When I was asked to compile a list of Austin musical moments related to my new book Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, I decided to take a broad approach to the task. Thus, this list isn’t exhaustive or definitive; I’m not going for the ten absolute best or most significant moments in the life of Austin music in the 1970s. Rather, these are ten moments that I find particularly interesting, that complement the narrative of Progressive Country, or that otherwise capture something of the scene’s flavor. Lists like this are never finished works; they are invitations to a conversation. So, if we run into each other at a show someplace, feel free to bring up some other moments you might have chosen.
—Jason Mellard
1
Janis Joplin’s last visit to Austin, July 1970
The connections between San Francisco in the ‘60s and Austin are dense. (The South Austin Popular Culture Center has even mounted an exhibit on the subject, on view through January 2014). Migrants from the Texas capital and elsewhere helped define the West Coast counterculture, and blues queen Janis Joplin may well be the poster child for these developments. Long before wowing the crowds at Monterey Pop, Joplin held court with Lanny Wiggins and Powell St. John in Kenneth Threadgill’s North Lamar bar. Her last visit to town honored Mr. Threadgill on the occasion of his birthday, at a concert in Oak Hill helmed by Shiva’s Headband. Her set was short and messy, but she also introduced Austin audiences to Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” The show also provided a taste of things to come, as Daily Texan journalist Roger Leinert wondered at the strange crowd of “longhairs and rednecks, hippies and businessmen.”
2
Dripping Springs Reunion, March 1972
By 1973, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics would ramp that hippie-redneck rhetoric to its fever pitch, but the first Central Texas “Country Woodstock” was the Dripping Springs Reunion of March 1972. The concert ably matched Nashville’s old guard with its new wave of singer-songwriters. Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, and Dottie West appeared alongside Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. Threadgill was there, too. Willie would play the Armadillo World Headquarters for the first time a few months later, sealing an alliance that would launch the first Willie Fourth of July picnic at the same Dripping Springs site in 1973.
3
Austin Music Has a Lot To Be Grateful For, Thanksgiving 1972
By November 1972, enough young artists in Austin had turned to country that this new, rootsy, rock-inflected “progressive country” sound could produce a little bit of magic on any given weekend. Thanksgiving that year was one such time. The Grateful Dead were in town to play a show at the Municipal Auditorium. Word got around, and Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jerry Garcia, and Phil Lesh, joined by members of the 13th Floor Elevators, Shiva’s Headband, and Greezy Wheels gathered for an impromptu jam session at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Sahm led the supergroup in rousing renditions of everything from Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” to Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and a little bit of everything in between. In the same weekend, the United Farm Workers held a benefit concert that brought Willie Nelson, Steve Fromholz, and Greezy Wheels together with Alfonso Ramos, Vida, and Teatro Chicano. These two events show that what was going on in Austin music was not divorced from the national music scene or from the decade’s tumultuous politics. The Dead and Russell thought highly enough of Sahm to follow his lead on a tour through musical Americana, while progressive country stalwarts Nelson and Fromholz lent their substantial talents to the Chicano Movement resonating in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio.
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