Groover's Paradise

Back in the good old days in Austin, Texas, say 1970, a guy could risk trouble for deriding country-and-western music, or merely hollering the words "rock 'n' roll." This was, after all, the ancestral home of Texas Swing, where the Light Crust Doughboys had helped elect a flour salesman, W. Lee O'Daniel, Governor in 1938. Even such talented native Texans as Singers Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, blues rockers both, had been forced to head as far away from Austin as possible to make the big time.

Rock is no longer a dirty word in Austin. Indeed, by embracing rock's big beat, Austin's musicians have evolved a brand-new style of country rock, and have made the city the fastest-growing country-music center in the U.S. Nashville, still the capital of country, may provide more regular work. Bakersfield, Calif., may offer the inspirational presences of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. But from the point of view of new sounds, freedom and plain musical fun, Austin now definitely ranks as No. 1. Within the past two years, following the lead of such veterans as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker, more than 200 musicians, vocalists and songwriters have moved to the Texas capital. Since last spring, three new country-music clubs have been built, and this month a converted movie palace will open as the Austin Ritz, a 700-seat theater devoted to country rock. The city now has 65 resident bands; they all work regularly, since Austin's 28 clubs and bars often hire as many as three bands a weekend. Says Townsend Miller, country-music columnist of the Austin American-Statesman: "Austin is country gone berserk." The music is country picking and basic bluegrass, leavened with rock and lightly glazed with acid.

At 24, B.W. ("Buckwheat") Stevenson is the most commercially successful of the young Austin musicians. He writes a lot about women, with emotion as honest as Merle Haggard's but a bit more realistic. Austin men are not suicidal; when a woman leaves, they survive. Michael Murphey is the most articulate lyricist. His new album contains a tune called Holy Roller, a tongue-in-cheek paean to Bible Belt religion that obliquely speaks to the question of loss of faith. Without doubt, the quintessential country rocker is Jerry Jeff Walker. His songs tend to be unpretentious autobiographical celebrations. For Jerry Jeff, life is "running naked in that high-hill country rain," and his spontaneity is the antithesis of the calculated Nashville sound.

If the Austin sound has a common trait, it is the lack, onstage, of show business antics or, in the recording studio, of slick electronic techniques. Leading musicians concertize and make records the way they drink--quickly, while everybody is looking, with few rehearsals and fewer regrets. The more natural, unlaundered, even raunchy the result, the better. As Michael Murphey puts it in his Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir album:

Lone Star sippin' and skinny dippin' 'n'steel guitars 'n'stars Are just as good as Hollywood And them boogie woogie bars.

Why a renaissance in Austin? Says Country M.C. Jim Franklin: "This has always been an anticommercial scene." Besides the sippin' and the stars, Austin happens to have one of the lowest costs of living of any metropolitan area in the nation, a benefice not lost on University of Texas graduates. Many stay on to drive cabs and show up during the daytime, when the musicians gather on street corners to trade hot licks and cool, mutual admiration.

What the Fillmores East and West were to the rock era, the Armadillo World Headquarters is to Austin's country-rock set. A cavernous old armory decorated with surrealistic murals of the burrowing, bony-plated mammal that now ranks second only to the longhorn in Texas esteem, the Armadillo is filled each night with a curious amalgam of teenagers, aging hippie women in gingham, braless coeds, and booted goat ropers swigging Pearl beer and swinging stetsons in time to the music. Doug Sahm, a 32-year-old fugitive of San Francisco psychedelia, who sings there regularly, says that "leaving Austin now is like climbing off a spaceship from a magic place." As he puts it in a song, the whole town is a groover's paradise.

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