In the Heart of Honky-Tonk Rock

Going back to the basics in Austin

Let's go to Luckenbach, Texas

Waylon and Willie and the boys

Jerry Jeff Walker, one of the hard-drinking boys, takes the stage and barrels into a country rocker titled Gettin' By. Almost immediately a fistfight breaks out in one corner of the auditorium; dancing bursts out in another. Midway through Walker's set the pedal steel-guitar player takes over with a whining rendition of Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and America the Beautiful The crowd of 1,500 cheers, hoisting half-empty Lone Star beers toward the stage. Walker finishes his two-hour performance, then returns for an encore number, Pissin' in the Wind. By now the audience is standing on chairs, whooping, waving Stetsons and screaming for more. The scene is good-time Texas honky-tonk anarchy. It is Saturday night at the Austin Opry House.

With one stage for every ten musicians in town, Austin has blossomed into a performer's paradise. Hangar-size halls like the Armadillo World Headquarters and slant-floored beer emporiums like the Split Rail give steady work to such country-rock artists as Marsha Ball, Joe Ely and 400 of their fellow singers, songwriters and pickers. Because of Austin's relatively low cost of living, musicians can work cheaply. "And if they're down on their luck," says a local writer, "they can score a dope deal to hold them over."

If the heart of Texas music beats in the capital city, its soul is in Luckenbach, a sleepy hamlet 65 miles away. After 128 years of near total obscurity, the three-family town was put on the map abruptly by Waylon Jennings' hit recording. Luckenbach, Texas sped to the top of the country-music charts, and the album it came from, Ol' Waylon, became Jennings' fourth gold LP within a year.

With one house, a crumbling blacksmith shop, a dance hall and a combination post office-saloon, Luckenbach belongs on an MGM back lot. Its rise began in 1970 when a slow-talking rancher and raconteur named Hondo Crouch bought up half the town, supposedly because of his unhappiness with the saloon's irregular hours. Soon the place was a laid-back, beer-stocked afternoon retreat for country musicians. Among them: Jerry Jeff Walker, who brought old pals like Willie Nelson by for a visit and in 1973 recorded his Viva Terlingua album there.

Then came the song, an appeal to country living and simpler ways:

We been so busy keepin 'up with the Jones'

Four-car garage and we're still buildin' on

Maybe it's time we got back to the basics of love.

No matter that ol' Waylon and the song's two writers had never been to Luckenbach. The tune captured the essence of Texas' country music--a return to the basics. "It's a symbol, really, of something that people are retreatin' to," says Nelson, easily the most visible member of Austin's musical colony.

Nelson, 44, is a survivor of the Nashville Country & Western mill who has become a near deity to fans of his gentle country rock. He broke into the honky-tonk circuit 20-odd years ago, playing broken-bottle clubs like the County Dump and the Bloody Bucket outside Fort Worth, where chicken wire protected the performers from airborne bottles. In 1960 he moved to Nashville and spent the next twelve years writing hits for other performers: Crazy for Patsy Cline, Hello Walls for Faron Young and standards like Funny How Time Slips Away.

His own recordings went nowhere, stuck in Nashville's syrupy strings-and-choir arrangements. Though he was living well on sizable composing royalties, Nelson left Nashville in 1972 when his house burned down and he retreated to a ranch on the edge of Austin. Says he: "The University of Texas was there, and I had an idea that the young people was really goin' to like country music. They were havin' a rough time findin' it sometimes; they were afraid to go to some of the places where hippies might not be welcome."

Nelson turned out to be the natural bridge between country music's beer-drinker followers and its longhair fans. As a singer, he is a careful stylist who knows about the niceties of phrasing and admires Frank Sinatra. When Willie sings his songs of troubled romance or lonely Bloody Mary mornings, his voice has none of the beery sentimentality found in many honky-tonk laments. "What we do is fairly simple," he says with genuine modesty. "If people like it, they really like it and they'll come back again."

Last year four Nelson singles made the Top Ten on the country charts. His new album, To Lefty From Willie, a tribute to the late Texas singer-songwriter Lefty Frizzell, stood at No. 5 last week--one notch behind Ol' Waylon. Meanwhile, Nelson's annual Fourth of July picnics have become mini-Woodstock festivals, drawing crowds of 100,000.

Willie's large Austin coterie hopes some of this success rubs off. Already a dozen local performers have signed recording contracts, and the migration of musicians into Austin continues. It all seems a long way from Luckenbach. Or at least the old Luckenbach. These days the town is a thriving weekend tourist spot, which does brisk business in T shirts and bumper stickers. Cardboard NO PARKING signs lean against the trees; nothing is nailed down because the nails, like the signs, have been taken by tourists. Each week a couple of weddings are performed under the big cypress tree down by the creek--if the bride and groom can find their way to town, that is. The last known road sign to Luckenbach, one posted about five miles out on the highway, was carried off by a souvenir hunter.

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