It was at once lyrical, topical, and personal, while retaining the hard-thumping, hard edge of rock ’n’ roll. These talented singer/songwriters then joined forces with local rock ’n’ roll musicians, fiddlers, and banjo pickers to start a new hybrid form. The visions were more complex, ironic and articulate than those of the older, uneducated country musicians. Soon, musicians like Michael Murphey (best known for his songs “Geronimo’s Cadillac” and “Backsliders Wine”), wild folkie Jerry Jeff Walker, esoteric mountain musician Bobby Bridger, talking jive artist Steve Fromholz, and a host of others were experimenting with traditional country music tunes, but writing lyrics that expressed their own visions of things. It took the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and a little-known album by former Kingston Trio member John Stewart ( California Bloodlines) to give ideas to the prodigal sons of Austin. If you were a young hip Texan, country was music for rednecks, something you wanted to get away from. In the early ’60s, these same musicians had scorned country music as ignorant and silly and hideous.
So around 1968, many of these folks found their way back to Austin. The new country-rock may occasionally deal with the old country staples-divorce, the bottle, bad luck, and hard women-but it also confronts less provincial American themes, like the closing of the frontier and the coming of the machine age to a small Texas town.Īll of this good news on the Austin scene started in the late ’60s when a number of singer/songwriters, mostly Texans who had moved to the big urban music centers like LA and Nashville, decided that they needed to get off of the commercial songwriting treadmill and go back to their own roots. There are over four hundred bands in Austin right now, and the level of musicianship is both lyrically and musically sophisticated. In Dallas, at Nelson’s Whiskey River Club, Nelson, David Allan Coe, or a visiting outlaw-country rocker like Tompall Glaser can sell out the house every night of the month.īut it’s Austin that all the new progressive country musicians really love. In Houston, Jerry Jeff and singer/songwriter Willie Nelson easily outdraw the Who. “I’m rallying and fading, buckaroos,” he says, laughing. Not at the Armadillo! In the nick of time, Jerry Jeff rights himself and staggers, laughing, back to the mike. He’s going to fall through the drums like he did a couple of months ago at Castle Creek.īut not tonight. Jerry Jeff Walker smiles, his happy puppy grin again, takes another hit of Johnnie Walker, trips on the mike chord and falls backward over the cables. On the word “hell,” the whole crazy audience of Austin shit-kickers, bikers, farmers, and graduate students throw off their cowboy hats, shriek and hoot, kick up their heels, and start in buck-dancing. Just kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell. He’s thirty-four and drinking in a honky-tonk
So it’s up against the wall redneck mother He is weaving and bobbing and staggering about, stoned on coke, grass, and uppers, but he’s still sober enough to belt out Ray Wylie Hubbard’s country-rocker classic “Up Against the Wall Redneck,” popularly known as “Redneck Mother.” “Hi ho, buckaroos,” Jerry Jeff says, and the show is on. He stands perfectly still, raises his arm and smiles like a goofy, tranquilized cow, and the 4,800 people at Armadillo World Headquarters go wild. He has a dark beard, a cowboy shirt that hangs out to conceal his growing beer gut, a big ten-gallon hat, and National Saddlery boots (hand-stitched by Charley Dunn). Up on the big stage here at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas, Walker is twice as drunk, twice as wild, and twice as “cowboy” as his audience. The object of all this frenzy is Jerry Jeff Walker, a late-thirties, ex-folkie artist turned progressive country rocker. The out-of-work mechanic with the beer gut, and the four turquoise rings, and the Gene Autry (pink and lime green) cowboy shirt with real pearl buttons, and the mutton chops, and the straight-back greased-down hair, and the big rhinestone belt, is stomping his heels and pounding his motor-oiled ham hock on the bench.
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