Happy birthday, Willie! Born in Abbott, Reborn in Austin
Willie Nelson has three birthdays- today, tomorrow and August 12
Aug. 12, 1972
With Vietnam still raging, the cultural chasm in Texas was wide as the Brazos River. Longhairs weren’t welcome in honky tonks, and cowboys didn’t mingle with “peaceniks.” It was jocks vs. nerds, Jesus vs. Jimi, bullies against the passive, but five words built a bridge.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Willie Nelson!”
A short-haired, clean-shaven Nelson stepped onto the stage of a counterculture haven and, with a three-hour show that nobody left early, expanded country music. Backed only by drummer Paul English and bassist Bee Spears, Willie merged the Broken Spoke and the Vulcan Gas Company that night at the Armadillo, as Austin became the city known as where kickers and freaks were starting to understand each other’s culture. If we can both love Willie, and show pride for Texas, maybe we’re not that far apart.
After years of wearing a suit, trying to get Nashville to accept him, Willie said screw it and moved to where his true audience was. His first Austin friend Leon Russell was a fashion mentor.
When Eddie Wilson heard that Willie, wife Connie, and the kids had moved to the Riverwalk apartments on Riverside Drive in July ’72, he made it his mission to book Nelson into his hippie beer barn. It wasn’t hard. Willie stopped by the Armadillo not long after his utilities had been turned on. “I’ve been looking for you,” said Eddie. “Well, you found me,” said Willie.
Willie Nelson’s first show at the Dillo was the Big Bang of Austin as a renowned music mecca. Chet Flippo, a grad student attending UT on the G.I. Bill, was there and wrote a big feature on Austin’s groovy longhaired cowboy scene in Rolling Stone in Oct. ’72. “Musicians from all over were flocking to Austin to see what the fuss was about,” said guit-steel master Junior Brown, who was one of them in early 1973. The intermingling of the species had started at the Split Rail Inn in the ‘60s, but that was just a local phenomenon. Willie put Austin on the map in a big way.
The Armadillo held 1,600, but only about 500 tickets, at $2 each, had been sold to Willie’s debut there. And at least half the people came to see opening act Greezy Wheels. Nelson’s most recent LP The Willie Way, which came out two months before the Dillo debut, wasn’t selling worth a damn. But Willie grew out his hair and sported a beard on the cover of his next album, 1973’s Shotgun Willie, which is considered one of the opening blasts of the outlaw country movement, along with Honky Tonk Heroes by Waylon Jennings and Viva Terlingua from Jerry Jeff.
Willie would be a Red-Headed Stranger to the charts until 1975, when “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” was his #1 crossover, breakout smash.
The photos above, which I’d never seen before, show an artist in transition. No longer a Nashville act, not yet a hippie. But by the end of Willie’s first year in Austin, he’d shared a stage (Last Bash on the Hill) with the 13th Floor Elevators and drawn an estimated 40,000 longhaired hippies to his first Fourth of July Picnic.
Micael was embarrassed by this poster more than any other he did, because of his portrait of Willie. Looked like an overweight Native American, he groused. Blamed it, kinda, on a photo he had referenced that made Willie look fat, or words to that effect.
Buffy Saint Marie was his masterpiece. Did it in a little over 24 hours nonstop, on meth. Since he did it in ink, one mistake would have been fatal and he would have had to start over. It turned out perfect. Excuse the digression from Willie, but that poster he did of Willie is an important piece of history nonetheless.
Bill Narum and I interviewed him maybe 15 years ago along with the rest of the surviving dillo poster artists for the be all and end all Austin poster book, 1839-1980. Commissioned by EOW, it was never published and never will be. Perhaps he has a copy of the raw ms. somewhere on some disk drive. A true loss of history it will be; Bill is gone, and when I am, the ms. and all we uncovered will disappear into the ether.
Most of the poster artist interviews are lying around in a shoe box.
Michael is doing his heroic best here, chapeaux.
Good Texas move, Willie, keen remembrance Michael!