Willie's country: 'The patron saint of Austin' reshaped a genre and the Texas capital

In the capital of Texas, Willie Nelson occupies whatever rank comes above legend and below god.

“He is the patron saint of Austin, that guy,” Kevin Russell, lead singer for Austin band Shinyribs, said in mid-April. Austinites might disagree over all sorts of things, “but you can usually always agree that, ‘Yeah, I like Willie Nelson. He’s pretty great,’” he said.

“90 years of Willie on this planet is, I think, something we all should celebrate,” Austin country music artist Bruce Robison said at his office across the street from the University of Texas a few weeks before Willie’s 90th birthday.

A year ago, for Willie’s 89th birthday, Robison assembled an ensemble of players for a tribute show at Willie’s Luck Ranch outside of Austin.

National stars mingled with local talent. Russell led a spirited call and response on "I Gotta Get Drunk" while Ray Wylie Hubbard drowned sorrows on "Whiskey River." Emily Gimble, granddaughter of Texas legend Johnny Gimble, paid tribute to the recently departed Bobbie Nelson hours before giving birth to her first child.

Ahead of “Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90," a star-studded two-night birthday tribute in Hollywood this weekend, we're looking back at that night a year ago, a celebration of community beyond Robison's dreams.

“This thing started out as this little bitty deal and then just changed into this crazy cool thing,” said Robison, who was able to press highlights from the evening to wax. And a group of local folks who are “really huge Willie Nelson fans… just kind of got swept along in it — in true, crazy, old 1970s Willie Nelson fashion.”

The magic of Willie's early Austin years

When he was tapped to lead the tribute, Robison's goal was to recreate the free-wheeling vibe of Willie’s transformative Austin years.

The Red-Headed Stranger relocated to Austin in 1972, disenchanted by the buttoned up ethos and overblown production of the Nashville music machine. He was inspired by the Dripping Springs Reunion in March of that year, which drew roughly 10,000 fans to a "dusty, deserted ranch" and where conventional country music fans mingled with "a good number of long hairs," Nelson wrote in his 2015 biography "It's A Long Story," co-authored by David Ritz. A native Texan, Willie also wanted to be closer to family.

Over the next few years, he released timeless classics like "Shotgun Willie" (1973), "Phases and Stages" (1974) and "Red-Headed Stranger" (1975). These stripped-down, soul-baring albums smashed the mold for traditional country music production while skyrocketing Nelson's career. They also put Austin on the map as a haven for hippies and iconoclasts, reshaping the city's culture and inspiring generations of aspiring musicians who followed.

From Willie to Gary: How Austin became the ‘Live Music Capital of the World’

Featuring a cast that mixed celebs like Sheryl Crow, Nathaniel Rateliff and Margo Price with a core group of Austin players, Robison's 89th birthday tribute aimed to recreate the rambunctious energy of the double LP “Willie and Family Live,” released in 1978.

“I had my friend Josh just recording it for the hell of it because it was so crazy. And the night was really just magical,” Robison said. The album, 'One Night In Texas: The Next Waltz's Tribute to The Red Headed Stranger,' is out on April 28.

A ‘hoot night at the Hole in the Wall’

The Hollywood event that celebrates Willie’s 90th will be a polished production designed to be cut into a TV special. Willie’s 89th was more like “a hoot night at The Hole in the Wall,” Robison said.

“There's tons of clams on there… we're winging it,” he said with a laugh. But the energy on the album crackles with warmth and spirit. “When I listened back, I just thought it was really amazing the way it sounded. And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it just sounded very organic and loose and fun.”

From the beginning, Robison knew he wanted to model the house band on Willie’s ‘70s band the Family “which is really big,” he said. The ensemble included piano, organ, lap steel, guitar and backup singers. Mirroring Willie’s band, he hired two drummers, but opted not to double the bass player’s role like Willie did.

Why did Willie have two bass players in his band? “It was the '70s and everything was crazy,” Robison said. “Probably, you know, they cooked good or had good weed or something. I don't know.”

Everything was indeed crazy in the ‘70s and some of Willie’s early Austin-area productions teetered on the verge of chaos.

A few years back, when the Ritz was still an Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, Robison caught an archival footage screening from the early years of Willie’s annual Fourth of July Picnic. “Leon Russell is out there without a shirt on. Just walking around between songs. God only knows what he's doing. The whole thing is just a mess,” he said.

TIMELINE: The definitive history of Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic

Leon Russell had worked with Willie to conceptualize the first Picnic. “You bring the rednecks, Willie, and I’ll bring the hippies,” he told the Austin icon, according to “It’s A Long Story."

The inaugural Fourth of July picnic in 1973 included performances by Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Jittery about turnout, Russell and Willie were up before dawn. They took to the stage and played gospel hymns as the sun rose to calm their nerves. A crowd eventually did show up and the bands, in turn, took the stage. “We might have been more than a little unorganized, but we pulled it off. The music was great. The crowd was happy. Buzzed on beer or high on weed or tripping on acid, the different cultures got along great,” Willie wrote.

Russell returned for the second Picnic, when the event took place at Texas Motor Speedway. “Some folks got a little loaded and decided to have an RV race on the speedway. There were a few wrecks, a few cars caught fire, but overall the crowd, estimated at a whopping 75,000, had a ball,” Willie wrote.

So yeah, kind of a mess.

Robison’s production was far more organized, but still laid back. Though there were celebs on the bill, he didn’t set up the run of show by artist popularity. Singers playing two songs did not perform them back to back. “It was just kind of people coming and going. And it worked. I didn't know that it would, but the artists, none of them cared,” Robison said. “It had that vibe, you know.”

'The right man in the right place at the right time.'

Shortly after tickets to Willie’s 89th birthday show went on sale, Bobbie Nelson, Willie Nelson’s sister, piano player and closest lifelong confidant, died.

It was Sister Bobbie who drew Willie Nelson to Austin. In the early ‘70s, the master pianist followed her adult son to the Texas capital where she supported herself playing in supper clubs and hotel lounges around town.

“She kept saying how things were changing. She kept describing Austin as something altogether different from anywhere in Texas,” Willie wrote in the 2020 book “Me and Sister Bobbie,” co-authored by Bobbie Nelson and David Ritz.

By the end of 1972, Willie had relocated to join her. Overnight, he became a local hero. “He was the right man in the right place at the right time. Willie became everything to everyone,” Bobbie Nelson wrote in “Me and Sister Bobbie.”

For Willie, the best part of the move was resuming the collaborations with his sister that were at the root of his early childhood love of music. She was his heart. The strongest link to his past. “She was the main spark I’d been missing,” he wrote.

They played together beautifully for the rest of her life.

Two days after her death, Robison received a phone call: Willie wanted to do a set at the show. The ensemble Robison was assembling was now slated to open for the man himself.

A ‘full circle moment’

Wanting to properly honor Sister Bobbie, “I spent all the money they paid me on renting the grand piano for Emily Gimble to play,” he said.

Gimble’s grandfather, the great fiddle player Johnny Gimble, was part of Willie’s musical family and is featured on albums like “Phases and Stages.” Emily Gimble met Sister Bobbie on a few occasions. “She was always just so sweet and gentle and kind to me,” Gimble said in April.

“I don't know Willie very well, but since my grandpa played with him so much, it feels kind of like we're connected,” she said.

Gimble, who took the stage “fixing to have my first baby,” was a living metaphor for the unbroken circle of the family band.

How pregnant was she? Her friends joked that she looked like Buddha as performers paused to touch her as they exited the stage. She had a scheduled C-Section the day after the show. Her obstetrician tried to talk her out of the performance. When she wouldn’t relent, the doctor gave her a condition: “She goes, ‘OK, well, you can do it if I can come (in case) anything happens,’” Gimble said with a laugh.

As a tribute, Robison asked Gimble to learn the ‘50s saloon swinger “Down Yonder,” a rollicking instrumental that Willie used to showcase Sister Bobbie’s piano chops.

“Bobbie used to play (it) every night in the shows,” Robison said.

The moment Gimble’s fingers began flying across the keys, the crowd reacted.

“It gave me goosebumps to be able to do it and it was so raucous and cool,” Robison said. It felt like a “New Orleans second line funeral celebration” for a woman who added “so much joy to our lives,” he said.

The performance, captured on the album, was extra special to Gimble because “Down Yonder” was a song she’d played with her grandfather with the elder Gimble playing lead on fiddle. When she claimed the melody hours before giving birth to her daughter Louise, it felt like a “full circle moment,” she said.

‘The fabric of living in Texas’

The house band did not have an opportunity to rehearse with the national singers before the tribute show. When they gathered to learn the songs, “it was more about a kind of community hang and just being together” than a rehearsal, Gimble said.

“Willie’s tunes are just kind of the fabric of living in Texas,” she said. There was no fumbling over chord progressions. “We just played them because we all knew the songs and grew up with them.”

Kevin Russell grew up listening to “Willie and Family Live” while playing basketball as a kid. The album is “imprinted” on his brain, his soul. There’s an “indelible mark (Willie) has made on all Texans, all kinds of Texans,” he said.

For musical Texans, he said, Willie’s path becomes “a roadmap to follow.”

For their first performance at Austin’s storied Armadillo World Headquarters in 1972, Willie and the band eschewed the flashy presentation that was standard for Nashville country acts and instead tried to reach the audience with the power of the songs alone. As the kids in the crowd “got high” on the music, Willie realized he was in a new musical world and it “fit him to a T,” he wrote in “It’s A Long Story.”

“I never did like putting on stage costumes, never did like trim haircuts, never did like worrying about whether I was satisfying the requirements of a showman,” he wrote.

Willie grew his hair long and he started wearing a red bandana to keep the sweat from his eyes. He felt liberated and alive. And he went on to record some of the best music of his career.

“He was like Django Reinhardt. He changed everything that came afterwards,” Robison said. During his Austin years, Willie produced “this kind of Big Bang moment (when) it changed what you thought country music could be.”

Coming up as an aspiring country singer in Bandera, Robison never had to “unlearn that country music was this crying in your beer, simple stuff,” he said. The first country music he heard “was this really involved and kind of emotionally sophisticated country music.” As a young boy, he flipped between 8-tracks of “Phases and Stages” and “Shotgun Willie” until “they were just burned into my brain,” he said.

More: Willie Nelson wins Grammy for best country album and best country solo performance

Willie’s career became “a blueprint for me,” Robison said. To make it as a country singer, he realized he didn’t have to move to Nashville where “all of those songs sound the same to me.” Willie showed him there was another way. Robison believes Nelson was instrumental in creating “this crazy kind of grassroots scene we have” in Austin.

“His authenticity, that's the great narrative of Willie Nelson,” Russell said. “It's a great story that he found himself by coming home to Texas.”

It taught Russell a lot about being true to himself. Before he was an Austin roots music heavy, he became a punk rocker, a move that he sees as embracing “the same idea that Willie was espousing,” he said.

“Don't listen to what the suits and ties in corporate offices tell you. Create your own reality. Live your own life. Be true to yourself. Life is short, you know, create something beautiful, if you can.”

'One Night In Texas: The Next Waltz's Tribute to The Red Headed Stranger'

From the recording of Willie's 89th birthday tribute, Robison culled a 14-track album. It features Sheryl Crow singing “Nightlife,” Steve Earle on “Pancho and Lefty” and Nathaniel Rateliff on “Crazy” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”  Representing Texas, Robert Earl Keen takes on “Pick Up the Tempo,” Russell hosts a raucous call and response on “I Gotta Get Drunk,” and Emily Gimble embodies Bobbie Nelson on “Down Yonder.” The album will be available on April 28 on vinyl and as a digital download at thenextwaltz.com. It will also be on streaming platforms.

Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90

The two-day concert at the Hollywood Bowl boasts a diverse lineup that speaks to the universal appeal of one of the greatest songwriters of the modern era. Willie will be in attendance on April 29 and 30 as chart-toppers like Neil Young, Beck, Chris Stapleton and Snoop Dogg take the stage to honor him alongside vaunted Texans like Miranda Lambert, the Chicks, Kacey Musgraves, Lyle Lovett and Leon Bridges.

The Statesman at Willie Nelson's Hollywood birthday party

Watch live as we cover the red carpet on Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl starting around 7 p.m. CST. Catch coverage from both nights at statesman.com and @austin360 on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Willie Nelson 90th: Hollywood Bowl lineup honors country legend