin’s diverse mix of country, blues, folk and psychedelia. Thus Austin City Limits (title courtesy of Bosner, who saw the sign every week when he commuted from Dallas to Austin) was born.⁸

Bill Arhos told this version of events many times over the years. He told it to Jan Reid, and it’s repeated in the text and on the dust jacket of a revised edition of Redneck Rock published in 2006. But the story makes no sense, because Redneck Rock wasn’t published until 1974, the year after Tolleson enlisted Arhos in the shooting, editing, and broadcasting of the Armadillo Country Music Review, all of which happened between July 8 and 29, 1973. You can find Bill Arhos’s chronologically impossible assertion almost everywhere: music books, dissertations, Wikipedia, and every place where amateur historians have tried to describe the Austin music scene of the 1970s.⁹

Arhos died in 2015 at the age of eighty, and I never got around to having a discussion with him on this particular topic.¹⁰ It would sure be nice to see Armadillo given proper credit for putting Austin music on television, but I’m not saying we were ripped off. We had a lot of other irons in the fire at the time. Plus, as Mike Tolleson points out, “KLRN had the money and gear and we did not.”

Early on, we had at least a hand in the production of Austin City Limits. Arhos had tapped Mike Tolleson to book the talent for the first season. “We were consultants,” said Mike, “but we wanted a role as coproducer.” Music video had long been one of Mike’s passions and areas of legal expertise. He laid out the need for clearing rights to the musical performances for commercial use following the PBS run. But unfortunately, his advice fell on deaf ears.

“This was all new to them,” said Mike. “Arhos and his people were just focused on getting shows on the air, making their budgets, things like that.” There were other things that Mike Tolleson and the ACL people didn’t see eye to eye on, including his role as consultant. Eventually, the two entities parted ways, and Mike’s job was taken over by Joe Gracey.

Even though music from “Armadillo Country” went on without us under a different name and with different people in charge, for many years Austin City Limits continued to draw from the Armadillo talent pool. And during its third season, the show famously began using Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues” for its end credits. So we got a shout-out (“I wanna go home with the Armadillo / Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene”) every week for the next several decades.

*   *   *

Let’s return to July 8, 1973, the night we taped the Armadillo Country Music Review. I was rightfully proud when I went onstage to introduce Willie, but I also felt compelled to make a sideways reference to what we all knew, that buzzards were circling over the Nixon White House:

There’s a story going around the United States of America, going around about the same time that the government’s crumbling, and the economics are falling apart and the prices are going up, and the story . . . is that there’s something weird going on in Austin, Texas. And what seems to be weird is that the cowboys and the hippies are getting along better, probably, than anywhere in the world. And maybe it’s because the cowboys took a look at the hippies a couple of days ago and said, “They look more like my grandfather than I do.”11

Another historic thing happened that night after the taping. Mike Tolleson and Carlotta Pankratz brought Willie back to the office to discuss booking another date at the Armadillo. Bobby Hedderman, who was still simmering from the last dustup, saw visions of Willie’s friends spitting on the floor; of gun-toting slimeballs pulling their redneck, used-car-salesman, mafia-intimidation tactics on our security team; and of every good-old-boy friend of Willie’s slipping in and out of the box office as Willie was being adored by his new, young fans.

“Willie, I’d love to have you do a show,” Bobby said, “but you have to control your friends. I can’t have them pushing around the staff and packing heat in the building.”

Willie glanced over at Mike and Carlotta, a little grin on his face. In his Blackland drawl, he said, “They don’t all carry guns.”

Mike and Carlotta went pale. Willie’s eyes reminded Bobby of an eagle’s—dark, piercing, and yet unknowable.

“We can both make some money here,” Bobby said, “but we don’t run the Armadillo like a saloon.”

“Bob,” said Mike, attempting to intervene, “Willie comes from a different—”

“I’m not having my staff endangered by those guys,” said Bobby. He was fuming. “Willie, we want you to play here, but you’ve got to control them.”

Willie retained his trademark cool, his voice soft, his eyes sparkling. “I can’t be responsible for what somebody else does.”

Temporarily shelving the disagreement, Bobby asked Willie if he wanted to schedule another date.

“Call my manager on Monday,” Willie said.

Neil Reshen was Willie’s manager, and Monday morning, Bobby called Reshen’s office in New York. He had hardly begun talking when Reshen interrupted.

“Willie said, ‘Fuck you,’” said Reshen. “If his friends aren’t good enough for you, then neither is he.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “he’s probably right.”

Bobby hung up the phone, and that was that. Less than a year after his first show at the Armadillo, the love between Shotgun Willie and the Armadillo had grown cold.