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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 17, 1980)
Lindsay Haisley, a Texas musician who instruments, including the Auto-harp. Started in Austin, plays a variety of musical Photo courtesy of Grins Beer Garden One familiar performer in the Bryan- corded part of an album at a local live- College Station area is Mike Williams. Wil- music club last year. Hams, who plays guitar and sings, re- Photo courte8y of Gr1n# Garden Kiwi, a three-member rock ’n roll group MSC Basement from Austin, has played several times in club, the Bryan-College Station area, both at the The song’s the s by Lyle Lovett So you want to be a Texas rock ’n’ roll star. You’ll have to buy a cowboy hat and move to Austin, of course. And hang out with Willie Nelson and do speed limit commercials for the highway department. Shoot, you might even make Texas Monthly and play the Lone Star Cafe in New York City — give those yankees a taste of real Texana. You could do cocaine with Jerry Jeff Walker and do cocaine with Townes Van Zandt and do cocaine. You could really be somebody— a real live Texas music ... thing. Travis Holland, a veteran Texas musician, captures the star in every performer in the opening to his book Texas Genesis, published by B.F. Deal in 1978: “As a child I was a genius. But no one could understand me. Some of them thought I was crazy. I had a terrible communication problem. My thinking was just on a different level. “Then I met Steve Fromholz and Mike Murphey in Denton in 1963 and discovered that they had the same problem. “Then I met Ray Wiley Hubbard, Rusty Wier, B.W. Stevenson, Jerry Jeff, Hondo, Willie, Leon (Russell), David Allen, Waylon, and several others. We are all working on the same problem: how to get stupid enough for people to understand us. “Some of us tried to get stupid with alcohol and other drugs. I went away to mountain tops and took LSD until I thought sure I was stupid. “When I got back to Austin, all the others were in Luckenbach. When I got there, I was unable to communi cate with anyone. ' “I had failed. But somehow, they had succeeded. “Fromholz drew me aside. The answer,’ he whispered, ‘is not drugs, but electronics. I have a chamber equipped with an electro nic device guaranteed to lower your IQ by at least 50 percent, and it will solve all your communication prob lems.’ “Then he sealed me in the cham ber and activated the device. Three hours later he opened the chamber and said, ‘You OK, Trav?’ “f said, ‘That’s a big ten-four, good buddy. We’re here in old Big D and I’m ready to boogie.’” A little exaggerated maybe, but sometimes Holland’s tongue-in- cheek spiel doesn’t seem too far off-base. Music labeled “Texas” in the last five years has lost its stereotype country-rock sound. Texas- produced popular music has be come more diverse. Austin musi cians don’t all wear cowboy hats. Not all important musicians in the state live in Austin and most of those who did when the Austin “scene” was in its hey-day, don’t anymore. But people — people who stand in the street in front of the Dixie Chicken at night in large numbers — still talk about Austin and prog ressive country and the music scene as though it were 1972 when Nelson, Walker, Van Zandt and Murphey still lived there — before Rod Kennedy packed up the Checkered Flag and moved to Kerr- ville. In Jan Reid’s aptly titled “The Im probable Rise of Redneck Rock,” published in 1974, Murphey talks about Austin, forecasting his reason for eventually leaving: “There are a lot of good musi cians in this town, but I don’t think anyone should ever come to Austin because there’s a scene here. Be cause any time you start relating to a scene, you’re in trouble. Scenes have destroyed an awful lot of places. I came here because it was a good, relaxed place to live, but you have to have your own scene together before you can make any kind of move.” Mike Williams, another veteran Texas performer, said about Austin music of the early 1970s: “Whether it was a scene or not depends on who calls it a scene. Normallly, when something’s called a scene, it’s because it’s become commercially or sociologically acceptable to the masses. And we didn’t care about that; we just