To my astonishment, Austin is now the second-most popular tourist destination in the country, behind Las Vegas, which puzzles me. One can already sniff the artifice and inauthenticity that transforms previously charming environments into amusement parks for conventioneers. The very places that made Austin so hip are being demolished to make room for the hotels and office spaces needed to accommodate the flood of tourists and newcomers who have come to enjoy what no longer exists. Forbes magazine just determined that Austin is the best place to live in America, which will only take it further from the manageable town it was to the megacity it is destined to become. Another indication of Austin’s growing international reputation is that Kim Jong Un placed the city on North Korea’s mainland nuclear strike list, right after New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. My band has a regular gig at a fabulous dive in East Austin, called the Skylark Lounge, which is tucked away behind an auto-body shop and not even visible from the street. If you sneezed, the whole place might turn a somersault. Recently Yelp labeled it the best music venue in the nation, heralding its inevitable demise by the developers, if Kim Jong Un doesn’t get it first.
Austin is divided, north and south, by the Colorado River, which is dammed to make Lady Bird Lake. The riverbanks are lined with towering cypress trees, which fill up with cormorants and egrets in the winter months, my favorite time to run. There’s a rusty train trestle spanning the water, covered with oddball graffiti, such as "i’ve got ninja style kungfugrip." I always feel an aesthetic release when the Southern Pacific freight train rumbles overhead while the rowing crews, like racing centipedes, pass underneath, and runners circle the path—a pleasing convergence of opposing motions. I’m reminded of Thomas Eakins’ paintings of the oarsmen on the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, with the clouds mirrored in the rippled water like rumpled sheets.
The Colorado serves the same purpose as the Seine in Paris, as a cultural divide. On the north bank are downtown, the state capitol, and the University of Texas—anchors of a city historically made up of teachers and bureaucrats. The south bank has Tex-Mex restaurants and dance halls. Austin is on the tail end of the dance belt, which starts in Louisiana with New Orleans R&B, and runs through Cajun zydeco, enters conjunto territory in South Texas, and then encounters the Czech waltzes and German polkas of Central Texas. The medium that the dance music travels through is Catholicism. In North Texas, the Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ hold sway. There’s an old joke that the reason Baptists won’t screw standing up is that somebody might think they were dancing. (...)
Austin currently has one of the highest rates of start-up companies of any metro area in the country. From watching Austin transform itself into the city it is now, I’ve developed a very Texas theory of how cultures evolve. Mike Levy began Texas Monthly in 1973, and it became the seedbed for the literary community. Bill Wittliff, the screenwriter for the epic television series Lonesome Dove and a number of successful movies, decided not to move to Hollywood, and his intransigence made it plausible for filmmakers to stay in Austin. Now Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and many others have turned the city into a film capital of international stature. In the fall of 1980, John Mackey started what would become the first certified organic grocery store in the United States. It was not much larger than a 7-Eleven. On Memorial Day 1981, we had the worst flood in 70 years, and the store was practically destroyed. Mackey had no insurance, but neighbors and customers helped clean it up and restock the shelves, courtesy of kindhearted creditors and vendors. By 2005, it had become a Fortune 500 company, called Whole Foods. In 1983, Michael Dell, a freshman pre-med student at UT, started assembling computers in his dorm room. The following year he incorporated the Dell Computer Corporation, capitalizing the venture with a thousand dollars. What started as “three guys with screwdrivers” now employs 138,000 people. There are more than 5,000 high-tech companies in Austin, and they all hark back to that freshman in room 2713 of the Dobie Center dormitory. (...)
The evolution of the Austin music scene is more organic and harder to explain. On the East Side, there was Victory Grill, part of the Southern “Chitlin’ Circuit,” where Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton would perform. In the early 1950s, Bobby “Blue” Bland, then a soldier stationed at Fort Hood, would drive down to sing on amateur night. Rock ‘n’ roll arrived, bringing Chuck Berry and James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner. On the south side of town was the headquarters for country music, the Broken Spoke, where Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Tex Ritter would play. There was a gas station on the north side, owned by Kenneth Threadgill, a country yodeler who also secured the first license to sell beer in Travis County. In the 1960s he began inviting hippies and folksingers to join his Wednesday night sing-alongs. Janis Joplin would sing duets with him while she was studying art at UT. Clifford Antone, son of Lebanese immigrants in East Texas, came to the university in 1968, but he dropped out after his arrest for smuggling pot. The blues club he started, Antone’s, became an institution in the music world. The musicians he mentored, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Clark Jr., would rejuvenate the blues form, creating a distinctive Austin sound.
Then, in 1970, a local band manager named Eddie Wilson was looking for a venue in South Austin and stumbled across a decrepit National Guard armory. He transformed it into the Armadillo World Headquarters, a strange amalgamation of psychedelic, country, hippie, and rock ‘n’ roll. There were only 250,000 people in Austin then, but 50,000 of them were students. Musicians began moving to town, as if some homing device were summoning them all at once. Jerry Jeff Walker came from New York, Guy Clark from Houston, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan from Dallas. Marcia Ball was on her way from Baton Rouge to San Francisco when her Austin-Healey Sprite broke down in Austin, and she never went farther. Austin already had a flourishing musical subculture, in other words, even before Willie Nelson played the Armadillo in August 1972.
All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas, and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to Texas, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.
Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He’s a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he’s beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie’s Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie’s bus over and “discover” his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.
In 2016, I went to Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic. Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player, invited me on the bus (there are actually three of them in Willie’s entourage; this one was weed free). As Willie has gotten older and even more physically diminished, there’s an existential quality to his performances. Nearly all of his contemporaries are gone. During performances, Willie stands alone in front, with Mickey a couple steps behind his left shoulder, providing a kind of harmonic commentary. It’s a conversation that has been going on a long time. “This is my 43rd picnic,” Mickey told me.
As he was showing me around the bus, Mickey pulled back the drape on his closet. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, pulling out a gray guitar case. Inside was Trigger, the guitar that Willie named after Roy Rogers’ beautiful horse. It is perhaps the most famous musical instrument in America, rivaled only by Lucille, B. B. King’s black Gibson, although there have been many Lucilles and only one Trigger. “Here,” Mickey said, handing it to me.
Trigger is really light. It has a big hole near the bridge, worn through by Willie’s pinky and ring fingers. Pick marks have scored the face paper thin. The entire instrument feels sheer, the frets worn down to nearly nothing. It’s been signed many times—Leon Russell used a pocketknife—but the signatures are fading into the patina. If you saw this guitar at a garage sale, you would walk on by. And yet Trigger has somehow maintained its distinctive mellow voice, a sound Willie thought resembled that of his hero, Django Reinhardt, although to me it sounds like Willie himself, twangy and full of character.
Austin is divided, north and south, by the Colorado River, which is dammed to make Lady Bird Lake. The riverbanks are lined with towering cypress trees, which fill up with cormorants and egrets in the winter months, my favorite time to run. There’s a rusty train trestle spanning the water, covered with oddball graffiti, such as "i’ve got ninja style kungfugrip." I always feel an aesthetic release when the Southern Pacific freight train rumbles overhead while the rowing crews, like racing centipedes, pass underneath, and runners circle the path—a pleasing convergence of opposing motions. I’m reminded of Thomas Eakins’ paintings of the oarsmen on the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, with the clouds mirrored in the rippled water like rumpled sheets.The Colorado serves the same purpose as the Seine in Paris, as a cultural divide. On the north bank are downtown, the state capitol, and the University of Texas—anchors of a city historically made up of teachers and bureaucrats. The south bank has Tex-Mex restaurants and dance halls. Austin is on the tail end of the dance belt, which starts in Louisiana with New Orleans R&B, and runs through Cajun zydeco, enters conjunto territory in South Texas, and then encounters the Czech waltzes and German polkas of Central Texas. The medium that the dance music travels through is Catholicism. In North Texas, the Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ hold sway. There’s an old joke that the reason Baptists won’t screw standing up is that somebody might think they were dancing. (...)
Austin currently has one of the highest rates of start-up companies of any metro area in the country. From watching Austin transform itself into the city it is now, I’ve developed a very Texas theory of how cultures evolve. Mike Levy began Texas Monthly in 1973, and it became the seedbed for the literary community. Bill Wittliff, the screenwriter for the epic television series Lonesome Dove and a number of successful movies, decided not to move to Hollywood, and his intransigence made it plausible for filmmakers to stay in Austin. Now Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and many others have turned the city into a film capital of international stature. In the fall of 1980, John Mackey started what would become the first certified organic grocery store in the United States. It was not much larger than a 7-Eleven. On Memorial Day 1981, we had the worst flood in 70 years, and the store was practically destroyed. Mackey had no insurance, but neighbors and customers helped clean it up and restock the shelves, courtesy of kindhearted creditors and vendors. By 2005, it had become a Fortune 500 company, called Whole Foods. In 1983, Michael Dell, a freshman pre-med student at UT, started assembling computers in his dorm room. The following year he incorporated the Dell Computer Corporation, capitalizing the venture with a thousand dollars. What started as “three guys with screwdrivers” now employs 138,000 people. There are more than 5,000 high-tech companies in Austin, and they all hark back to that freshman in room 2713 of the Dobie Center dormitory. (...)
The evolution of the Austin music scene is more organic and harder to explain. On the East Side, there was Victory Grill, part of the Southern “Chitlin’ Circuit,” where Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton would perform. In the early 1950s, Bobby “Blue” Bland, then a soldier stationed at Fort Hood, would drive down to sing on amateur night. Rock ‘n’ roll arrived, bringing Chuck Berry and James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner. On the south side of town was the headquarters for country music, the Broken Spoke, where Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Tex Ritter would play. There was a gas station on the north side, owned by Kenneth Threadgill, a country yodeler who also secured the first license to sell beer in Travis County. In the 1960s he began inviting hippies and folksingers to join his Wednesday night sing-alongs. Janis Joplin would sing duets with him while she was studying art at UT. Clifford Antone, son of Lebanese immigrants in East Texas, came to the university in 1968, but he dropped out after his arrest for smuggling pot. The blues club he started, Antone’s, became an institution in the music world. The musicians he mentored, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Clark Jr., would rejuvenate the blues form, creating a distinctive Austin sound.
Then, in 1970, a local band manager named Eddie Wilson was looking for a venue in South Austin and stumbled across a decrepit National Guard armory. He transformed it into the Armadillo World Headquarters, a strange amalgamation of psychedelic, country, hippie, and rock ‘n’ roll. There were only 250,000 people in Austin then, but 50,000 of them were students. Musicians began moving to town, as if some homing device were summoning them all at once. Jerry Jeff Walker came from New York, Guy Clark from Houston, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan from Dallas. Marcia Ball was on her way from Baton Rouge to San Francisco when her Austin-Healey Sprite broke down in Austin, and she never went farther. Austin already had a flourishing musical subculture, in other words, even before Willie Nelson played the Armadillo in August 1972.
All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas, and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to Texas, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.
Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He’s a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he’s beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie’s Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie’s bus over and “discover” his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.
In 2016, I went to Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic. Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player, invited me on the bus (there are actually three of them in Willie’s entourage; this one was weed free). As Willie has gotten older and even more physically diminished, there’s an existential quality to his performances. Nearly all of his contemporaries are gone. During performances, Willie stands alone in front, with Mickey a couple steps behind his left shoulder, providing a kind of harmonic commentary. It’s a conversation that has been going on a long time. “This is my 43rd picnic,” Mickey told me.
As he was showing me around the bus, Mickey pulled back the drape on his closet. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, pulling out a gray guitar case. Inside was Trigger, the guitar that Willie named after Roy Rogers’ beautiful horse. It is perhaps the most famous musical instrument in America, rivaled only by Lucille, B. B. King’s black Gibson, although there have been many Lucilles and only one Trigger. “Here,” Mickey said, handing it to me.
Trigger is really light. It has a big hole near the bridge, worn through by Willie’s pinky and ring fingers. Pick marks have scored the face paper thin. The entire instrument feels sheer, the frets worn down to nearly nothing. It’s been signed many times—Leon Russell used a pocketknife—but the signatures are fading into the patina. If you saw this guitar at a garage sale, you would walk on by. And yet Trigger has somehow maintained its distinctive mellow voice, a sound Willie thought resembled that of his hero, Django Reinhardt, although to me it sounds like Willie himself, twangy and full of character.
by Lawrence Wright, Austin Monthly | Read more:
Image: Ala Lee
