Outlaw Country
When the counterculture came to town… how Waylon, Willie and their progressive peers took Austin, Texas by storm
H“E’S ONLY THE BOB DYLAN of country music, you hippie assholes!” Eddie Wilson, proprietor of the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, announced Willie Nelson on the night of August 12, 1972 to a bewildered audience of freaks and stoners who were pondering what Nelson was doing there at all. An esteemed Music Row songwriter who had written standards such as “Crazy”, “Night Life” and “Funny How Times Slips Away” in the ’50s and ’60s, Nelson had never quite broken through as a recording artist. At 39, with his rollneck sweaters, side parting and slick grin, he appeared to embody Nashville orthodoxy, but however incongruous his slot at Austin’s premier countercultural venue seemed, Nelson knew what he was doing.
On a previous visit to Austin, he had recognised the Armadillo’s strategic importance straight away. “I knew it would be a good place to experiment with what I was trying to do, which was bring the hippies and the cowboys together,” Nelson told me. “You’ve already got your long-haired cowboys, and you’ve got your short-haired cowboys, and if you put me and Waylon [ Jennings] and Jerry Jeff
[Walker] and all these different people in there, you’re going to bring them together.”
“The Armadillo was one of those places where the hippies would show up no matter who was playing,” says Texan singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard. “Willie came out, and the hippies found themselves standing next to the rednecks, where outside of that venue they would not have gotten along. It was cross-pollination.”
Born in Abbott, Texas, 125 miles to the north, Nelson moved to Austin from Tennessee later in 1972. Over the next two years he played the Armadillo on a further half-dozen occasions. During that time, the line between audience and artist blurred. He grew out his hair, stopped shaving and added an earring. Drummer Paul English took to wearing a vampiric cape, while Bee Spears placed a rooster on the head of his bass as he played. Joints were thrown onstage and enthusiastically consumed.
Nelson was not the first Cosmic Cowboy, nor did he create what became known as Progressive Country, but he was the movement’s catalytic figure. Alongside fellow travellers such as Hubbard, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doug Sahm, Michael Martin Murphey, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, from his home base in Austin he spearheaded a localised revolution in country music in the early 1970s. “We were all rebelling against Nashville’s control of country, and LA’s control of pop music,” says Murphey. “We didn’t think there was a market for it, we thought it was just for the Texas audience. We got that wrong!”
AuSTIN had always been a funky town. In the ’60s, while the rest of Texas remained stubbornly resistant to social change, the state capital was a “little oasis in the middle of the desert”, according to Nelson. Nestled between the gentle slopes of Hill Country and the Colorado River, it was home to the university Of Texas, the biggest in the country. Each year hordes of students arrived, and many stayed after graduating, creating a young, socially enlightened core rubbing against the city’s more traditional inhabitants. Culturally and musically, it meant Austin created its own aura. “There were 25,000 students there,” says Murphey. “And they listened to everything. They went to symphonies, ballets, jazz concerts, blues clubs. They were the most eclectic music fans I have ever seen.” Not for nothing did Doug Sahm title his 1974 album Groover’s Paradise.
Blues and R&B acts would play Antone’s. Folk-orientated singersongwriters such as Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker would check in at the Chequered Flag coffeehouse or One Nite club. Psychedelic rock bands like The 13th Floor Elevators would play Vulcan Gas Company and Mother Earth. Austin had a thriving counterculture, but there was strict delineation between the hippies
and the rednecks. “There were two completely different ideologies and lifestyles,” says Mickey Raphael, who moved to Austin in 1973 to play harmonica in Willie Nelson’s band – a job he retains to this day.
Country music tended to attract the conservative crowd. When Nelson came to Austin in 1970, he would play the Broken Spoke, the Alliance Wagon Yard or Big G’s in nearby Round Rock. These were cowboy outposts for my-country-right-or-wrong Texans. Country music was changing, however. On the West Coast, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard had minted the revolutionary Bakersfield sound, while The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead were incorporating elements of country, folk and bluegrass into their music. In Los Angeles, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were also busy reclaiming traditional forms.
In Texas, the catalyst for country’s latest evolution was the decision of a group of exiled artists to move back to their home state. Doug Sahm had relocated to San Francisco with the Sir Douglas Quintet during the Summer Of Love. Michael Martin Murphey had been working as a contracted songwriter for Screen Gems in LA, while Jerry Jeff Walker had lived the life of a drifter – beaten up in New York and jailed in New Orleans, where he had written his most famous song, “Mr Bojangles”.
Now, they were all heading to Austin, along with other Texan artists like BW Stevenson, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Billy Joe Shaver. “We were all songwriters, mostly, living in Nashville, New York, California,” says Murphey. “Nobody had really got a career off the ground. We eventually gravitated to Austin. It was a big exodus from the music centres of the country, by people who’d never quite got traction.”
They were looking for something more organic and more personal, in a place where the drugs were softer and the lifestyle less demanding. Progressive country grew out of a desire for modern, authentic artistic expression that acknowledged the values of the past in a time of social turmoil. “There were protests going on in California over Vietnam at that time,” says Hubbard. “There was such a big rift that people stopped speaking to their parents, but that’s never going to happen in Texas. Most of the Texas hippies came from families who were WWII heroes. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to split off from our families in protest.” It wasn’t rebellion, so much as reclamation. “We all came back and said, ‘We’re Texans.’ We might have long hair and have counterculture ideas, but we’re Texans,” says Murphey. “We didn’t turn our backs on the tradition, but we did it our own way, and everyone was digging it.” They found freedom in Austin, the ‘oasis’ where they could smoke dope without harassment, live cheaply, and make the music they wanted to make. In 1971, Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his eponymous album in a disused laundromat with burlap on the walls, fuelled by jugs of sangria. The same year, Murphey made Geronimo’s Cadillac, overseen by Dylan’s producer Bob Johnston. Leonard Cohen popped in to sing backing vocals on “Lights Of The City”. On both albums, the backing group was the Lost Gonzo Band, featuring Bob Livingston, Gary P Nunn, Craig Hillis and Herb Steiner. They practically became the house band for progressive country. “We were known as the Austin Interchangeable Band,” laughs Livingston, who played bass, piano and guitar. “We’d come off the road with one and go back on with another.” “The Gonzo Band was like the Austin version of Little Feat, and just as valid,” says Raphael. “Music was a conduit among all these groups. It was very organic, and there was a big exchange of musicians, everyone would play with everyone else’s bands.” “Both those records were a big deal, Austin was being put on the map before our eyes,” says Livingston. “You have me, Murphey and Jerry Jeff, who are basically folkies, and you have Gary P Nunn, who is a rock’n’roller, and Craig Hillis, who is a rock’n’roll electric lead guitar player. We have Herb Steiner on steel guitar, and it’s called progressive country.” The phrase was first coined by Joe Gracey, a DJ on the local Austin station KOKE-FM, which played Bob Wills and Lightning Hopkins next to Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers and The Rolling Stones. If KOKE became the unofficial mouthpiece for this new sound, the Armadillo World Headquarters was its unofficial clubhouse. Opened in 1970 in a former armoury building on Barton Springs Road, it was the first significant rock venue in the city. Sparrows fluttered in the ceiling, above a concrete floor decorated with patches of old carpet, and a few tables and chairs. There were murals on the walls, but no air conditioning. It was hot, rough and ready. Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Commander Cody, Leon Russell, Ravi Shankar all played there in its early days. Soon, Walker, Murphey and the Lost Gonzo Band followed suit, and cultural lines became entangled. “We thought of it as an experimental arts lab,” says Eddie Wilson. “The Armadillo was where it came together like a clap of thunder. That was where we had these great crowds, with people growing their hair or wearing a hat!” “You had the musicians, you had the venues, you had the radio station and you had the college,” says Hubbard. “It worked together hand in hand.” A LL this was in the air when Nelson finally moved back to Austin in 1972. He’d initially sensed something when he’d performed at the Dripping Springs Reunion – “It sounded like a venereal disease convention to me,” says Billy Joe Shaver – in March 1972, alongside Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. A country music festival organised by local music impresarios, perhaps more important than the artists involved was the constituency of the audience. “All these people came out of the woodwork,” says Livingston. “It changed perceptions. By then, everybody is smoking pot. Pot is the big equaliser, it changed everything. The hippies and
“Pot is the big equaliser. It changed everything” bob liviNgsToN
rednecks are drinking and smoking and dancing and having a great time.” Nelson had also seen Murphey playing with the Lost Gonzo Band at a club called Mother Earth. “We’d got hippies and rednecks hanging from the rafters,” recalls Livingston. “Eddie Wilson is showing Willie around. We knew Willie. He had short hair and wrote all those great songs, but we didn’t know much about him. So Willie sees this and it blows his mind. Then Eddie takes him to the Armadillo, and it further blows his mind. All of a sudden Willie says, ‘I’m moving here, this is the place for me. Fuck Nashville!’” Within a few months, Nelson had left his ranch in Ridgetop, Tennessee, and moved to Austin, renting an apartment on Riverside Drive with his wife Connie and their children. His drummer and sidekick, Paul English, moved next door. Around the same time, he made his first appearance at the Armadillo, part of a modest Texas tour supporting Murphey and the Lost Gonzo Band. “He was my opening act!” says Murphey, who was enjoying success with Geronimo’s Cadillac. “Willie was so broke, he couldn’t afford a band, he just had Paul. They were in this funky RV, playing chess and smoking pot.” Nelson embraced both sides of the cultural divide. He was savvy, well connected locally, and could assimilate with hippies, rednecks, cowboys, the local football coach, policemen, crooks and businessmen. Natural selection ensured that he rose to the front of the pack. “It really came to a head when Willie showed up,” says Murphey. “He was older and had been playing honky-tonks for years. We elected him chieftain when he got there. I was a minor-league chief, but Willie was the big kahuna who coalesced it all. He wasn’t the instigator, but he pulled it together.” Significantly, he persuaded Waylon Jennings to play the Armadillo. Jennings was a big star, and already making albums that were pushing the boundaries of the country establishment, but he was reluctant. “Waylon says, ‘I ain’t going to play for those damn hippies,’” recalls Livingston. “Willie tells him, ‘Waylon, these people are going to love you more than any audience you’ve ever played for!’ Sure enough, he was right. They wouldn’t let him off the stage.”
Murphey remembers “meetings of all of us at Scholz beer garden and the outside bar at the Armadillo: ‘What are we going to do with this scene?’ Willie was the ringleader, and Eddie Wilson. They wanted to put together a big festival of this music. That was the first time anyone had thought there was a scene in Texas big enough to justify a festival.”
Following the Dripping Springs Reunion in 1972, Nelson decided to hold his own 4th Of July Picnic at the same site the following year. This time the lineup better reflected the progressive country landscape. Doug Sahm, Tom T Hall, Billy Joe Shaver, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson all played. It became an annual event, the yearly communal gathering of a local scene that was buzzing.
“There were so many clubs,” says Raphael. “When we weren’t on the road, there was a place I could go and play every night. We almost had to go on the road to get rest.” Doug Sahm would hold court at a “real cool dive club” called Soap Creek Saloon, which became another key locus for progressive country artists. Nelson’s sister, Bobbie, lived a couple of blocks away. “I was staying at Bobbie’s when I first moved to town, and after the club closed people would come to Bobbie’s and jam all night,” says Raphael. “Sometimes Willie might be there. That was the idea, that he might show up. There was a lot of abuse. You’d see Tony Joe White and hip stars passed out drunk. It was a pretty motley crew.”
“It was a family,” says Billy Joe Shaver. “A little dysfunctional, but a family. There was no sense of being a star. Usually after the club, we would go over to someone’s house and keep the party going. There was a real after-hours scene.”
The old battle lines had not entirely faded. The wrong face in the wrong place could be potentially lethal. “At the real Western clubs, I would sit in my car until Paul and Willie and the band got there,” says Raphael, then a young Jewish hippie with an impressive frizz of hair. “I couldn’t walk into these places by myself. Paul would escort me. There was always a fight or some gun play going on. When those clear glass ashtrays started flying, that was time to pack up! I was pretty intimidated by our fan base, but we ended up playing music, and it soothed them.”
Nelson’s crew could handle themselves. He eventually fell out with the Armadillo management over the antics of some of his associates, who remained unreconstructed in the old ways. “The guns came out to collect
“Willie says, ‘I’m moving here… Fuck Nashville’” bOb lIVINgSTON
the money,” says Raphael. “Paul would always walk into settling up with guns showing. Willie and I were all about peace and love. Paul was all about, ‘I’ll blow your fucking brains out.’” It’s a pretty pithy summation of the alchemy of progressive country.
Nelson transferred his allegiance to the Texas Opry House, which opened in 1973 as an alternative to the rough-house charms of the Armadillo. “We thought we could make a better situation,” says the owner Wally Selman, whose son John is now Nelson’s tour manager. “Doug Sahm opened it, and we gave away 20 kegs of beer and sold about $6,000 of liquor! We were super plush. There was nice carpeting, statues and fountains, dimmed lights and drinks trays. Willie played there a lot, and he brought his friends. It became a good hotspot.” Alongside the cream of local talent, Ike & Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Maria Muldaur and the Eagles also played during the year it was open. “It was an assortment,” says Selman. “It wasn’t straight country. It wasn’t straight anything!”
BY the time of the second 4th of July picnic in 1974, held at a speedway track in College Station, some 80 miles east of Austin, progressive country was peaking, and being endorsed far outside of the inner circle.
Oklahoma’s Leon Russell recorded with Nelson and pitched up at the picnics; he also proved something of an inspiration for Willie’s evolving sartorial style. Says Raphael, “If you were a rock’n’roll fan you were like, ‘Holy shit, Leon is playing on cowboy records?! Hmm, maybe the lines aren’t so clear.’” Kris Kristofferson was always his own man, but heavily aligned to the scene. “The story goes that Kristofferson wrote ‘Why Me Lord?’ in the front drive way of the University Of Texas football coach, and passed out right afterwards,” says Raphael. Dennis Hopper was filming Kid Blue in Texas, and was hanging out with the cosmic cowboys in Austin. “All that craziness was in full swing,” says Raphael. “It was great fun.”
The 1974 picnic lineup once again included Jerry Jeff Walker, whose Viva Terlingua! album was a full-tilt celebration of progressive country’s life-force and lack of boundaries. The same year, Waylon Jennings consolidated his credentials with Honky Tony Heroes, an album of songs written by Billy Joe Shaver. Both men played at the picnic, as did Murphey, whose third album, Cosmic Cowboy Souvenirs, had cracked the album charts. BW Stevenson appeared off the back of his biggest hit, “My Maria”, a Top 10 in September 29, 1973, while Doug Sahm had recently made his solo debut, Doug Sahm And Band, for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, featuring cameos from Bob Dylan and Dr John.
Nelson, meanwhile, secured his ‘chieftain’ status by making two of the greatest records of his career for Atlantic’s short-lived country scion, having refused to re-sign with RCA in a show of defiance to Nashville. Shotgun Willie was a funky country-blues album recorded in New York, which sold modestly but put Nelson on the radar of a younger, hipper audience. He followed it in 1974 with Phases & Stages, a stark and ambitious domestic concept suite recorded at Muscle Shoals. Both were groundbreaking. Both were conceived in Austin and recorded outside of Nashville. Both provided Nelson, and others, with a clear path to follow.
Progressive country had travelled overground. By 1975 a book had been written about the phenomenon, The Improbable Rise Of Redneck Rock, by Jan Reid, and Rolling Stone had sent writer Chet Flippo down on several occasions to take the pulse of the scene. He reported back in full colour. It was good for business but arguably bad for the music.
“The carpetbaggers were showing up,” says Murphy, who left Austin at the end of 1974. “There were people hanging out on every street corner who were not Texan and not part of the scene, trying to say they were. Record companies were hanging around trying to sign everything in sight.” The Austin City Limits TV show piloted in 1974, and at the end of 1975, the Heartworn Highways film crew came to town to document the rise of a new wave of progressive country singers and songwriters, among them Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and Townes Van Zandt.
Murphey’s career peaked the following year with Blue Sky – Night Thunder, which gave him a Top 10 hit with “Wildfire”, but of all the Austin-based artists, only Nelson really broke through on a sustained national level. Red Headed Stranger, released in 1975, proved to be one of the great modern country albums, and a foundation stone of what became outlaw country, the next phase of progressive country. “Willie said, ‘I’ve got an idea for a record,’ and pulled out all these papers and napkins,” says Raphael. “He’d written it in his car on the way back from Colorado. That whole album was cut in a day or two, as he was teaching us the songs. That’s why it’s so sparse. The label thought it was a good demo!”
Aside from the music, the victory that emerged from it all was creative control, a generally unheard-of concept in country music circles at that time. When Wexler closed down Atlantic’s country department, Nelson got back his master tapes. On signing to Columbia, he insisted on complete freedom. “Red Headed Stranger was the first record he was able to record with his own road band, which just wasn’t done in Nashville at all; nor was the artist being his own producer,” says Raphael. “That was all new. Columbia wanted to put strings on it and add studio musicians, and Willie said no. He had final say. There was a big war about it, but he was right. That record did phenomenal things.”
Red Headed Stranger went to No 1, and made Nelson a star. The following year, Columbia capitalised on the progressive country boom by compiling Wanted! The Outlaws, featuring Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter and Tomphall Glazer. A slightly contrived piece of work, it duly became the biggest selling country album ever. By 1980, the Texas scene had become defined nationally by the bandwagon hopping John Travolta vehicle Urban Cowboy and the TV soap Dallas. “It wasn’t about songwriter’s any more,” says Hubbard. “It wasn’t about writing ‘Mr Bojangles’ or ‘Wildfire’ or ‘Geronimo’s Cadillac’. It became this scene with lizardskin boots and hats with feathers in them and line dancing. The whole Texas thing just got slick.”
Yet the legacy of those few years runs deep. As an innovative reclamation of roots, progressive country was a game-changing precursor to outlaw country, alt.country and Americana. Today, Austin remains a unique melting pot of music and live venues, while the annual South By Southwest showcase is a significant fixture on the industry calendar. The city turned pro long ago, but the freaks, chancers and oddballs still have a foothold. ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is the motto of its independent creative class. “They were way ahead in Austin,” says Willie Nelson. “I realised back then that this is the place it can happen. It made sense. These guys knew what was going on and they weren’t afraid to say it. And it’s still there. Ain’t nothing changed.”