Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Like the Avalon and the Fillmore in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Armadillo was all about the music and a shared tolerance for marijuana and psychedelic drugs. But unlike San Franciscans and hippies just about anywhere else, Texas hippies also embraced Lone Star and Pearl Beer and country music as a part of their twisted heritage. The Armadillo had already brought in a parade of talent that would otherwise have bypassed Texas, including Ry Cooder, Little Feat, Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, Dr. John the Night Tripper, and Frank Zappa. But there was a definite twang to many of the touring acts, such as the Flying Burrito Brothers, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bill Monroe, and especially Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. They were younger musicians raised on rock and roll but inspired by the country music their parents grew up with, a movement defined by the seminal 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo by the California folk-rock band the Byrds. This version of country was considered safe by hippies rather than the antithesis of the counterculture, which is how most mainstream country was regarded by the young hipsters.

  The Armadillo and a smaller club in West Lake Hills, west of town, called the Soap Creek Saloon, where Doug Sahm ruled the roost, were the touchstones of the Austin version of the country-rock culture, where long hair, blue jeans, cowboy hats, boots, good pot, cold beer, and cheap tequila fit together naturally. If a line had been drawn in the sand, hippies and cowboys in Austin were hopping over it.

  Willie had been noticing a few longhairs showing up whenever he played Big G’s in Round Rock, some of them asking to hear chestnuts like “Night Life,” “Fraulein,” and “San Antonio Rose.” He’d been touring all over the world trying to find his audience, and here they were, looking for him. When he started hanging out in the clubs in Austin, he realized hippies who dug cool music were everywhere. He also noticed a style, or lack thereof.

  “It became apparent the audiences were dressing down,” he said. “At the [Grand Ole] Opry, everybody dressed up, wore suits and ties. At the Armadillo and places like that, nobody dressed up. I felt out of place being dressed up.”

  He adapted quickly, letting his hair grow long, growing a beard, dressing onstage in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts, with a bandanna around his neck or head. It was no big deal to Willie. “I’d already done that,” he said, pointing out that jeans, casual shoes, T-shirts, and bandannas had been standard issue in Abbott, like they were everywhere else in Texas when he was growing up. Hippies were the new adapters.

  In the summer of 1972, Willie and Connie found an apartment on Riverside Drive between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35 for Paula Carlene, Billy, Susie, and Shasta, the German shepherd they brought from Ridgetop. There was a nice view of Town Lake, which ran through the center of Austin and was in the process of being beautified per the wishes of Ladybird Johnson, the former First Lady and wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who’d returned to Austin and his nearby LBJ Ranch, west of Johnson City, following the end of his presidency in 1969.

  After Connie became pregnant again in the fall, with daughter Amy Lee, they moved to Lake Austin Estates off Cuernavaca Drive in the hills west of the city. Willie’s family lived in a duplex, and Paul and Carlene English and their son, Darrell Wayne, lived in another nearby. The Lost Valley Country Club in Bandera was being re-created in suburban west Austin.

  AS the 1960s faded into the 1970s, the 251,808 residents of the capital city of Texas led a wonderfully simple, sheltered, semi-idyllic existence. Set on the banks of a river that had been dammed into a string of narrow lakes where the Hill Country descended into the coastal plains and prairies, Austin was easily the most beautiful city in a state often dismissed by out-of-staters as plug ugly. Its older neighborhoods were lush with oak and pecan trees. A natural spring less than a mile from downtown functioned as the city’s main public pool. Several lakes were within a thirty-minute drive of Congress Avenue.

  Education and government were Austin’s economic engines. Culture was pretty much limited to football, politics, and music, along with whatever the University of Texas brought in. The population was 10 percent African American and 12 percent Mexican American and included fifty thousand college students. Local cuisine boiled down to the three basic food groups of Texas cooking: Southern-style, westernized comfort food, such as chicken-fried steak, fried potatoes, fried okra, and fried everything else; barbecue smoked meats cooked and prepared all kinds of ways—most of them exceptional—by the local Anglo, Mexican, and African American populations; and Mexican, or Tex-Mex, food rooted in the Mexican American east side of Austin at institutions like Cisco’s and Carmen’s on East 6th, El Mat on the brown-white borderline of the Interregional (Interstate 35) Expressway, and Matt’s El Rancho on East 1st Street, two blocks from Congress Avenue and home of the Bob Armstrong Dip, named for the Texas land commissioner, who was a frequent customer. Former president Lyndon Johnson’s family preferred El Patio, north of the University of Texas campus on Guadalupe, one of several Mexican eateries established in Texas by Lebanese Mexicans, where instead of the usual complimentary basket of tortilla chips, saltine crackers were served with the salsa.

  The nightlife was refreshingly provincial. Scholz Garten, the city’s oldest bar, established by August Scholz in 1866 and still the home of the Saengerrunde German singing club, defined the local style. Scholz’s attracted politicos from the capitol two blocks away, thirsty for a beer. (Liquor by the drink in Texas was restricted to private clubs, although you could bring in your own bottle as long as it was in a brown bag.) On hot summer nights, college students, attorneys, blue-collar folks, kids, and dogs gathered at the picnic tables out back under a string of yellow light bulbs beneath ancient oak trees to drink pitchers of Lone Star or Pearl and bullshit the evening away until midnight (one a.m. on Saturday nights), when all bars were required to shut down.

  Austin didn’t have the deep musical past of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, or San Antonio, since its population was historically smaller than even Waco’s. There were some local stars among the country bands that worked the area during the forties and fifties, among them Cotton Collins, who wrote and performed an elegant fiddle-dance instrumental “Westphalia Waltz,” which paid tribute to Central Texas’s German heritage. Collins fiddled with perhaps the best-known musician in Austin, Kenneth Threadgill, a disciple of Jimmie Rodgers, the Blue Yodeler. Mr. Threadgill hosted folk music hootenannies at his North Lamar gas station beer joint in the mid-1960s, which were popular with a cabal of University of Texas students, including a future rock and blues singer named Janis Joplin and her friends Powell St. John and Travis Rivers—all three would enjoy careers in music in San Francisco during that city’s hippie heyday in the late 1960s.

  Two Austin acts made it onto the national charts in the 1950s—Ray Campi, a young rockabilly crooner and bassist, and the Slades, a doo-wop group that included the blind pianist Bobby Doyle. By the mid-1960s, a small but very hip rock and roll scene spawned the 13th Floor Elevators, a pioneering psychedelic band led by a screaming Travis High School dropout named Roky Erickson that had a national Top 40 hit, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” distinguished by an electric jug, long before psychedelic became part of the music vocabulary. The Elevators and like-minded rock bands worked rooms such as the Old New Orleans, the Jade Room, and Mother Earth around the UT campus.

  Austin was also a steady payday for the Top 40 and soul cover bands tapping into the lucrative fraternity and sorority party circuit around the University of Texas, a scene controlled by booking agent Charlie Hatchett that included young players such as Don Henley, who would later be the linchpin of a popular band known as the Eagles, and country rocker Rusty Weir.

  The hippest venue in Austin during the 1960s had been the Vulcan Gas Company on Congress Avenue, a local smaller version of San Francisco’s Fillmore Ballroom, run by a hippie collective headed by Houston White. Famous for its posters, most created by Gilbert Shelton, who also drew underground comics, including the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the Vulcan featured local band
s such as Shiva’s Headband, while occasionally bringing in touring blues, rock, and folk acts that otherwise would not have passed through Texas, including the Velvet Underground from New York, the California country-rock group Poco, and Chicago urban blues giant Muddy Waters.

  A small clutch of white kids enamored of the blues were drawn to East 11th and East 12th, the main streets of what was left of Austin’s tiny version of Harlem before segregation laws were lifted. They frequented juke joints like the Victory Lounge, the IL, Charlie’s Playhouse, Ernie’s Chicken Shack, and Marie’s Tea Room Number 2, to soak up the music of Erbie Bowser, Hosea Hargrove, Blues Boy Hubbard, T. D. Bell, and barrelhouse pianist Robert Shaw. The white blues kids had their own playhouse, the One Knite, a self-declared dive that permanently reeked of vomit with a coffin for an entrance, a half block from the police station and one block west of I-35—the racial border of the city. Mexicans lived east of I-35 and south of 7th Street to the river; blacks lived east of I-35 and north of 7th to Airport Boulevard and Highway 183.

  Mexican Americans had their own music clubs along East 6th Street and ballrooms on the edge of town, where conjunto and Tejano were the preferred sounds and Johnny Degollado (El Montopolis Kid) and Ruben Ramos and the Mexican Revolution were the local stars.

  The so-called folk music clubs in Austin, such as the Saxon Club on 34th Street at I-35 and the Chequered Flag on Guadalupe Street, south of campus, were not as tradition bound as the scene at Threadgill’s. These rooms featured sincere singer-songwriters playing acoustic guitars, many of whom had taken to wearing cowboy hats and boots and jeans, a look adopted by newcomers like Jerry Jeff Walker (né Ron Crosby), a New York folkie who’d played in the band Circus Maximus and had written a hit song about a New Orleans street dancer called “Mr. Bojangles,” another singer-songwriter from Houston, Guy Clark, who’d been covered by Walker, and a lanky Fort Worth kid with high cheekbones and a taste for liquor named Townes Van Zandt, considered by his peers the purest songwriter of all.

  Four Austin performers were capable of drawing a thousand crazed hippies and college students at the drop of a cowboy hat: Michael Murphey, a flaxen-haired singer-songwriter from Dallas, who had the two best-selling albums in Austin, Geronimo’s Cadillac and Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir; B. W. Stevenson, another Dallas folkie, whose husky voice powered several national hits, notably “My Maria,” which reached number 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; Willis Alan Ramsey, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who also came out of Dallas, whose debut album showcasing exquisite ballads informed by country music was released on Leon Russell’s Shelter Records, gaining him instant cachet with a hip audience; and Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band, whose live recording Viva Terlingua! made in the old dance hall in the Hill Country hamlet of Luckenbach (pop. 3) with hay bales for baffles, set the standard for Texas-style country-rock. Jerry Jeff himself was the culture’s icon, the out-of-control Gonzo “Scamp,” prone to extended bouts of extreme drunkenness, especially when under the additional influence of a new drug on the scene called cocaine. He became something of a role model for throwing televisions into swimming pools and wrecking hotel rooms with more vigor than a British rock band. “With Murphey I generally knew where he was coming from,” said Herb Steiner, the pedal steel guitarist who played with both stars. “Jerry Jeff was an unguided missile.”

  Shortly after meeting Walker, Willie Nelson experienced that unpredictability firsthand at a guitar pulling late one night in Bastrop, east of Austin. A very loaded Jerry Jeff kept trying to grab Willie’s guitar Trigger and play it, which irritated Willie to no end, finally prompting him to grab it from Jerry Jeff and pound him with his fists until Jerry Jeff was crumpled on the floor. As he picked himself up, he looked up at Willie and slurred, “I remember now. You’re the same son of a bitch that knocked me down last night for the same reason.”

  Whenever Jerry Jeff wanted audiences to hear his lyrics, he worked Castle Creek, the former Chequered Flag, a listening room one block from the state capitol that booked singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Rusty Weir, and B. W. Stevenson. At Walker’s request, a friend from Florida named Jimmy Buffett started sitting in between sets in the three-hundred-seat room until he earned his own gig. Castle Creek provided inspiration for a song he wrote called “(Wasting Away in) Margaritaville,” which would be his calling card when he played in stadiums to tens of thousands of wannabe islanders in floral-print shirts.

  AS the home of the University of Texas, Austin experienced its share of student unrest in the 1960s and sported a flourishing hippie culture associated with the folk, rock, blues, and psychedelic scenes. No matter how many hippies started dressing cowboy, they were still regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, in most country music establishments. But at least Austin was a whole lot looser and more tolerant than the rest of Texas, where kicking a hippie’s ass was considered entertainment. Austin had more places than the rest of Texas combined that welcomed or at least tolerated hippies, which embellished the city’s reputation as an oasis of peace and love in a desert of angry assholes spoiling for a fight. That image was enhanced by Travis County sheriff Raymond Frank, who openly declared he wouldn’t bust folks for personal use of marijuana.

  One of the few hippies able to cross the cultural divide and venture into the country bars and get away with it was a San Angelo native named Bobby Earl Smith, a Law School student and semi-longhair who played bass in Freda and the Firedogs, a band of like-minded college students who might not have been real country people but dug country anyhow.

  Freda was a dark-haired Cajun pianist named Marcia Ball who sang lead and played piano. Her instrumental foil was John X. Reed, a lean Panhandle towhead who played lead guitar with a pronounced rockabilly twang and echo. The Firedogs attracted a mélange of students, bikers, Mexican families, hippies, and rednecks, who jammed into Split Rail, a no-cover bar and drive-in on Lamar Boulevard, just south of Town Lake, every Sunday night to hear a repertoire that mixed Loretta’s “Don’t Come Home Drinking,” Tammy’s “Stand by Your Man,” and Merle’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” with Texas-style rock and roll (Buddy’s “Peggy Sue”) and a few credible originals. But the Firedogs were regarded as too hippie to be booked into Austin’s country joints such as Big G’s in Round Rock, Big Gil’s on South Congress, where the nightly pay for bands was $45 and a case of beer, or the Broken Spoke on South Lamar.

  Townsend Miller, a skinny stockbroker by day who wrote the country music column in the Austin American-Statesman, had taken note. He frequently wrote that his two favorite singers were Waylon Jennings and Marcia Ball (aka Freda). More than once he urged the owners of the Broken Spoke to take a chance and book the Firedogs or a band called Greezy Wheels.

  The Firedogs got their chance at a benefit at the Broken Spoke for UT Law School grad Lloyd Doggett in his bid to be elected to the Texas House of Representatives. The Broken Spoke was so packed that owner James White asked the band to come back and play his place on a regular Friday night.

  Townsend Miller’s mention of Greezy Wheels referred to one of the house bands at the Armadillo World Headquarters that were engaged in a similar musical experiment, borrowing bits and pieces of country and gospel and playing it like it was something brandnew for the hippie crowd. Greezy Wheels was led by Reverend Cleve Hattersley, another New York refugee with a bombastic stage presence that was part preacher man and part hippie Godfather, and featured Sweet Mary Egan, an enigmatic fiddler who could whip both the crowd and herself into a dervish on her signature rendition of “Orange Blossom Special.” Their song list included an extended jam version of the traditional spiritual “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and their big crowd pleaser “Country Music and Friends,” with the sing-along refrain celebrating “cocaine, country music, and good ol’ Lone Star Beer.”

  WHEN Willie called Waylon to tell him “something is going on down here,” he was referring to bands like Greezy Wheels and Freda and the Firedogs. Something told Willie tha
t he could tap into their audiences. They might be a little younger than he was and they might be a little crazier about drugs than he was. But they were Texas kids like he was who loved music almost as much as he did.

  Willie tested those waters by asking Sweet Mary Egan to sit in with him, Bee Spears, and Paul English at a benefit concert for Sissy Farenthold, the liberal Democratic candidate for governor at Woolridge Park, between the library and the Travis County Courthouse. Greezy Wheels was on the bill, as was the Conqueroo, the eclectic folk-rock-blues-jazz de facto house band of the recently defunct Vulcan Gas Company; the Storm, one of the white blues bands from the One Knite, featuring Jimmie Vaughan on guitar and Lewis Cowdrey on harmonica; an organic and splendidly sloppy blues-and-rock bar band called Lee Ann and the Bizarros; and, incongruously, the New York folk musician Phil Ochs, who was just passing through.

  Sweet Mary played with Willie, Paul, and Bee like she’d worked with them for years, her presence warming the crowd of long-haired groovers and Democratic Party officials to the “straight” country musician. The ensemble showcased Willie playing his best compositions back-to-back as “Crazy” melted into “Hello Walls,” then “Me and Paul,” before he grabbed the crowd with “Night Life,” a blues everyone could recognize and relate to. The small crowd signaled their approval with applause. When Greezy Wheels and the Conqueroo played, they resumed their free-form hippie dancing.

  A few days later, Willie and Paul went to the Armadillo World Headquarters, the place where the band had dropped off the hippie chick from Kerrville, looking for Eddie Wilson. A gregarious exMarine and ex–beer lobbyist, Eddie was the Armadillo’s head honcho, the closest thing to a leader of the stridently leaderless collective. The Armadillo technically functioned as a business, but those who worked there sure weren’t in it for the money. They were in it for the music, the beer, the dope, the camaraderie, and whatever else the counterculture movement symbolized.