“We had an independent record and we used it to the nth degree. It wasn’t this independent deal where you find a producer, go up to Nashville and record in a studio. We actually applied it to being here, made in Texas for Texas,” says Walker, now 76. “It’s still the quintessential Texas album as far as explaining how it all was before Austin City Limits.”
“It set a fine example for singer-songwriters and everything that followed. It was more Texas than, say, Willie [Nelson], who was a Nashville product. He had the whole Nashville record company sheen behind him,” says Gary P. Nunn, the author of “London Homesick Blues” and then a member of Walker’s Lost Gonzo Band, which played with him on the album. “It made a statement and created an image of what Texas [music] was and could be.” (...)
“The people in Texas, if they heard a new song, they were so excited and eager to play on it. They just wanted to try things,” says Walker, whose voice has worn into a hoarse and painful-sounding rasp. His seat-of-the-pants approach never fit well with his first label, Atlantic Records. “The studios in New York, they don’t want to sit through that. They’re on a time schedule. You got to have all that shit worked out in advance.”
In the Lost Gonzo Band — a name cribbed from his friend Hunter S. Thompson and a perfect encapsulation of the group’s countercultural ethos — Walker found his vehicle for an eclectic mix of country, folk, rock, Tex-Mex and Tejano, all of which were native to Texas but rarely used together in Music City or the Big Apple. “Somebody told me ‘gonzo’ meant taking an unknown thing to an unknown place for a known purpose. I always thought, ‘Yeah, we don’t know where the fuck we’re going, but when we get out there and do it, we’ll know it,'” he says.
by Jeff Gage, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Paul Natkin/ArchivePhotos/Getty Images[ed. See also: Morning Song to Sally. And, Running Wild with Jerry Jeff (Texas Monthly).]
