ELLN September Music Quick Pick
Each month for our ELLN teleconference this year, I am highlighting an album. I hope you join us on our Forums or for this afternoon’s call. If you’re an in-house counsel and not part of the ACC or the Employment & Labor Law Network, you can join ACC and ELLN today and see what we’re all about! I hope to (virtually) see you soon.
ELLN September Music Quick Pick
ELLN Chair Doug Hass has long been a music buff (he founded country music site Roughstock.com in 1993) and long done a lot of driving for and to work. That’s given him lots of time to indulge and explore his music interests To help entertain you on your commutes or at the gym, office, home, or on the go, Doug is offering a year-long series of picks that will showcase some of the best albums you may have never heard, or that deserve another listen. We hope that each monthly choice piques your interest in these albums and artists. These may be titles that you have never heard of, but our hope is that your interest will be piqued and your musical world enriched!
| Jerry Jeff Walker – ¡Viva Terlingua! (1973) |
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| Amazon Music – Apple Music – Spotify — Pandora |
I’m not sure where I first fell in love with the Austin music scene. I am sure that watching Austin City Limits on PBS as a kid (our antenna got 3 channels: PBS, NBC, half of CBS, and half of ABC) got me started, but I was hooked permanently twenty years ago during the SXSW festival. Rather than going to the festival, a friend took us to a tiny bar on the outskirts of Austin where Justin Trevino was playing. The bar was roughly 20 feet wide, Pearl beer was 25 cents a can, and the party spilled out both the front and the back doors before the night was through. During the band’s breaks, someone kept playing songs from our September music pick on the jukebox.
Arguably, the man most responsible for creating that music scene—and Austin City Limits’ initial success—is Jerry Jeff Walker. Walker and The Lost Gonzo Band recorded ¡Viva Terlingua! live in August 1973 at the Luckenbach Dancehall in Luckenbach, Texas, a tiny Hill Country town west of Austin. If you have been listening to some of the previously monthly picks, you will recognize some of Walker’s sound in Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett. ¡Viva Terlingua! sold over 50,000 copies in Texas, but never got a fair shake outside the state. Nearly 50 years later, it may only be a cult classic, but it stands up as the quintessential Austin country record. The two most famous tracks, Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues” (which served as the theme song of ACL for 30 years) and Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” are two standouts, but all 9 songs are a treat. Nunn built a successful solo career on the back of the former, and Walker’s recording of the latter is better than even Hubbard’s. My favorite version of Desperados Waiting For A Train appears here, and is the one track you shouldn’t miss.
I hope you enjoy (or enjoy rediscovering) this month’s pick!
