Late in the run of Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnics at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack amphitheater, I noticed that Willie’s son Lukas had stationed himself to the right of his father and younger son Micah was standing to the right of longtime Family drummer Paul English as they performed.

The next generation, safeguarding the now-unsteady old outlaws. For a longtime fan, to recognize it was to feel a bit unsteady yourself, at least for a minute.

At this year’s Picnic, the second at the Q2 Stadium in North Austin, Paul English was gone, like so many other Picnic performers before and since.

But the Picnic marches on. Willie does not care about your expectations, fitting finales or big round numbers. If you expect the 50^th Picnic to be the last, don’t be surprised if a 91-year-old Willie keeps going next year, pushing for 51. He’ll do it if he can.

This year, Willie’s right-hand man was Micah, and the duo made a strong pair. At 90 years old, Willie, who now sits down for his hour-long set, can no longer carry a whole show without a moment of rest now and then.

Micah was there to lean on, contributing three songs over the course of the Willie show. “Die When I’m High” was the first, answering the question of why Micah didn’t play his most Picnic-friendly song during his opening set.

I’m not qualified to judge Micah’s other, somewhat experimental music – my area of expertise is narrow enough to fall right over. But with “Die When I’m High,” Micah swerved into my lane so confidently, you’d think he had three names and a record of hits and arrests from the 1970s.

Micah and Willie sang it beautifully together, likely the highlight of this year’s Picnic.

I’ve only seen Willie a couple of times since COVID, when he was still working out his new, shortened show. I’ve seen (and loved) the same Willie set at Picnics, give or take a few recent songs, for the last 15 years, at least. The new approach, though necessitated by age, was an engaging departure.

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This is the part where we would talk about Tyler Childers – who was in the ringer spot ahead of Willie, actually playing a longer set at an hour and 15 minutes. But Tyler was no surprise. Fans everywhere across the stadium were wearing hats and T-shirts fixed with his name and he sure as hell gave them what they wanted.

As Tyler wrapped up his set, a surprising and sustained roar of appreciation came from the whole stadium. As someone who had often enjoyed seeing Ray Price play that slot at the Picnic, Tyler just wasn’t for me, but, damn, most of the crowd loved him.

Instead, I’ll argue the pre-Willie highlight was Dwight Yoakam.

If you had told me before the show that Dwight would cover a Buck Owens song, I wouldn’t have blinked. If you said he’d do some Merle Haggard songs, yeah, that makes sense. If you had told me Dwight Yoakam was going to sing Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Redneck Mother,” I’d have probably fallen over.

I have no idea what was behind that inspired cover. Did Dwight – who performed at the Farm Aid II / 1986 Picnic – even know that Ray Wylie was a long-time Picnic performer and “Redneck Mother” has been a Picnic sing-along for decades? Or did he just think it would be cool?

He scored a bullseye either way. Dwight sang the whole song for all it was worth. We all sang along. Dwight and his band were all joy and fun, something harder to find in the very serious younger artists.

For years, one of the highlights of the Picnics has been Willie bringing in an older artist who isn’t usually associated with the Picnic. For the Tyler Childers crowd, I guess Dwight counts – although at 66 he still seems young.

Between the Haggard covers, “Redneck Mother” and a bunch of his greatest hits, Dwight was the most dynamic performer, taking the Picnic back to the old days for just an hour in the evening. The people in the floor seats were dancing in the aisles.

If Willie hadn’t had his name on the show for 50 years, it might have been Dwight’s.

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I missed last year’s Picnic due to COVID, so this was my first look at the soccer stadium. It’s definitely a nice place – the concourse was shaded and large fans made it actually feel pleasant during the heat of the day. There were two air-conditioned bars for the public to duck in (if they weren’t full) and plenty of restrooms, as well as places to refill your water bottle – if you didn’t want to pay $6 a bottle.

Let’s talk prices for a minute. That kind of markup for a bottle of water during a Fourth of July Picnic is just as irresponsible as it has always been. The competition between vendors did keep the food prices somewhat grounded to reality. But damn, the beer prices.

Prices started at $13.95 for a pint of beer – something that discouraged drunkenness among the proletariat.

Some folks were stubborn though.

I was proud of the floor seats I had secured. The very back row of section A3, two seats on the aisle for me and my 16-year-old son. We could come and go with ease and had nobody behind us, save for a security guard.

Or, during Willie’s set, about a half-dozen security guards, each arguing with drunks who didn’t have the right ticket or refused to pour their beer into a cup – all of this happening in my left ear as I tried to focus on Willie.

The floor seats were unfortunate. Line after line of 30 cheap folding chairs, all zip-tied together for maximum closeness. This led to strangers sitting side-by-side, close enough to be engaged. It’s no wonder that some chose to sit on the plastic-covered pitch, farther away from the action, but with a little more Picnic feel.

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When the Picnic had Leon Russell, Merle Haggard and Billy Joe Shaver on the lineup, Asleep at the Wheel was not, I admit, my favorite band. But when Ray Benson is the only old Willie friend you got, you gotta dance with who’s there.

Asleep at the Wheel never sounded so good, at least to my ears. We Boogied Back to Texas. We rode in that Hot Rod Lincoln. We traveled Route 66, heard a little Bob Wills – everything you expect from the Wheel.

Familiarity goes a long way at a live show. Faced with an act we hadn’t heard before – Shane Smith and the Saints – we watched the whole show and pretty much didn’t understand a word. When the band likes to turn it up and jam, those who don’t know the songs are at a disadvantage.

I asked my son what he thought of them. “They were loud,” he said.

The definite disadvantage of having only 8 artists at the Picnic instead of the traditional 20+ is that if you’re not interested in a set … boy it goes on forever. But then, this wasn’t a traditional Picnic crowd. When the emcee asked if it was “your first Picnic,” there was a lot of cheering from the floor seats.

Folks like me had to make do with memories most of the day. There to help that was a slide show of past Picnic performers between sets and before the show. There’s Ray Price! Hey, Johnny Bush! Look, Ben Dorcy! Produced by longtime Willie superfan and photographer Janis Tillerson, the pictures were a poignant reminder of what’s gone.

Walking back to my seats after getting one of those $14 beers between sets, the house music was playing the Grateful Dead’s “Trucking.”

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” Jerry Garcia sang.

Yeah. Hell of a trip.

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Onstage, Willie is wearing that hideous lime-green Austin FC soccer jersey. This year, instead of “420” it says “50.”

At 90, it’s hard to read Willie’s emotions. Is he happy? Is it a difficult night? Is he tired? As he opens with “Whiskey River” and plays standards such as “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” “Good-Hearted Woman” and “Always on My Mind,” it’s tough to tell what he’s feeling.

But there are clues. When he pauses to let Micah sing “Everything is Bullshit,” Willie joins in the chorus, jokingly warbling along “Bullllllshiiiiiiit.”

Long known for his sense of humor – he wrote a memoir packed with dirty jokes – Willie hasn’t often shown that side on stage. Not so tonight.

Willie ends the show, as always, with the gospel singalong, bringing out the other Picnic artists to join him. And then pulls out one more: Mac Davis’ 1980 “It’s Hard to be Humble.”

“To know me is to love me / I must be a hell of a man / Oh Lord It's hard to be humble, / But I'm doing the best that I can.”

Picnic done, Willie waves to the crowd a few more times and exits to the left, the “50” on his jersey fading into the dark beyond the spotlight.

Before Dad died, I spent about 20 years thinking about his eulogy in my head. I knew that he wanted me to do it. I knew that I would do it. By the time he died, I had three separate Sam Peckinpah references ready and I had to edit it down to one.

When we realized Mom's death was imminent, I expected my sister, Julie, would deliver the eulogy. She knew Mom best. But she inherited Mom's distaste for standing before a crowd as the center of attention.

Julie asked me to do it, but what to do? I thought about several approaches and settled on a letter to my 16-year-old self. Here it is.

Dear Dave,

As I write to you, I am 51 years old and I’m preparing to deliver the eulogy for our mother. I know, you’re doing the math right now and thinking you’ve figured out how much time you’ve got left with her.

Really, it’s less than that. All I’m gonna say is that you should consider donating to the Alzheimer’s Association now and then.

Before we get down to business, look around the house. Your sister is around there somewhere. We have to mention her because eventually you won’t be able to think of your mother without thinking of Julie, too. They will be very close. And I know you think Julie’s got it easy now, but she’s going to end up doing the hardest work, and for a long time.

Maybe Julie should be the one to give the eulogy. She knew Mom best. But she’s hurting now and it’s our job to step up. I’m just saying you should probably say something nice to our sister every now and then. She’ll make you proud, I promise.

OK, business. First things first. Emotions. You aren’t all that good at them. In fact the whole family isn’t really good at it. Our mother is at the heart of it. You can’t blame her, though. That grandfather you never ask her about? He didn’t just die young. He struggled with mental illness all his life. In 1966, he killed himself with a rifle in his own backyard. Our mother was never really the same.

Sure, you really wouldn’t know it at the surface level. She was a great mother and we had a good childhood. There was plenty of laughter and good times. But you also know how easy it is to be alone and in silence. Honest expressions of emotion aren’t really our strength.

I’m telling you this so that you can try to extend a little honest emotion to her every now and then. Before you’re in your thirties. Like now. Yeah, we’ve always been good at not saying the wrong thing. But you’re going to learn that failing to say the right thing at the right moment can be just as haunting.

You need to understand the gift she gave us. The love of language and the written word. We were weaned on Scarry and Suess and Silverstein. We were raised in the library. Our home was a library of its own. And she never proscribed anything. There was no censorship. If we could read it, we could read it. Reading is an education all its own, and the breadth of that education would change who we are.

It’s natural that you want to be like the old man. Hard-living and a worker and a warrior. You’ll get to do at least two out of three. But you need to recognize that your mother’s influence is at least half of your personality. You need to know that and thank her for it.

Our mother was her own force of nature. You’ll remember her laughter. You’ll remember her young, wearing a Luckenbach T-shirt, listening to Waylon sing “Bob Wills is Still the King.”. You’ll remember her mad as hell and cussing like a sailor. You’ll remember her as a worthy opponent at Trivial Pursuit. And you’ll remember her old, worried about her short future, but putting on a brave face for you and Julie’s benefit.

The pictures will help with the memories. There y’all are on the side of a mountain in Switzerland. She was tough. Posing for a photo during a hike along a creek. She was fun. The family photo at Leavenworth. She was … let’s face it, she was just about perfect. Dancing at your 30th birthday party in Luckenbach. She was OK with you being you. Dancing at your wedding. Hey, it’s gonna happen.

You’re going to try and catch up. You’re going to give her a DVD of a movie you made about her grandchildren … only to realize that your parents no longer know how to work the DVD player. You’re going to create a little book about her early life, only to finish it when she no longer recognizes such things. Maybe this time, we can try a little sooner.

She gave us another important gift. We have always been a wanderer. We’ve scared the bejeezus out of her time and again by wandering down the road, into the woods, across the neighborhood. Now you’re 16 and you’ve got a car. She knows what it means to you to be on your own. Pretty soon she’s going to accept it and let you go. 

But that doesn’t mean you have to stay gone. You need to return a little more often, if just for a bit. You need to call every now and then. Because she loves you like only a mother could, and you love her, too. Even if both of you aren’t really great at saying so.

Let’s say it together: “I love you, mom.”

Trust me, someday you’ll wish you said it more. 

And you’ll miss her.

That’s enough truth for now.

Maybe in my next letter, I’ll offer some advice on women and whiskey. Kid, we’re gonna have a LOT to talk about there.

Regards from the future,

Dave

My mother’s debutante dreams were right there, sacked up in a small plastic bag sitting alone on a metal workbench in my father’s garage.

I’d used those same bags to buy nuts and bolts at the Ace Hardware down the street. I poured about a dozen charms and pins out on the table. 

Some I recognized: A Girl Scouts pin. Tiny Austin High School and drama club charms. Others spelled it out for me: “1960-61 Miss Y-Teen Finalist,” and “Singer Young Stylemaker Contest Qualifier’s Award.”

My mother grew up in an upper middle-class family – maybe even wealthy – in a Hyde Park home in Austin. During the 1960-61 school year, she would have been 14. Things would change terribly for her family, but at that moment she could have seen a bright high society future.

Sixty years later, her teenage treasures were in a plastic baggie on a workbench in Pilot Point, Texas. And my mother was dying of Alzheimer’s in the shadow of Oklahoma.

The mysteries abound for my mother’s side of the family, all stemming from the afternoon of Jan. 6, 1966, when my grandfather took a rifle and killed himself outside the family home.

Mom transferred to the University of Texas from Centenary College in Louisiana after that, but had little interest in classes.

Instead she would drive aimlessly around Austin in her Mustang, smoking cigarettes and developing the silence that would eventually characterize our family.

In late 1967, my mother found solace in the sturdy arms of a good-looking member of Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets. I don’t know if she thought much about life as an Army wife, but she knew that my dad could take her far away.

I don’t mean to say that my childhood home was silent, really. I don’t remember being unhappy. We were an Army family, semi-isolated from relatives, but we did make occasional visits. When I was young, my parents even socialized with friends. My dad’s life was an open book, full of stories he’d tell for the first time every time he’d had enough whiskey.

But mom didn’t talk of her family, or at least was extremely guarded in what she would say. I was a grown man when I found out the my grandfather’s death was a suicide. I was in my 40s when I pieced together enough clues to realize that he was manic-depressive.

Mom and I weren’t particularly close, not in the way she was with my sister, Julie. There was love there, but I struggled with my own emotions and the silence suited me. Soon enough I was a wayward son like my father before me.

It’s no mystery how my parents came to Pilot Point – the story is familiar to far too many families. When my father retired from the Army, they bought a home outside of Gladewater which they slowly built into their dream home. They loved that house until my mom’s illness forced them to move to be close to Julie.

The three years they owned that home in Pilot Point were sad to the point that I often thought about what else could have happened – though I always came up with nothing. My mother wasn’t in the house long before she had to go to a memory care facility. My dad spent the second year in a succession of hospitals as age and hard living finally took its toll. In the third year he’d die in a hospital bed in the living room.

Going through the house and the memories, we discovered a few new things – I’d have warned Julie not to read those old love letters – but I thought a lot about the things left unsaid and the answers we’ll never know.

The final mystery was that little bag on the workbench. Who put those things in there? Why was it there? 

It is, I suppose, a writer’s crutch to assign such significance to such a small thing. It was, certainly, a crutch of sorts for an Army brat who grew up in a house of repressed emotions. For the first time I wondered about her childhood dreams and tried to guess what she’d think of where she ended up.

Her memory care facility was in Whitesboro, just down the road from a doublewide trailer that flew the Confederate flag for a good while. It’s a damn far piece from Hyde Park in Austin. Cows graze in the field across the street.

Whitesboro wasn’t our first choice. We had originally put Mom in a much fancier urban facility in Frisco until it became clear that the care there wasn’t what Mom required.

Still, my sense of guilt remained until Jule shared a picture of one of Mom’s caretakers with her. 

The love there was unmistakable. Not just from the caretaker, but from Mom as well.

In her final days, there was a steady flow of visitors to her room. The caretaker I had seen in the photo stayed for an hour and held her hand and wept. All these people were there for her, just as they had been there for her. She was loved and cared for.

Yes, she died in the shadow of Oklahoma, far removed from her youthful dreams. But, somehow, in a far-traveled life, she ended up where she needed to be.

The traditional Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic couldn’t possibly have returned after October 2020, when we lost Billy Joe Shaver and Johnny Bush. There’s just a certain threshold of familiar faces required at this event and as big as Ray Benson is, he and Asleep at the Wheel are not quite enough.

For the longtime Picnic fan, there are questions about the lineup: Where is Ray Wylie Hubbard? Where is Lukas and Paula Nelson? Folk Uke? 

That said, the buzz about the return of the Picnic is that it will be held at Austin’s Q2 Stadium, a venue newly built for the city’s Major League Soccer franchise.

Because I haven’t been to Q2, and I don’t know how the event will be structured, I’m at a disadvantage to tell you how the event will feel compared to recent Picnics at the Circuit of the Americas.

But I can tell you that this is not the first time, by a considerable margin, that the Picnic has been held at a stadium.

Let’s take a look at the history.

1978: Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas

On July 2, the inaugural Texxas Jam in Dallas gave Willie a day for the Picnic and it drew a then-disappointing crowd of 20,000 to see Willie, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, the Charlie Daniels Band and several others.

Just the day before, more than 50,000 attended the July 1 Picnic at Arrowhead featuring Willie, Waylon, the Grateful Dead and Jerry Jeff Walker.

But Texxas Jam co-promoter Louis Messina of Houston’s Pace Concerts was undaunted.

“As far as I’m concerned, this was Year One of the ‘Willie Nelson Picnic,’” Messina told the Austin American-Statesman. “The days of going out in the fields are over.”

The next two years, the Picnic would be held on the golf course at Willie’s Pedernales Country Club.

1983: The Carrier Dome in Syracuse and Giants Stadium in New Jersey

After two years off, the Picnic returned in 1983 with a 3-day series of concerts along the East Coast, ending at Atlanta International Raceway on July 4.

About 25,000 attended the show at the Carrier Dome, featuring Willie, Merle Haggard, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and the Stray Cats – really. More than 55,000 went to Giants Stadium for the same lineup, plus Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter.

If Willie was hoping to avoid the Texas heat, it didn’t work out. The humidity inside the Carrier Dome was said to be extraordinary and the Syracuse Herald-American dubbed it “the Syracuse Sauna.” And at Giants Stadium multiple news agencies reported the temperatures on the field were over 100 degrees.

1986: A near miss … almost UT’s Memorial Stadium

Farm Aid II in 1986 was set for July 4 and the hybrid Farm Aid/Picnic was originally planned to be held at Memorial Stadium.

However UT remembered the 1974 ZZ Top Rompin’ Stompin’ Barndance and Bar B.Q., where concessionaires had run out of food and drink and hot and thirsty fans ended up tearing water fountains from the walls and causing considerable other damage. Negotiations broke down over insurance concerns and left Farm Aid II homeless. 

The event was moved to Manor Downs at the last minute and drew a crowd of more than 40,000.

2009: Coveleski Stadium, Indiana

Bob Dylan, Willie and John Mellencamp went on a tour of minor league baseball parks in July and August of 2009. With July 4 falling on a Saturday, a stop at Coveleski Stadium was promoted as a "Fourth of July Picnic" and Willie took Dylan's closing spot for the night. It drew a crowd of 8,500 – far more than the stadium’s normal capacity.

Look for my book on the history of Wille Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics in July 2023 from Texas A&M University Press.

One of the things my father told me about his funeral was that he did NOT want us to play “Amazing Grace.”

We were drinking beer in my garage. It was late. I thought about that for a bit. 

Our conversations were never the hurried flurry of words you hear from most people. There were long pauses. Silence. Reflection on what was said. Then searching for the right reply. 

I thought for a bit, then gave up. 

“OK, why no ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“Because,” he said. Another pause. “I’ve never been lost a damn day in my life!”

Did he mean spiritually, as the song intended? Or physically? Both? 

He seldom explained his pronouncements.

He did have other ideas about what song to play at his funeral. We’ll get to that.

We’re going to talk about trees.

When my father retired from the Army, he moved just north of Tyler, Texas, about halfway between the Starrville Church of the Living God and Lambert’s Liquor store, just across the county line in Gregg County.

(If you’re thinking that’s a metaphor, well, yeah. He was probably a little closer to the county line than the church.)

His place was in the country, essentially. He had neighbors, but he could ride a four-wheeler, fish in a pond, shoot a gun. And he had trees. A dozen or so huge, towering pine trees. 

He loved trees and loved watching the animals that lived among them. He had been a hunter in his younger days but in his retirement years was essentially a bird watcher and animal lover. He took in several stray cats, including one that had been shot up by a neighbor’s kid. He waged a peaceful battle against the raccoons that attacked his bird feeders. Shooting them was never an option for him. He had to outsmart them.

Still, he talked tough.

He texted me one day, while he was living out there.

“Shit! Bro! Mom saw a snake in the garage and it hid before I could get it!”

I texted him back, “Well, close the garage door and put a cat in there. If the cat gets the snake, you’re good to go. If the snake eats the cat, you probably ought to move.”

He texted me back: “Move! Hell! I’ll throw the rest of the cats in there!”

(This was the man who would tell you he hated cats)

He had tried a succession of jobs after the Army -- but he didn’t fit in with the private sector. There wasn’t a lot of room in the Northeast Texas good ol’ boy network for a guy who was gonna tell the boss that he was wrong and this is how it should be done.

He worked for a car lot for a very brief time. Would you buy a used car from this man? No. Because if you asked enough questions, he couldn’t help but tell you that the car was a piece of shit.

He loved those trees. Wouldn’t cut one down unless it was dead. But he had no problem turning the remains of oak trees into family treasures. He didn’t go out to Home Depot and pick out a few boards. Lumber was delivered to him on 18-wheelers.

So, Bullworker took the plunge and started his own business -- Solid Oak Wood Products. Did I say these were his retirement years? Hell, we were 15 years away from that.

With a little bit of help, he could’ve made a good and comfortable living selling custom pieces to wealthy customers. But nobody in our family is a salesman and we had no way of connecting the craftsman to the customer.

The temperature hit 100 degrees in Austin on July 4. This time, fans at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic did not care. The virtual Picnic, thanks to COVID-19, was something new entirely. And, let’s face it, it was weird.

We got 40 minutes of Charley Crockett in the afternoon -- way more than enough -- and about 3 minutes of Steve Earle in the post-sundown finale. The early live sets were way too long for too little. I know folks like Lyle Lovett and Ziggy Marley had other stuff to do, but surely there were more local bands that could have helped carry that long afternoon load.

But the 2-hour finale was interesting and fast-paced. A stretch there in the middle made even the most hard-to-please Picnic fan pretty happy. The interviews desperately needed more context -- they were a combination of surprising new information and old misinformation. Some of our interviewees were good at telling stories and some were not.

If you paid to see the Picnic on the Fourth, you can replay it through July 11. Anyway, I viewed it again this morning (I was, uh, celebrating on the Fourth) and typed down some thoughts. If you’d like to view it again, you can follow along.

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1:10 -- They never tell us who this is, but the daring fashion choice of twin denim shirts gives Daniel Rateliff away. I appreciate opening with “Whiskey River,” but let’s keep in mind that Johnny Bush was originally advertised as being part of this show, but wasn’t in the finished product.

2:17 -- The “Fourth Annual” Picnic poster you see under the TV is a poster for the Picnic held in Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in 1978. The “fourth” is a mistake, as Gonzales in 1976 was the fourth Picnic. All three posters are enlarged versions. The original prints were smaller. I presume they were chosen as decorations for this event and not part of Willie’s usual decor. I just wonder why these three were chosen.

3:56 -- I interviewed “L.G.” in 1996 in Luck. Glad to see he’s still with us. But that chopped edit of his interview didn’t help him out much.

4:59 -- I’ve heard a lot about Dahr Jamail, but this is the first I’ve ever seen him. “Probably the biggest star in the world at that time was Leon Russell. We asked Leon to come to the Picnic and of course he’s agreeing, but his management’s going ‘no way.’ So they say, if you don’t announce it, then he’ll come.’”

5:33 -- Geno McCoslin (who often blurred the line between promoter and gangster) gets the first of several mentions here, but the man who should get the credit for successful radio advertising of the Picnic is Woody Roberts. 

5:44 -- Dahr Jamail: “I got a loan for my car for $5,000 and used that money to print tickets. We printed tickets, gave Jim Franklin a couple hundred bucks for the first poster and then I went out and bribed the mayor of Dripping Springs with $500 and the sheriff for $500 and rented the land out there for $2,500.” This is the first I’ve heard of the “bribing.” Will have to ask about that. It’s worth remembering that the Hurlbut Ranch had already hosted the Dripping Springs Reunion.

6:27 -- Ray Wylie Hubbard: “I think I’ve played at all the Picnics except for probably three or four.” It’s actually been more than that, but let’s give Ray Wylie credit for attending more Picnics than anyone except Willie.

7:41 -- Sorry, Mickey Raphael, the stage was not a flat-bed truck. And it did have a roof. The story goes that the roof came off a few days before the show and Eddie Wilson had a new one made in a hurry out of chicken wire and sprayed-on urethane.

7:58 -- “Well the first one was in Dripping Springs, and it was a shit show.” Thank you Freddy Fletcher. No, it was not on a flatbed trailer. “The funny thing about that Picnic was the money disappeared mysteriously.” Later on, the IRS wouldn’t think it was very funny.

9:10 -- Mickey Raphael is obsessed with roofs. The stage had a roof in ‘73.

9:45 -- It was awesome when Waylon Jennings played Luckenbach in 1996. But it wasn’t cool -- it was one of the hottest and dustiest Picnics. There was such a drought that year that Willie donated some of the proceeds from the Picnic to Farm Aid.

11:22 -- Sorry, Kurt Vile, Luckenbach has not hosted the Picnic “more than any other spot.” Fort Worth hosted it 7 times and Austin has hosted it at least 8 times depending on how you count the outlying communities. Luckenbach had a great five in a row, but it’s not the most.

18:04 -- This is the best shot so far of the beer cans “scattered” in front of the drum kit. What brands are they? Are they decoration, or was someone really thirsty?

18:30 -- Before John Doe leaves the stage, I should point out that X performed at Farm Aid II in Manor Downs on July 4, 1986.

19:53 -- Willie has long embraced diversity, and this year’s Picnic features more diversity than ever when it comes to Black performers. But still, it’s a boys club. There’s not a lot of women artists at the Picnic and I’d love to see more. Anyways, I like Devon Gilfillian’s cover of “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Cowboys.”

23:20 -- I suppose it’s the Aggie in me, but it’s weird to see “Goodnight Irene” at the beginning of the show. This was the last song performed at the Armadillo World Headquarters and I always wanted to confirm that’s where Don Ganter got the idea to make it the closing song at the Dixie Chicken in College Station, but Don died before I could ask him about it.

27:47 -- I mean, seriously. Use some title cards to introduce L.G. set up the year and the location that he’s talking about and let him tell a complete story. 

28:46 -- “It looked like the U.S. troops exiting Hanoi,” says Mickey Raphael on performers exiting the ‘79 or ‘80 Picnic via helicopter. 

29:05 -- Actually, it was the second Picnic that was in College Station, Mickey.

31:41 -- I wonder if when the artists signed up to do this, they knew the finished product would show the house band a lot more often than them. 

32:16 -- I love Steve Earle and I love this song (a duet with Willie on Earle’s album), but I have enough small children that those hanging guitars are making me nervous.

32:55 -- There’s beer cans and blankets and lawn chairs amid the nonexistent audience, too. It’s a Picnic! Set design!

33:30 -- There’s no way Kinky Friedman wouldn’t show up in person. This is a nice song though.

37:40 -- And there’s no way Lyle Lovett wouldn’t be sharply dressed. Damn shame he hasn’t played a Picnic before this one. I’ve never interviewed him before and would really like to. 

39:27 -- Are those Topo Chico bottles new? A little more product placement?

40:58 -- “I think that I was the date because I was the guy with the car.” I know what you mean Robert Earl Keen. 

41:43 -- I’m gonna feel really bad if someone tells me it’s a skin condition, but right now I’m wondering what kind of superhero mask Robert Earl has been wearing that has left him with that sunburn.

44:28 -- Keen’s first one he performed at was in 1995 in Luckenbach. People started throwing their empty beer cans in the air to the point where it looked like a giant popcorn popper during “The Road Goes on Forever.” He came off stage and I was there to greet him and he looked at me and said “Did you see that?” 

47:25 -- By the time this is over I’m going to know how to play steel guitar.

52:47 -- As we go from Robert Earl Keen to Ray Wylie Hubbard, this seems to be an appropriate time to point out I’m really missing Billy Joe Shaver.

53:26 -- This is the slow-dance version of “Redneck Mother” If you count playing the song in the car during the 2018 rain out, I’ve sang this song with Ray Wylie at 22 Picnics. Yes, I’m singing along right now.

57:40 -- This is what I’ve been waiting for all night: A reggae cover of “On the Road Again.” Or if not a true reggae rhythm, at least in Ziggy Marley’s wonderful Jamaican accent. I’m a sucker for reggae versions of country songs I like. I have no idea why. 

58:32 -- The best shot so far of Jim Franklin’s poster for the 1975 Picnic in Liberty Hill. This poster appeared in rock poster book “The Art of Rock” and subsequently fake versions of it flooded eBay. The fakes were all distorted to fit an 11x17 sheet of paper. The original prints are narrower.

1:05:20 -- Ben Dorcy!!! The legend. Guy started off in 1950 with Hank Thompson. I shook his hand once. When he found out I was a journalist he took it back pretty quickly. For some time I’d always spot him running some errand for somebody at the Picnic. He’d move through the crowd and people wouldn’t notice. I wanted to tell them he was more legendary than whoever was on the stage would ever be.

1:07:20 -- I had known Waylon had written a song for Ben Dorcy, but I wasn’t sure I had ever heard it. It’s damn cool that Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen are doing this salute during their time on the virtual Picnic. 

1:10:55 -- Two more stories about Geno McCoslin. The guy knew how to make people remember him. Again, the guy who was behind the Bob Dylan rumor for the first Picnic was Woody Roberts. If Geno stole his idea for Picnic No. 2, good for him.

1:11:54 -- Another Geno story. There must be some sort of anniversary or something. This time Freddy tells the bathroom/exit story that Mickey didn’t quite pull off.

1:13:00 -- Ray Wylie with the quote of the night: “You wanted to be a part of it. Each one was like a magical thing that wasn’t happening anywhere else in the world. … You would show up there early. You’d get there and stay, as long as you could. It was such an incredible world that you didn’t want to leave that Willie world and go back to the rest of it.”

1:14:00 -- Mickey goes into a long story here about Farm Aid II without pointing out that it was Farm Aid II or that it was 1986. I mean, some captioning here would have really helped.

1:14:26 -- I had no idea that Mickey Raphael played on a Motley Crue album. I bet you didn’t know either.

1:15:20 -- My wife and I spent this whole song debating who this was. It turns out I was right, but they didn’t have to make it a guessing game.

1:19:12 -- Jamey Johnson has done “This Land is Your Land” at the Picnic the last few years and it has always been great. Not sure why he picked this one.

1:22:14 -- The Picnic had been short on saxophones up until now.

1:24:07 -- Not only did we not get to see Margo on the Fourth, but that meant we didn’t get the band introduction either. Glad that we added her back on the replay -- we needed a Leon Russell tribute.

1:26:34 -- OK, at least three of those crumpled beer cans on the floor are Lone Star cans. What is sponsor Budweiser going to say?

1:27:41 -- Lukas is just better than us at everything. Hell, even his Zoom meetings are awesome.

1:33:10 -- I just want to know what Sheryl Crow has on her ceiling. Waiting for the Willie Picnic Cribs show on CMT. 

1:36:46 -- The McCrary Sisters have just tripled the number of women featured in the Picnic finale. 

1:40:11 -- Willie mentions Dripping Springs twice in this show. I can’t imagine that we’d return to a Picnic in a field at this point, but with Willie, you never know.

1:41:53 -- It’s not bad to see Micah back on drums. It’s just weird not to see an English back there.

1:45:00 -- Willie sounds good. The time off the road has agreed with him, apparently. 

1:52:00 -- I wonder who is keeping track of Ol’ Dillo while Willie is off the road.

1:58:16 -- The video and the sound have gotten off track on this viewing for me and now this is like a bad kung-fu movie.

1:59:30 -- I never was as enthralled with “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” as everyone else in the world seemed to be, but I have enjoyed it being part of the gospel sing-along at the close of the Picnics these last few years. 

2:02:52 -- End credits show Willie was supposed to play “I’ll Fly Away” and “I Saw the Light” which traditionally close the Picnic. I guess he didn’t have time, but we’ll close here.

Happy 80th birthday, Lone Star Beer!

But … what about “since 1884”? Well, it turns out that date has been co-opted. Borrowed. Eh, it’s more like stolen. 

Basically, it’s a lie — not any less than me introducing myself as Dave Thomas, wealthy hamburger entrepreneur.

The “National Beer of Texas” has its roots in the 1940 purchase of a San Antonio brewery by Kansas City-based Muehlebach Brewing Company. That San Antonio brewery was built just after Prohibition by Sabinas Brewing Co. and operated until 1939, when it was briefly run by Champion Brewing Co.

Muehlebach bought the brewery from Champion and in April of 1940, Muehlebach put their “Munich-style lager beer” on the market: Lone Star Beer was born.

“But there was a Lone Star Brewing Company in San Antonio in 1884!” you say. And that’s true. Adolphus Busch had an interest in it, along with a couple other early Texas breweries, and it stayed in business (brewing Alamo beer, not Lone Star) until Prohibition shut it down in 1918. 

But here’s the key. It was a completely different company. There were absolutely no ties between the pre-Prohibition Lone Star Brewing Co. and the beer that would emerge in 1940. The breweries were at different addresses, the management and ownership is different. Basically, it’s just two companies with the same name separated by 30 years (the latter Lone Star Brewing Co. would not emerge until it split off from Muehlebach in 1949).

Early on, there was little confusion. There’s no evidence that Lone Star Beer traded on any residual fame from its pre-Prohibition forebear. Instead it stood on its own legs and rose quickly.

Lone Star Beer grew into “The National Beer of  Texas,” eventually outpacing Pearl beer and becoming a cultural icon during the 1970s.

And Lone Star Beer was proud of its own history. They talked of their 1940 beginnings in their official communications, and marked their 25th anniversary in 1965. They celebrated 60 years in 2000. They even had a whole “65 years of Pure Texan Beer” marketing campaign in 2005.

So what happened?

Inexplicably, by 2010 Lone Star had labels that said “since 1845” — not just on the cans and bottles, but on promotional materials as well. I wrote a letter to the company asking for an explanation, but got none. Texas became a state in 1845, of course, but if you’re just going to absolutely make something up, 1836 would have been a better fit for the National Beer of Texas.

I never have seen an explanation or an acknowledgement of the "since 1845" branding, but by 2016, Lone Star had quietly dropped it and adopted the “since 1884” that it brags about today. Media writers who rely on news releases have fallen for it, of course, and every time they do, they just push us all a little farther from the truth.

Why does Lone Star do it? Well, it makes them the oldest beer in Texas — beating out Pearl by 2 years and Shiner by 25 years. And it gives them a rarefied history. Who needs to be associated with the cosmic cowboys when you can claim you were there with the real thing?

But, in the end, the fact is that they are claiming the history of another company as their own. It's not true and it's not right.

For a minute there I thought it was gone. If so, it all would’ve been gone.

Yeah, I know the Public Storage that we built is still standing, looming over the Austin Chronicle. Over the course of a few months, alternative journalists and regular construction workers looked over their shoulders, each worried that the other was gonna report them for smoking pot.

But after two dozen years, a building becomes just a building. You don’t clearly recall the brooms and dust, taco trucks and dirty jokes. Where did we carry that Port-A-Potty again? Never has shit been moved so literally and delicately. What was the name of that asshole kid from Manor who ruined a thousand-dollar door trying to install a hydraulic closer? Must’ve drilled 40 holes in that son of a bitch. Some days I drive by without thinking about it at all.

No the last bit was the Congress Mobile Home Park, where a leathery old ex-miner named Colorado climbed under my ‘82 Chevy truck and sawed off the catalytic converter, in exchange for a steady stream of Busch beer. 

Well, he probably did it for the company, what with Brian being in jail and all.

I drove by again. I took a good look.

Nah, the trailer park is still there, at least for now. The future is settling in just north of it. New construction — condos and coffee shops. It’ll feel just like home to asshole kids from Indianapolis.

This story takes place between the beginning of October and the middle of December in 1996. It was just about 10 weeks. 

I’m pushing 50 and these days, 10 weeks are gone before you turn around. The years go almost as fast, memories vanishing under a roiling wake of stress and responsibility. A quarter-century ago, I had equal parts nothing and nothing to lose. 

And I remember.

My clothes were clean.

I had driven from Hyde Park to South First and Oltorf, unshaven and hungover. I walked into the day labor hall at 5 a.m. in worn jeans and old flannel. Labor Ready was crowded with broke men — those broken by circumstance and those broken by hard living. There was only one guy in there who could and did walk away from successful journalism job. Still, with the right attitude and my quiet nature, I figured I’d be just another guy looking for work. It took me most of an hour to understand why I still stood out.

By then I’d been selected for a work crew cleaning up a construction site at East 41st and Interstate 35. I had a truck and so I was driving two coworkers back north — one of them was Max.

I can’t write about Max. Not and get away with it. He was a young black man who delighted in teaching me the ways of the day labor hall. It took him all of half a minute to figure out I wasn’t really just another hard-up guy. 

(Apparently, having a bunch of silver change in the truck console was a dead giveaway. If you haven’t paid for a tallboy with a bunch of dimes and nickels, you’re not really broke.) 

I didn’t talk about who I was, though he didn’t stop trying to solve the mystery the whole time. “Why you on skid row?” he asked me daily. He was curious and gregarious and a source of nonstop energy — for talk and mischief, at least. Yet the man was a walking black caricature of himself. He spoke in stereotypes, with the speech patterns and subject matter you’d find in the most unabashedly racist material.

(Max had a sweatshirt with a prominent cross on the chest that he wore sometimes. “Lawd, this is my panhandlin’ shirt,” he  told me. Then he demonstrated the Uncle Remus-meets-black preacher routine he said would always get him money — and he was convincing.)

Maybe Max was a hell of an actor. Maybe he was messing with my head. At one point he asked me to scoot a trashcan his way and I literally said “shit, that motherfucker be full” before recoiling in realization that I was imitating his speech. I waited for him to call me out, to give me shit, but he didn’t seem to notice.

I eventually found out his real name was Marvin. I didn’t tease him, instead, I called him “Mad Max.” He never understood the reference, though he seemed to enjoy the notoriety. One day he called me a “95% white boy,” and to my regret I never asked if that was good or bad or what the other five percent was.

I don’t know if he was looking out for me or working the long con. If I had to choose, I’d say Max was my friend.

The other guy in the truck, more often than not, was a Hispanic guy named Johnny. Johnny C was a lovable goofball who was just smart enough to not think twice about hiding in a storage unit and pulling a jump scare on a black guy with a wooden broomstick in his hand. He didn’t get hit — but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Johnny C was the sort who physically shrank from me when I yelled at him for smoking pot in my truck while Max and I ate lunch at the H-E-B at the Hancock Center. (Max had to tell me, I was too naive to figure it out.)

Johnny R was a short, quiet guy who had blue ink prison tattoos featuring spider webs and tear drops. Nobody asked him much and he seemed to deeply prefer it that way. Johnny R was the sort who if I had yelled at him for anything they probably would have found my body a few days later in a field in Dove Springs. (Max didn’t have to tell me, I figured that out on my own.)

We had guest stars sometimes. The tall lanky guy whose body was missing something terribly and worked so little and so ineffectively that Max used him as a prop to educate me in the different ways of passing the work day. I remember “Cadillacking” (working steadily but at a snail’s pace) and “Posting Up” (just leaning on the broom everytime the boss wasn’t in sight).

Then there was the country boy from Manor who thought he knew how to do everything. He figured he could worm his way into the ranks of the real construction workers from the day laborers and ended up being the only guy I saw just get outright fired — after the thousand-dollar door incident.

Until this year, the Circuit of the Americas racetrack had left me with few indelible memories as a Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic fan. But one of those was from 2015 — Sturgill Simpson playing the main stage in the heat of the afternoon.

Sturgill was fine, but the memory is of watching Kris Kristofferson watch Sturgill — intently. Not quite hidden behind the black mesh in front of the right side of the stage, his lean frame and gray hair unmistakable, his enjoyment of the music just as obvious. It wasn’t a passing of the torch or any such cliche, but it was a fine benediction. It was a moment.

Now here I am, four years later, standing in the same spot as Kristofferson. Standing on the side of the stage at the Picnic, amid musicians and their family, watching Willie Nelson and his Family. Now this is a moment, perhaps THE moment of my 21 Picnics. At least within range of seeing Waylon Jennings in Luckenbach.

I didn’t know I’d be here when I was in front of this stage a few hours earlier singing “Copperhead Road,” in the searing sun with Steve Earle, or over yonder singing along with “Snake Farm” or “Green Snakes on the Ceiling.” (Yes, I had called this the “Reptile Trilogy” on Twitter, and, verily, it came to pass).

Jamey Johnson was onstage when I got a phone call from a friend who said he had an extra backstage pass. I didn’t ask questions. I met him by the gate and when I put that pass on, I was gold. Security didn’t ask questions, either. 

Of course, I fit in nicely among the cowboy-hatted, full-bearded musicians. While going through the Statesman photo gallery the next day, I recognized Colter Wall as one of the guys who had stood next to me for a good portion of Willie’s performance. I didn’t know him because I had missed his set — truth be told, I was just too lazy to hike over there when I could sit on a padded chair in the shade at the Luck Lounge and drink free Budweiser.

Yeah, that happened, too.

But let’s tackle the obvious questions first: How was Willie? What was it like backstage?

Willie was great, possibly better than last year. It seemed grim for a minute as he walked stiffly to the microphone, and his show has been shortened to only an hour — we ended the night on “I’ll Fly Away” instead of the traditional “I Saw the Light.” But if the show started right at 11 p.m. and ended exactly at midnight, everything in between was fantastic. You wouldn’t confuse him with young Willie, but there was plenty to be grateful for.

Backstage was a maze of buses and friendly, hairy faces. Some red eyes to go around, but any outlaw behavior was discreet. I did climb the tower, and if you’re suspecting there was someone up there smoking a joint, you’d be right. Later I would spy a skunk — an actual skunk — shuffling along a fence line. I joked to everybody in earshot, “Boy, I have some apologies to make.” I got no laughs.

There were plenty of attractive women, but nobody I’d have dared call a groupie. There were no tubs of beer or other such hedonism out in the open, which was probably good, given my afternoon indulgence. The stars were in their buses, or the trailers provided for them. And on stage … with me.

Yes, that’s Jamey Johnson stopping to hug old outlaw Paul English. There goes Luke Combs to pay his respects to David Allan Coe, slouched in a chair a few feet away. Hey, it’s Ol’ Dillo — the band’s taxidermied mascot — atop the sound board in front of me. When the all-star sing-along finale closes the night, Coe limps up to the group that includes Combs, Wall and Earle. 

Coe didn’t look much better half a day earlier when he opened the Picnic at noon, compressed into a chair under the weight of the years and his ever-more-ridiculous wig. Sadly, his “Storms Never Last” duet with wife Kimberly Hastings was even more painful to behold than his wig. Still, we got to sing along with “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” one more time, at least.

This is where we compare Coe’s performance with Johnny Bush, who followed him a few acts later. Bush started off a little shaky as well, but gained strength along the way. “All the Rage in Paris,” was a little rough, but I got goosebumps all the same. The difference was in the supporting players. Where’s Coe’s band was tiptoeing around his ragged vocals, Bush’s band was having a helluva time, bringing the San Antonio legend along in the process.

Over the previous few weeks, I had examined files, photos and videos of almost fifty years of Fourth of July Picnics, and for at least half that time, Willie kept answering the same question: “How long are you going to do it?” (“As long as it’s fun,” was the most common answer.) 

When I started writing about the Picnic consistently in the mid-2000s, I would often end my stories with Willie leaving the stage, convinced each time it could be the last.

I have finally realized that it’s a fool’s errand trying to guess which Picnic will be the last. Instead, the past 25 years has been one continuing farewell. Goosebumps? Yes. I realize there are people out there who love David Allan Coe the way I love Johnny Bush, and I hope they felt like I felt: grateful for one more Picnic set.

(Still, there’s always gonna be some wannabe outlaw singing “The Ride” to any sumbitch who will listen. This very well might’ve been the last time I’ll hear anybody sing “There Stands The Glass.”)

Thanks to the rain, I missed Ray Wylie Hubbard last year, who had been to every Picnic that I had been to since 1995. Hubbard has consistently been my favorite set of the day, but this year I might have finally tired of the predictable lineup of fan favorites, if not for Lucas Hubbard’s heroics. I am not a guitar guy, but has Lucas taken another step up? More than ever, I’m thinking of Billy Joe and Eddy Shaver when I see Ray and Lucas together — in the best way, of course.

And Billy Joe? Shaky is the word that came to mind. He came out gripping a plastic water bottle with what fingers he had, only to set it down on the stage. After each song, as he leaned over to pick up that bottle and take a swig, I kept worrying he was gonna fall over.

But there he was, wearing that battered brown hat with its crown stretching toward the heavens and a worn denim shirt, a large hole in the sleeve calling attention to the set list he’d written on his arm. Four songs and he was gone, forgetting the set-up to the punchline of “That’s What She Said Last Night,” but getting a big laugh anyway from the crowd and Steve Earle, watching from the side of the stage.

Earle was the man of the Picnic, a much-needed fresh face who gets my vote to join the dwindling ranks of Picnic regulars. After all, he very much seemed to get the spirit of the day. There he was, introducing Bush. There he was, hugging Shaver after he left the stage. There he was, coming out at midnight for the all-too-brief all-star finale.

And there he was, putting in another fiery Picnic set in the searing heat of the main stage in late afternoon. His Guy Clark songs (including “Rita Ballou” and “LA Freeway”) came off well, his originals (including “Guitar Town” and “Firebreak Line”) even better. 

If it seemed particularly hot in the concrete pit at 5 p.m., it’s because I’d spent most of the previous 2 hours kicked back in the blessed shade and padded chairs of the Luck Lounge. This luxury added an extra $100 to my ticket, but it seemed worth it at the time, even before I discovered that it also meant free cans of Budweiser. 

I pulled up a chair near the bar at the back of the tent and supervised Gene Watson from there. (Earlier, Bush had told us he had borrowed Watson’s steel guitar player because his was “in rehab.” I was thinking Bush was damn lucky to find another steel guitar player at the Picnic these days.)

Watson went through his hits, including “Love in the Hot Afternoon.” Ordinarily, I advise against slow songs during the daylight heat of the Picnic, but this one felt right. Hayes Carll, who had broken this rule a few years earlier — singing a couple of slow weepers as his crowd just melted into the concrete — picked it up this year, drawing from his newer songs and at least keeping the crowd moving. 

I left the shade and had meant to pick up a bottle of water and a burger on the way to see Earle when I picked up an $8 tall boy instead. By the time Earle was done, I was half-lit and thinking of that long 90 minutes between the end of Alison Krauss and the start of “Whiskey River,” with nothing to do. It’d be hard enough to stay sober for Luke Combs’ set, and now I had a head start in the wrong direction.

Salvation, oddly enough, was backstage. Over the next five hours, there was too much to take in to think about drinking. For instance, I bet you didn’t know there’s a small battalion of roadies under the stage. Some in hammocks, others in front of glowing computer monitors and cell phone screens. That’s not how we did it in Luckenbach in the ‘90s, y’all.

Back in those days I knew a bar owner who referred to the pop country of Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney as “flat-belly music” — meaning that they were more models than musicians. I reckon the guy did not anticipate Luke Combs.

I saw just enough of Combs to feel that he was an OK ticket-pusher for the Picnic. On the scale of Brantley Gilbert (so bad he’s entertaining) to Eric Church (dreadfully self-serious) to Dierks Bentley (entertainingly OK), he’s closer to Bentley than Church.

(Don’t ask me about Nathaniel Rateliff. I missed every bit of him, wheezing my way up the tower and limping my way down.)

And here we are, back at Willie. His walk is stiffer, his set shorter. We get songs ranging from “Beer for my Horses” to “My Favorite Picture of You.” We get standards ranging from “Whiskey River” (of course) to “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” (of course). 

I stay until the end. What’s a Picnic story without a description of Willie disappearing backstage? It happens quickly this year, one gospel song and then he’s gone — passing right by me as he heads for his bus.

I go the opposite way. Down the stairs at stage left and through the gate. Into the crowd, heading for my car. 

By the mid-1840s, the Germans were coming ashore at Indianola and finding room for themselves throughout Texas. As soon as they settled, they started brewing beer, of course. The Czechs did the same — with the added bonus of kolaches. Whatever Texans thought about immigration then or whatever your views are now, there’s no doubt it was a damn fine thing for Texas beer.

Home brewing slaked the immediate thirst, but as individual brewers began to prove their talent, larger operations began taking shape in towns such as New Braunfels and La Grange. True commercial brewing in Texas, however, first emerged in the state’s oldest urban center, San Antonio.

Things got started by (German immigrant) William Menger who started his Western Brewery in 1855 even as raids by Comanches were still winding down. You might have heard of Menger’s hotel, which he built a few years later. Fellow German Charles Degen was his brewmaster and when Menger shut down his brewery in 1878, Degen operated his own brewery until 1915. Indeed, San Antonio was the early beer capital of Texas, boasting at least 8 breweries before Prohibition that lasted a decade or more.

I can recall the bit of beer memorabilia (a Pearl beer calendar, give to me by my wife who probably regrets the move) that sparked me to first dive into the history of Texas beer. Given the lack of definitive information I had then, I decided to limit my investigation to post-Prohibition Texas beers — easily traceable from the 1930s boom down to the remaining trio of Lone Star, Pearl and Shiner.

I do not recall what inspired me, these five years later, to study the pre-Prohibition beers. I’m sure it was something very attractive on eBay that my heart desired and my wallet rejected. Once the desire to learn about them was sparked, though, all it took was to find Mike Hennech’s book “The Encyclopedia of Texas Breweries” to give me a base of knowledge to operate from.

The goal for this series was to narrow the field and come up with a list of the top pre-Prohibition Texas breweries. It was easy enough to eliminate the startup breweries that only lasted a year or two, or perhaps never opened at all. Then I came up with two rules: The brewery had to have lasted 10 years and it had to exist into the 1900s when rail lines and growing technology allowed brewing on a scale we would today consider to be commercial.

The second rule eliminated the Kreische Brewery near La Grange which for a short time was one of the largest in Texas. Heinrich Kreische opened his brewery in the 1860s, not long after the Western Brewery, which I have also eliminated. The rule likewise rules out the William Esser Brewery in San Antonio, which was absorbed into Adolphus Busch’s Lone Star Brewery in 1884, and Alamo Brewing Co., also swallowed up by Lone Star.

With 11 breweries on my list, it was time for some judgment calls. Because of their continuing service to Texas, I bent the 10-year rule to let Shiner in (it was open for 9 years before Prohibition). Then I had to take a trio of San Antonio breweries off the list: The Degen Brewery, the Ochs & Aschbacher Brewery and Schober Ice & Brewing. All three simply did not match the remaining nine’s level of success and recognition (though Schober did produce some really nice promotional items which you could buy for me if you ever see any).

So here are the Texas pre-pro nine: Dallas Brewery, El Paso Brewing Association, Texas Brewing Co., Galveston Brewing Co., American Brewing Association, Houston Ice & Brewing, San Antonio Brewing Association, Lone Star Brewing Co. and Shiner Brewing Association.

Tomorrow, we start with the Metroplex.

Anton Wagenhauser was the father of industrial beer in the Metroplex. The Bayern, Germany, native moved from St. Louis in 1884 and quickly founded an eponymous brewing association, personally putting up 60% of the $100,000 invested.

By 1885, Wagenhauser had a steam-powered brewery producing up to two hundred barrels a day. As soon as a grand opening was announced, if not sooner, the prohibitionists started in with the hand-wringing and lamenting.

Despite advertising his beer as a tonic that will “restore to you your health and add vigor and strength to your broken constitution,” the financial troubles set in quickly. Before the brewery was a year old, it was sold to satisfy creditors.

One of those creditors, Frederick Wolf, ended up with the brewery and handed it off to the Gannon brothers who, in the midst of a lawsuit and legal mess that The Dallas Morning News headlined “The Dallas Brewery Muddle,” established the Dallas Brewing Company in 1887.

Financially, they fared little better, though they limped along until Thomas Keeley purchased the brewery in 1893. He re-chartered it as The Dallas Brewery.

From there, the Dallas Brewery finally found its footing. By 1900, it was producing 75,000 barrels a year and poised to make a $75,000 investment on facilities that year and more than twice as much in 1907.

It was about the turn of the century where it first occurred to name beers rather than just advertise “lager beer” and the Dallas Brewery established brands including Home Beer, Tipperary Beer and White Rose Beer.

Though the Dallas Brewery tried to ride out Prohibition as the Grain Juice Company with a delicious-sounding “pure cereal and hop beverage” called “Graino,” the business eventually shifted focus. Beginning in 1925, the old brewery was demolished for new construction and it was entirely razed by 1930.

Remember the Gannon brothers? One of the pair, James J., departed Dallas in 1890 with the idea of traveling, but ultimately he didn’t get farther than Fort Worth before a clean well and handy trains convinced him to build the Texas Brewing Company in late 1890.

Before the beer was even on the market in May 1891, they were already expanding. Soon the Texas Brewing Company was known as the largest brewery and ice plant in the south, with 160 employees and 250,000 barrels per year. The brewery soon grew to a nearly 5-acre complex.

Gannon was quick to promote his beer as Fort Worth-made and urged in advertising to “Patronize Home Industry.” Among its brands were Household Beer, Crown Beer, Worthburger Beer and, after winning a prize at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Gold Medal Beer.

“When you buy Gold Medal Beer at the price of common beer,” one ad read, “you are getting double value.”

When Prohibition came in 1918, Texas Brewing Company became Texas Beverage and Cold Storage Company, then the Texas Ice and Refrigerating Company.

And when Prohibition was over, the facility was back in business, but as Superior Brewing Company, instead of ‘Texas.’

UP NEXT: Coastal water and Eastern capitalists go west

When the Galveston Brewing Company was chartered in 1893, Galveston was only a few years removed from being the largest city in Texas. And yet there was no immediate action — due to serious reservations about the lime-tainted, brackish water.

In 1895, nearby Alta Loma (today the city of Santa Fe) was found to have suitable water and a pipeline was constructed. Adolphus Busch himself came to the island to establish the brewery on the island, where it still (sorta) stands today — the shell of the brewery is being redeveloped in the same manner of the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio.

Stock worth $400,000 was quickly purchased to fund the brewery, which architects designed in the Romanesque style. Construction began in September of 1895 and the initial brewing capacity was 100,000 barrels of beer a year. Brewing began in October of 1896 and the brewers aimed to imitate a then-well known German beer from Munich.

In early February 1897, the Galveston Brewing Company held its formal opening, serving beer from kegs to a curious public. They called their first beer Seawall Bond.

The brewery, built heavily and solidly above sea level, survived the great hurricane of 1900. In 1907 they introduced High Grade beer, advertised as “the beer that’s liquid food.” At the time it sold for 5 cents a glass, or “3 dozen pints in a case for $3.00”

Already fighting the battle against Prohibition, an advertisement from 1907 reads “High Grade is really a temperance drink, because it contains little more than 3.5% of alcohol — not enough to hurt anyone.”

But, perhaps reading the omens wrong, the brewery spent $100,000 in 1913 building a new bottling facility with a copper pipeline to carry its beer from the brewery to the new facility across the street.

When Prohibition struck five years later, the brewery became Southern Beverage Company, a soft drink maker. Among their products was Galvo “made from hops — for sparkle, snap and delightful flavor” … but no alcohol.

With $200,000 raised by “Eastern capitalists,” and the promise to raise $100,000 locally, George Pence began work on the El Paso Brewery in June 1903. The El Paso Brewing Association began brewing a year later under the direction of president Wilhelm Griesser (an Easterner!).

The plant was equipped for a daily output of 250 barrels of beer a day. “I am not the least bit afraid of the success of the institution and I am going to show the people of El Paso what they have been missing right along by not having a brewery,” Wilhelm said.

Wilhelm talked large of investment in El Paso and what he would do for the town, but within a year-and-a-half he would be taken to court by a contractor.

For a mere $66,000, J.P. Dieter bought the brewery in March 1905 — quite a bargain considering the vats held 2,793 barrels of beer worth $30,000 and the building and property was worth $160,000.

Creditors thought it was too much of a bargain and petitioned the court and the sale was invalidated. A few months later, Dieter bought the brewery again for $76,000.

The El Paso Brewing Association carried on with little drama, save a labor strike or two, until Prohibition.

The brewery made Premium Beer (“a special brew for family use”), Golden Pride and Southern Bud. When Prohibition came, the brewery sold Bravo (“a non-intoxicating drink.”)

UP NEXT: An American Busch and a Houston boss

Houston was said to have dozens of bars long before it had its first church and those bars were kept wet by up to a dozen family-operated breweries. But when it came time to bring industrial brewing to Houston, the king himself got involved.

Adolphus Busch began the American Brewing Association in 1893 with an aim to produce 100,000 barrels of beer a year “equal in purity and flavor to the best brands of St. Louis or Milwaukee and superior to any made in the South.”

Of course, he also sold his own established brands, Faust and Budweiser.

The grand opening in 1894 attracted 10,000 Houston residents who enjoyed “inspiring” music and “unlimited” beer. Notes from the Brewers Journal, compiled in “The Encyclopedia of Texas Breweries” show a brewery constantly building -- storage depots, stock houses, bottling works -- and fighting -- strikes, fires, hurricanes.

An 1897 newspaper ad shows the stoppered bottles selling for $1 for a dozen pints. An 1899 ad said “this beer is brewed to fill the needs of those who require a beverage to tone up a weak constitution.”

Though backed by Busch and in business until Prohibition shut them down in 1918, Houston’s American Brewing Association is largely forgotten today. We know they made Dixie Pale and Hackerbrau beers, as well as American Bock (seasonally), American Pilsener (“Pure as the sun’s rays”) and, later, American Perfect. Some of their advertising products were remarkably beautiful.

The brewery was razed during Prohibition and was not rebuilt. In the 1960s, construction of the Academic Building for the University of Houston-Downtown revealed it was being built on the site of the old brewery.

“In 1912, Houston Ice & Brewing hired the Belgian-born Frantz Hector Brogniez as brewmaster, Brogniez brewed his first batch of Southern Select and shipped it off to compete in the World's Fair in Ghent, Belgium, in 1913. The judges apparently didn’t know Texas was a heathen backwater, because the Texas beer won the Diplome de Grand Prix ... Southern Select was No. 1 of a world’s worth of beer (beating more than 4,000 competitors).”

I wrote that a few years ago when I was just beginning to look into Texas breweries. A few more years of research has only confirmed my suspicions — when you’re talking about pre-Prohibition Texas breweries, Houston Ice & Brewing was the boss. Adolphus Busch might have had his hands in Houston and San Antonio, but the king of beers in Texas at the time was Southern Select.

Houston Ice & Brewing was incorporated in 1892 and opened the following year with a party that drew more than 10,000 and emptied 120 kegs of beer before noon. After a siesta, the party continued into the night: “Nobody thirsted and nobody rested,” a newspaper report said.

Within 20 years, what was called the Magnolia Brewery* covered four city blocks and brewed 175,000 barrels a year. In addition to Southern Select, they brewed Richelieu, near-beer Hiawatha, Reputation and Magnolia Pale.

Houston Ice & Brewing was one of the larger breweries in Texas, but it was Southern Select and Brogniez that secured the brewery’s legendary status. Here’s what I wrote about the brewmaster:

Houston may have been somewhere still between mud and money, but Brogniez was as worldly as they made ‘em. He was a student of biology and a composer of classical music – which he once performed for Kaiser Wilhelm. He stood toe-to-toe with Louis Pasteur and Henry Ford. He helped establish the Houston Symphony. His family had been making beer since 1752 and … just for good measure … he was fluent in multiple languages.

Prohibition hit Houston Ice & Brewing hard. They couldn’t find a viable business to make it through the lean years, then flooding destroyed portions of the Magnolia Brewery. Still, they did return in 1933 … sort of.

The brewery combined with the Galveston brewery (in Galveston) to form “Galveston-Houston Breweries,” which would continue until the 1950s.

(*Though Houston Ice & Brewing did brew a beer just called Magnolia — apparently in addition to Magnolia Pale — the beer you know is Magnolia Beer was brewed by Galveston-Houston Breweries in the 1930s.)

UP NEXT: Busch, again, and a scandal at Pearl

When the Lone Star Brewing Company opened its brewery in 1884, there was Adolphus Busch, but no Giant Armadillo. Despite the “since 1884” found on Lone Star branding today, the original has nothing to do with the National Beer of Texas.

An ambitious Otto Koehler would help Busch get the Lone Star Brewing Co. underway, before jumping ship and helping fire up the San Antonio Brewing Association two years later.

The original brewery was a wooden structure, but Busch kept buying out investors and building until by 1896 he had a massive stone and brick brewery that sold more than 65,000 barrels of beer a year. The facility had its own bottling department and soon had “the largest ice making plant in the South.”

The Lone Star Brewing Company may have brewed beer known, at least informally, as Lone Star Beer, but they were better known for Alamo Beer, Cabinet Beer, Erlanger Beer and Santone Beer.

The brewery was going strong when forced to close by Prohibition. Though they tried to survive selling the nonalcoholic drink Tango, eventually Lone Star Brewing Co. folded.

The massive plant was remodeled and became the home of the San Antonio Museum of Art in 1981.

J.B. Belohradsky’s City Brewery was only 3 years old when he was forced to give it up, overcome with the costs of defending himself in court against allegations of embezzlement.

Belohradsky’s attorney, Oscar Bergstrom, helped J.B. clear his name, then stepped forward with a small group to buy the struggling brewery. A few months after the deal closed in 1887, the City Brewery became the San Antonio Brewing Association.

It was Bergstrom who lured Otto Koehler away from Lone Star, and Koehler who purchased a new beer recipe from the Kaiser-Beck Brewery in Germany.

Pearl Beer was first sold on July 4, 1887, advertised as ‘XXX Pearl Bear.’ The brewing association would also later make Texas Pride beer.

(The book “San Antonio Beer” explains that the brewery used 1887 as its origin date at first, but after Prohibition fudged it back to 1886.)

Koehler took charge of the fledgling brewery and its beer was a hit with German Texans, requiring increases in production and upgrades in equipment.

“San Antonio Beer” reports that even as far out as West Texas, Judge Roy Bean would only serve Pearl Beer in his bar. Pearl would later return the favor, doing their best to contribute to the Bean legend with their promotional items featuring his likeness.

Another expansion in the mid-1890s would begin give the brewery complex the shape that can still be seen today.

The brewery would continue to grow even as Prohibition forces started to flex their muscles, but it would suffer a major blow in 1914 when Koehler was shot and killed by one of his mistresses. There was shock and scandal and trials and tears, but when it was all over, Koehler’s wife, Emma, would take his place at the top.

When Prohibition finally arrived, San Antonio Brewing Association did not fold its tent, but hung on as Alamo Industries and later as Alamo Food Company.

Pearl, of course, survived and even after decades of buyouts and consolidations and struggles, it remains — albeit in limited form — the oldest Texas beer.

UP NEXT: Kos-mic intervention in Shiner and final rankings

A few years after the town of Half Moon was founded in 1885, the railroad came through the area … but not quite close enough to Half Moon to suit them. So the town picked up and moved to land donated by a local businessman.

Guy’s name was Henry Shiner.

Fast-forward 20 years and the German and Czech immigrants who made up most of Shiner were feeling dissatisfied with the beer arriving on that train from Houston and San Antonio. In 1909 the Shiner Brewing Association was founded with a brewmaster borrowed from Galveston. Mr Herman Weiss had the heritage, but had trouble keeping his product consistently up to snuff.

Fate arrived via Bavaria (and Cairo and Montreal and San Francisco) in 1914.

Guy’s name Kosmos Spoetzl.

I’m probably not going to improve much on what I wrote about Kosmos five years ago, but Kosmos was just what was needed in Shiner — a perfect and portly character whose worldly experience was no hindrance in connecting with local farmers and small-town businessman.

The little brewery in Shiner made Shiner beer, of course, and Shiner Bock somewhat intermittently. (Things like Shiner S’More and Candied Pecan Porter would have to wait a long goddamn while. Probably not long enough for Kosmos.)

Prohibition ended the brewing (maybe) in 1919, but somehow Kosmos pulled the little brewery through those lean years, enjoying a good run from 1933 until his death in 1950.

Let’s face it: Pre-prohibition beers and breweries in Texas are limited to the realm of the historian. Not important historians, mind you. H.W. Brands is not holding forth on the History Channel about High Grade beer. No, it’s mostly limited to people like me who are slightly off-kilter.

With that caveat, let’s rank our top 9 pre-pro breweries, based on their contributions to Texas before Prohibition (sorry, Shiner).

1. Houston Ice & Brewing

2. San Antonio Brewing Association

3. Texas Brewing Co.

4. Galveston Brewing Co.

5. Lone Star Brewing Co.

6. El Paso Brewing Association

7. Dallas Brewery

8. American Brewing Association

9. Shiner Brewing Association (despite their storybook perfection, they just got a late start and didn’t get much rolling before Prohibition)

If you’ve read all the way through this series, I salute you. You really should go read the original series, too. It’s better. If you’ve read all the way through both, you’re invited to discuss Texas beer history with me in my garage.

The magic password is “I’ve brought a 12-pack of Lone Star.”

My parents lived outside of Tyler for more than 20 years. They moved there after I graduated from Texas A&M, so I never lived in East Texas. But in a couple of decades running up and down Highway 31 to go visit, I got a sense of the place.

After awhile, I noticed that almost every little town you run across (about every 8 goddamn miles, if you're in a hurry) had a dollar store and a doughnut shop. It didn't take long before I decided that a song about an East Texas town called "Dollars to Doughnuts" would be my ticket to fame and fortune. I kinda pictured 2013-era Kacey Musgraves singing it. Yeah, this has been cooking for awhile.

(Yeah, I know, without music, it's just poetry. And my last song/poem wasn't much of a hit. I'm just adding to the list of things I can do not quite well enough to be in demand.)

I thought about the obvious: the guy-gets-the-hell-out-of-the-small-town song. And I figured, shit, there's way too many of those songs. Steve Earle's "Someday" comes to mind. 

No, I wanted to write a song about the guy who doesn't make it ... and knows it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Dollars to Doughnuts: A Song For East Texas"

Out on Highway 31 we all shop at our own dollar store

The general draws a crowd to the western edge of our 2-bit town

And the doughnut shop, it’s the final stop out on the eastern side

You can see one from the other ‘bout as soon as you turn around

I was made and born in the back of a car, halfway to Athens

I couldn’t wait for the hospital, already going nowhere fast

Been here most of 50 years -- you can call it roots or rot or rust

It ain’t how I wanted it, every year was gonna be my last

I got a job at the Kidd Jones, killing time selling cigs and beer

Got an old shotgun house couple blocks down on Birdsong Avenue

If I was strong, I’d be gone, but I guess I just ain’t brave enough

It’s a poor man’s hell to have a little more than nothing left to lose

Had a girl and a couple kids but they’ve been gone these last few years

They came to judge me by what I’d lost, though I gave it all away

I acted right, but I had no fight, guess I can admit it now

I swear they were sitting on my stump, yelling where the hell’s the shade?

Everytime I look in there mirror, there’s a little bit more of me, a little less of who I used to be

Gonna die a stranger, in a place I never left

I attended my 20th Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic this year — my fourth year in a row at the Austin360 Amphitheater at the Circuit of the Americas race track. That’s nothin’ though. I did four years in a row in Fort Worth. And five years in a row in Luckenbach.

This time, it was different. I took my 11-year-old son (nicknamed Buddy for literary and social media purposes) … and we hadn’t spent 15 minutes inside the gate before he managed to do something I hadn’t done in 23 years of Picnicking. We were evacuated due to bad weather. We went and sat in the car for 2 hours.

The show eventually went on. Here’s 9 things I learned at the 2018 Willie Picnic …

1. Was it a real Picnic? Well, without the ever-shrinking cast of Picnic regulars, without the heat and the sore feet, without the almost-religious satisfaction in seeing the sun dip below the horizon … no, not really. What we got was the Austin date of the Outlaw Music Fest.

David Allan Coe (for what he’s worth these days) didn’t show. Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, Johnny Bush and Asleep at the Wheel were canceled by rain.

Can it be a Picnic without singing “Redneck Mother?” Without Johnny Bush carrying the torch for classic country? Without Billy Joe doing Billy Joe thangs? I guess it can for someone else. But not for me.

(Coworker Peter Blackstock reviewed the show and noted later that it might be the first Picnic without a three-named performer. I’m almost curious enough to track that down. Certainly, if you leave out the pseudo-Picnics in 2007 and 2009 — which did not have traditional lineups — then I know you get back to ‘95 for sure, because Ray Wylie has played every Picnic I’ve attended until this month. There’s a good bet that you’d get all the way back to ‘75.)

2. What about the rain?  Was it the coolest Picnic? No, 1985 was way cooler. And not just because Johnny Cash was playing Southpark Meadows that year. With afternoon temps in the mid-70s, this year’s Picnic did spend a chunk of time below the high of 79 degrees in 1985. However, in 1985, 79 was as hot as it got all day. This year it was in the 90s before the rain came in.

3. Paying $25 for VIP parking? Shit yes. I am never not doing that again. Best $25 I’ve spent in years. (My other concession to bringing my boy — having seats instead of standing all day — wasn’t as clear cut. I’ve never been to a Picnic where at the end of the day my ass hurt more than my feet. And there were plenty of moments where I’d much rather have been standing in front of the stage. But I couldn’t have the boy standing around all day. Even in cool weather.)

4. Worst move of the day? In an abbreviated Picnic, there wasn’t time to screw up much. But we missed some of Margo Price’s set while the boy ate his pizza at a continental drift type of pace. If I could have held him off a bit longer, missing part of Edie Brickell’s set instead would have been a win-win.

5. Time for a stump speech? Our review of the show made much of Beto O’Rourke’s appearance. The Democratic Senate candidate made a short but passionate speech before the fireworks show, with Ray Benson at his side, and later came out and played guitar with Willie.

Right away, I’m gonna tell you that I don’t just tolerate artists writing and performing protest songs, I think it’s absolutely imperative. If we don’t have artists urging us to be better, we’re gonna go downhill (more downhill) pretty goddamn fast.

But I don’t know if the Picnic is the right place for a political speech by a candidate. Certainly there were a few guys in the audience behaving with the kind of classlessness I have come to expect in such situations. 

I remember the bemusement that greeted Dennis Kucinich when Willie brought him out in 2003. And I remember the boos that Kris Kristofferson’s anti-war songs got in 2004. This is a different time entirely. As much as I’d like to see Beto take down Cruz, I’d like to see the political talk at the Picnic limited to verse and chorus.

6. Great songwriting, who needs it? Sturgill Simpson introduced his band and then said “We play music.” And then went straight away trying to test the shit out of that. I remember Sturgill three years ago, in button-up denim shirt, complaining about allergies and showing off his bad-ass songwriting with Kris Kristofferson watching from the side of the stage for the whole damn set. That was freshman-year Sturgill. This was senior-year Sturgill, brushing aside those lyrics to jam. OK, I get jamming, but Sturgill and band were pushing it to the level of industrial noise.

In one of my early phone interviews with Robert Earl Keen, he instructed me about need for an artist to evolve. And I get it. Sturgill and I had a moment together a few years ago. But he’s moved on.

7. Ryan Bingham? Damn, he was badass. Set of the night. I said years ago at Fort Worth he was a natural fit for the Picnic and should be one of the new Picnic regulars — it’s an honor I don’t bestow lightly. I still hope he takes me up on it for whatever the Picnic has left.

8. So what about the boy? Did he make it to see Willie? Well, of course. He’s my boy after all, and he got a gut full of everyone in the family telling him he’d never make it to the end of the Picnic. So he did. Then again, that determination didn’t last long into Willie’s set. We left a handful of songs in. But we did it. We saw Willie do “Whiskey River.” Finally, a little Picnic traditionalism.

I’m not gonna say we had a great show together. But we had a helluva time. He’ll remember sitting in the car for two hours waiting for the rain to die down. He’ll remember wet seats, Lukas' guitar and Margo Price’s pants.

Years from now, when he’s going through my stuff, he’s gonna pull out a Picnic poster or thirty and think, “yeah, I was there for one of those.” And that’s why we did it.

And yes, the boy loved those fireworks.

9. Suggestions for the future? On the way out, an angry woman who had an ear full of Sturgill, listened to Willie playing in the distance and remarked to her friend, “Finally! They’re playing some damn country music!” I wasn't as fooled as she apparently was, but I know what she meant. 

I don’t know if the Picnic will return, but if it does, I’d like to see a classic country-focused Picnic. It doesn’t have to be all country — the Picnic never was — but it would be nice to see a focus on it. We missed the hell out of Ray Price and Merle Haggard last week. And seeing Gene Watson and Johnny Bush get rained out didn’t help a damn bit. C’mon, Willie. Bring out a traditional country headliner! Loretta Lynn! This needs to happen.

And a Waylon hologram. 

I’m not giving up on that idea.

Waylon. Hologram.

Having bogged down halfway (I hope) through “Indian Depredations in Texas” and slogged through Perry’s “The Story of Texas A&M,” I was in the mood for something light and quick. I figured a thin collection of essays from the eminently readable Larry McMurtry would do the trick.

But though I got what I was looking for — I finished it in just a few mornings of coffee-time reading — “In a Narrow Grave,” doesn’t hold true to McMurtry’s dominance as a novelist.

To begin and end the book, he pounds through one statement: The cowboy and the cowboy life is finished and he watched the last of them — old and failing — drive off into the west.

But there’s little magic to the first chapters about the filming of “Hud,” based on his novel “Horseman, Pass By” and, next, the state of the Western movie in general. (This book of essays was compiled in 1968, when Westerns were still vital, though very much changed from the beginning of that decade.)

The most useful chapter, “Southwestern Literature?”, along with the bibliography, intends to tear down the pedestals placed under Dobie, Webb and Bedichek, but at least offers a master’s take on recommended reading for neophyte Texas history students like myself. I added a dozen books to my reading list, and should I finish them, will likely raid this list for another dozen.

One recommended book, Dobie’s “The Ben Lilly Legend,” is my next read, and I’m already far enough along to be both suspicious and appreciative of how McMurtry borrowed this real-life man, fleshed out into legend by Dobie, and sprinkled him into the “Lonesome Dove” series of books.

McMurtry departs the theme for “Eros in Archer County” (useless filler), a chapter on driving around Texas (a string of cafes and reveries and one brief poignant moment with an old cowboy and old friend) and a hit job on the Astrodome (a fitting example of one of those LBJ-era pieces where Texas writers kick the shit out of their own state lest they be seen by their contemporaries as … what? Texan? I don’t know. It must’ve been hell to be a proud Texan back then, I guess.)

The other departure is “The Old Soldier’s Joy,” where he can barely stand to attend a fiddling contest in Athens long enough to mock it. Though a few moments shine through, particularly his description of a poverty-stricken boy longing for a vendor’s trinket, it is quickly tiresome.

This essay was included in another, much finer, collection called “Growing Old at Willie’s Picnic And Other Sketches of Life in the Southwest.”

That book, though I have not read it completely, is marvelous. I bought it just to read the magnificent title essay, though it is Larry L. King’s “The Old Man” that sticks with me. (I have long wanted to take a similar road trip with my father and son, though it now appears that I have wanted it too long and that window has closed.)

Read “Growing Old …” also for N. Scott Momaday’s otherworldly writing in “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and Leon Ralls vs. the bull in Al Reinert’s “The End of the Trail.”

McMurtry closes “In a Narrow Grave” with an extended remembrance of his family and the book comes alive with the closing tale of Uncle Johnny, a man who never forgot or really recovered from his youth as a cowboy on the range. A man whose seemingly supernatural talent for breaking bones was only matched by his stoic indifference.

We last see Uncle Johnny leaving a family reunion, folding his broken, elderly body into a Cadillac for a drive West. It’s a scene that will stick with you, no less than many of the fine ones in McMurtry’s novels.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 7 out of 10 (in this book)

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: This book’s legacy will, I’m sure, be the other books that it has recommended to me.

Will it make the bookshelf? Yes.

Maybe a decade ago, when I was a copy editor and worked with a team of fine folks, someone gave me a small book. One of those advance-copy type of things that gets handed from newsroom employee to newsroom employee.

This one was about … something. Zombies? I don’t recall. What I do recall is that I kept it on my desk for years. Not because I enjoyed it. Shit no. It was because every time I felt low, I just had to look at that book and remember that somebody got paid for writing something so goddamn terrible.

It was terrible. It was a hundred-some-odd pages of un-funny humor. This guy was an author? I could be, too.

I saw “Pearl: A History of San Antonio’s Iconic Beer”on eBay and promptly bought it a month in advance of its release date. I was excited. I have a lot left to learn on the mother beer of Texas, particularly when it comes to its decline and the reason it continues to limp along.

I was disappointed.

Jeremy Banas is a craft beer expert, I’m sure, but as a history writer, he’s given us uneven lumps of awkward prose. He stumbles along, jumping over bigger and bigger swaths of history until he reaches his comfort zone: “The New Pearl” -- which is not Pearl at all, just some new businesses on the old grounds.

Banas easily and confidently writes about the new craft brewer on the old brewery site, giving them several times as much text as he devoted to the last two decades of the beer named on the cover.

I could have written this book.

No, I could have done better.

Then again, shit.

Banas has written two books. Even the zombie book guy has written at least one.

I’ve written zero.

Overall rating: 4 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 3 out of 10

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: These days, there is apparently no particular standard for what makes a history book.

Will it make the bookshelf? Yes, sigh. Until a better Pearl Beer book comes along. Which may be never.

When looking for something to write about, I check the Texas State Historical Association’s daily history page for ideas. The Dec. 13 entry described the death of George Sessions Perry.

Who? An author? From Rockdale? He walked into a river in Connecticut in December?

Rockdale is in Central Texas. I am into Texas literature right now. And I’ve had success (if not page views) writing about anniversaries of deaths of unusual Texans.

So I learned about him. And I wrote about him. And I wondered why I hadn’t heard about this guy or his most famous novel, “Hold Autumn In Your Hand.”

I hadn’t finished writing my story before I had ordered the book on Amazon.

It’s beautiful.

Perry’s writing is compelling and effortless to read — even the slowest reader can hardly stop himself from zipping through this book to find out what happens next.

It’s not as epic as, say, “Lonesome Dove,” but in its small scope, it is every bit as Texan. Perry illuminates the life of a poor tenant farmer, letting us peer into 1940s rural Texas and see a way of living that your grandfather might have known.

As Sam Tucker, our protagonist, struggles to feed his family on a daily basis, I felt guilt about the aging cans of food in our pantry.

When one of the characters fell ill to what I recognized must have been pellagra, I wondered why the author didn’t name the illness. As it turns out, it was because our characters didn’t yet know what it was. Identifying it, and learning how to prevent it, drives the finale of the book.

I’m not going to go on and on about it. (And I don’t have any confessions to share in this review, sorry.) But I’m gonna say it should be in your Texas library.

I bought mine through a Tennessee retailer on Amazon for less than $10. And when it arrived, it was marked “Austin Public Library.” I didn’t just buy a book. I brought it home.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 9 out of 10

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: The hard times behind a romanticized way of life — and the courage and determination that elevate a man.

Will it make the bookshelf? Absolutely.

I need to get this book off my desk and into my display case. Here are 12 quotes and things I learned from Eddie Wilson's book, including the possible connection between the last night of the AWHQ and closing time at the Dixie Chicken ...

On Billy Joe Shaver ...

"Billy Joe was a gnarly piece of work with the wrinkled face of a shar-pei dog.  ...  I hadn't known him for more than twenty-four hours when I realized he had more soul than the next fifty or so songwriters put together."

On Kinky Friedman ...

I interviewed Kinky on the fly at Willie's 1996 Picnic. He told me about his first visit to Luckenbach where he and the Texas Jewboys were afraid to face a crowd of rural German immigrants (referring to himself in the third person). But Wilson confirms it was all true and it was him who threatened Kinky onto the stage.

On Austin City Limits ...

There's a lot to get into, but Wilson points out that it was the Armadillo that pioneered the idea of putting Austin music on television with the Armadillo Country Music Review, which aired more than a year before the Austin City Limits pilot. It would be nice, Wilson argues, for AWHQ to get a little credit for inspiring the eventual juggernaut.

On Lone Star beer ...

Wilson tried to explain this to me during our interview, but I didn't really get that a subset of AWHQ folks were responsible for the Lone Star Beer advertising campaigns that are near and dear to my heart. I figured Lone Star had simply borrowed Jim Franklin to do the posters, but he was deep involved, even coining the phrase "Long Live Longnecks." (FYI, the Armadillo didn't serve longnecks because of the dangers of the glass bottle. It was pitchers and plastic cups only.)

On Ray Benson ...

The Asleep at the Wheel frontman is an Austin icon, but it was Eddie Wilson who urged him to move here, offering the Wheel a chance to be the house band at the Armadillo. "Ray Benson was a six-foot-seven-inch tall, red-haired Jewish boy from Philadelphia," Wilson writes. "He looked like a baby giraffe with a cowboy hat."

On Bruce Springsteen and Kenneth Threadgill ...

Wilson writes of Springsteen pacing back and forth before his first AWHQ gig as Alvin Crow opened the show. Apparently the venerable Kenneth Threadgill was on hand, because Wilson says the old man said Springsteen was as jittery as a "cocker spaniel trying to pass a peach pit."

On the Texas Opry House ...

The venue on Academy Drive, backed by Willie Nelson's people was, briefly, stiff competition for the Armadillo. Then it was quickly done in by troubles with rent, taxes and corruption. "The Opry House's decline was like a fat man tripping on a ski jump and rolling in the snow."

On "The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock" ...

"I'm a big admirer of Jan Reid as a person and as a writer, but at the time, his take on the scne made me think of a loud party for Johnnies-come-lately at the day-old bread counter."

On the weirdest billing in AWHQ history ...

Ray Charles (legend, icon, etc.) opened for David Allan Coe one night in the mid-1970s. They had been booked at the Opry House, which had since closed, so the AWHQ took the show, only to see Coe's fans treat the legendary Charles like shit. "Coe didn't even have that many fans, but the few who were there acted like a mob ... I should have tried to quiet them down, but I was so mad I just wanted to go out and slap them all with a shovel. And so the great R&B singer cut his set short and said good night. The assholes booed him for that, too." 

(I hope that years later, Charles was watching from above with satisfaction, as Charley Pride followed a flaccid Coe at Willie's Picnic and absolutely crushed him.)

On Clifford Antone and his now-legendary venue ...

"Here came this kid from Port Arthur with big plans to showcase blues seven nights a week. I gave him six months, tops." (Wilson's admiration for Antone is later made clear.)

More on Lone Star beer ...

Taking the stand that armadillo racing was cruel and inhumane, Wilson and the AWHQ urged Lone Star beer to call off the practice. After a huge event at the Hemisfair in San Antonio in 1976, the AWHQ pulled out all of their Lone Star taps and kegs and boycotted the beer. (Something I will keep in mind when time travel is invented.)

One the final night at the AWHQ ...

The last song performed on the last night of the Armadillo World Headquarters was "Goodnight Irene." Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel performed the Leadbelly standard as a farewell to the AWHQ and to an era. Aggies, of course, know that "Goodnight Irene" marks closing time at the Dixie Chicken and it wouldn't surprise me at all if Don Ganter (a noted fan of "progressive" country music who would have been familiar with the Austin venue) was inspired to start that tradition by the end of the Armadillo. (I contacted the Chicken and asked, but Don is long gone and they couldn't tell me.)

Jan Reid’s book, “The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock” was my introduction to the 1970s Austin music scene — it was ground zero for something I previously knew nothing about.

Joe Nick Patoski’s book “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life” was a capstone in 15 years of learning and reading about Austin music’s king — it confirmed and clarified things I knew a lot about.

“Armadillo World Headquarters” by Eddie Wilson with Jesse Sublett fits somewhere in between, filling in the gaps of tales I love on one page then telling a story I’ve never heard on the next.

I didn’t know there was a Holy Trinity of Austin Books for Dave Thomas, but Wilson’s memoir now fits comfortably among the great three in my library.

And what would I have given to have been able to read this book in 1995? So much Austin history, all of it so effortlessly explained. From the Vulcan Gas Company to the Raw Deal and the AWHQ in between, pieces of an Austin puzzle I had scattered about in my head are now assembled — not with the (sometimes hazy) surety of someone who lived it, of course, but with a historian’s confidence.

Because I know that nobody reads these book reviews, we’re going to pause here for a confession. Back in 2013, just before the 40th anniversary of the first Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, I went to Eddie Wilson’s house to interview him.

Eddie had been instrumental in making the first Picnic a success, before he and the AWHQ ultimately had a falling-out with Willie. He was a gracious host and I talked to him at length. After the story came out he contacted me to let me know how pleased he was that I had every detail right — one of the prouder moments of my career.

In the story (https://atxne.ws/2Eg8LmH), I had described Eddie’s house as the sort of place a Texas memorabilia collector would go when he died (it was awesome, you couldn’t look in any direction without seeing something you’d kill someone to have). So I was clearly interested a couple years later when I found out he was having a huge auction of his stuff at Burley Auction House in New Braunfels.

I went, correctly guessing that almost everything would be out of my league (I did come away with a small light-up Pearl Beer sign). And while I was there, I ran into him for a moment. I stuck out my hand and said … “Hi! Mr. Threadgill …”

The enormity of my slip about crushed me as soon as it was out of my mouth. I had been planning on asking him if the sign I had purchased had been on display at the original Threadgill’s restaurant. I stammered as he smiled wearily with the resignation of someone who gets mis-named a lot. He said, “No, I’m Eddie Wilson … “ and he moved along with the good-natured tolerance some folks have for idiots.

I didn’t expect him to remember me, of course. But what I did expect was for me to not fuck up. I knew who Eddie Wilson was. I knew who Kenneth Threadgill was. I HAD WRITTEN ABOUT BOTH OF THEM.

I guess it was just one of those things. But if there’s a more embarrassing moment in my career, I must’ve blocked it out. Shit. Back to the review …

Perhaps the only thing weird or uncomfortable about the book is the preface in which Wilson lets Ann Richards, Dave Richards and Cecile Richards brag about him and the AWHQ. I think one Richards would clearly have been enough.

Early on, Wilson sets the scene, explaining South Austin as “the domain of people who needed cheap rent and enterprises that needed to be a respectable distance from courthouses, churches, and schools.” He details the history of the AWHQ building as a skating palace, National Guard armory and “Sportcenter” — which hosted wrestling matches, fights and the occasional music act, including Elvis Presley as part of a touring Louisiana Hayride show.

The birth of the Armadillo World Headquarters (it would have been the Armadillo National Headquarters if not for the intervention of Bud Shrake, who urged Wilson to think bigger) is spectacularly documented. Certainly there were struggles in the early years. In a bit of karma for the decade of Geezinslaws performances I had to suffer through at Willie’s Picnics, Wilson mentions the only check the Armadillo ever bounced was $150 to Sammy Allred.

One of the better stories was how Dallas Cowboy quarterback Don Meredith, lounging backstage during a Freddie King show, saved the Armadillo from a TABC bust, signing autographs for the agents and giving a new sheen of respectability to the hippies who were running the joint and rolling the joints.

The Armadillo Art Squad — including my favorite, Jim Franklin — is introduced and their work is celebrated throughout, including a display of scores of posters at the end of the book.

One of the most celebrated nights in AWHQ history is detailed: Willie Nelson’s first performance in August 1972. In case you were wondering if attributing a convergence of the longhairs and the rednecks to that show is something that was a symbolic gesture settled on later, Wilson takes pains to share immediate reviews of the show that point out the cultural shift as it was happening.

It’s not all praise, though. Wilson takes aim at Jerry Jeff Walker (“Eventually, even the most foul-smelling fart leaves the room) and shares no love for Rod Kennedy, founder of the Kerrville Folk Festival. He also wouldn’t much care for how I opened this review … he did not like “The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.”

I’ve got another dozen places earmarked in the book, but no interest in making this the longest review ever. Wilson details the Armadillo through his departure and up until its inevitable closure at the end of 1980 with a journalist’s clarity and not a touch of poetry here and there. He goes on to describe his mini-restaurant The Raw Deal and then his bigger challenge: reopening Threadgill’s.

It’s a fantastic read and perhaps one of the best possible entry points for learning about the history of Austin music. I was genuinely sad to come to the end. Like the others in my Austin Music Holy Trinity, I will read it again.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 7 out of 10

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: A ton of Austin music history. This book is awesome.

Will it make the bookshelf? It will make the display shelf.

I never understood what it was, exactly, that drew me so strongly to concert posters.

Sure, as a newspaper designer, I had an appreciation for how they were created. And as I dove deeper into the history of the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, I appreciated the older posters as tangible connections to that history.

But there really had to be more to it. For awhile, it was a sort of madness.

My last read of 2017 and first review of 2018 — Homegrown: Austin Music Posters 1967 to 1982 — doesn’t pose the question of why these posters speak so strongly to certain people. But it does provide some clues, nonetheless.

Joe Nick Patoski’s opening essay makes a strong case for the importance of concert posters as advertising medium in an era where your favorite band could play across town and you might not ever know about it because you’re 40 years away from following them on Twitter.

Opening with 1820s broadsides posted around New Orleans seeking colonists for Texas, Patoski narrows in on Austin’s printing history and ultimately the marriage of art and information in the mid-1960s that resulted in the music posters you see in books such as this.

The major Austin poster artists get their due, but Patoski starts with Jim Franklin — my favorite artist. (And I don’t just mean poster artist. I wouldn’t walk across the street to piss on Picasso if he were ablaze.)

There is also a mini-history of important venues, starting not with the usual suspect, but the Vulcan Gas Company, the importance of which can be overlooked as it rests in the shadow of the Armadillo.

(Thank goodness I read this book recently and not during the height of my poster-collecting craze. God knows what kind of debt I would’ve racked up if I were driven to touch a larger scope of history rather than just Willie’s Picnic. Say … that Vulcan Gas poster is kinda cool though …)

The second essay, by artist Nels Jacobson, takes a more personal look at the artists and a more technical look at their art, introducing phrases like “split-fountain ink printing” and “Multilith 1350 offset press.”

The meat of the book, however, is 122 posters, divided across five chapters. The pioneering Vulcan Gas Company gets its own chapter, featuring a dozen-and-a-half posters and handbills ranging from the sort of hippie-trippy images you’d expect from San Francisco to Jim Franklin oddities.

If you’re expecting the Armadillo World Headquarters to get its own chapter, well, so was I. But those works are split across the next three chapters: Blues Portraits (including Danny Garrett’s work for Antone’s), Reimagining Texas (opening with a herd of Jim Franklin armadillos) and Traveling Bands (no, the Savoy Brown poster you’re thinking isn’t here).

The last chapter explores the rise of Punk and New Wave posters and handbills that popped up in the early ‘80s as lush professional artistry gave way to a different aesthetic entirely. Many of these posters are interesting, but only a few can stand alongside their predecessors.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: N/A

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: I’m not weird for loving old posters.

Will it make the bookshelf? Yes.

When an acquaintance calls you up and says something about free tickets to see Willie Nelson, you listen.

When you know that guy is a professional ticket broker and the kind of fellow who wouldn't blink at buying a $5,000 poster because he thought it was cool, you listen extra hard, because these seats ain't gonna be the "in-the-balcony-next-to-the-bar" kind you usually get.

That's how Shannon and I ended up on the fourth row at ACL Moody Theater on Saturday night, sipping $8 beers and thinking about ways to describe how close we were.

("I could have hit Lukas Nelson with a marshmallow" is the winner. A jumbo marshmallow, though our host did try to move us up to the front row during intermission when two in his 4-person party didn't show — but someone ratted us out and a ticket stub check hastened us back to our just-as-good seats.)

Let's get right to it: Willie, at 84 years old, sounded great. He didn't sound 1970s great. Or even 1990s great. But he sounded as great as as a grateful fan could reasonably expect. No, his set isn't much changed. The same half-dozen songs to open the show, the same gospel medley to close it. And the usual suspects in between. 

I soaked it all in—at this stage, every time is the last time — but it was also fun to watch the show through the eyes of Shannon, who hasn't seen this set annually for the past 20 years. The last time, in fact, was at the 2004 Picnic in Fort Worth, a day of heat and crowds that prompted Shannon to tell me on the Fifth of July "I love you, but I am never doing that shit again."

Shannon is not an outdoor festival person. I am, I guess. I've listened to Willie play this close before. But that was standing on sore feet, sweaty, stinking and sunburned after 12 hours at a Picnic, wedged into a crowd in the same condition as me, except drunker.

The ACL Moody Theater is a different scene entirely. Quite comfortable and easy to navigate — although the tightly packed floor seats meant you couldn't get up without disturbing your neighbors. It's probably best (for my wallet at least) that I didn't feel like I could buy more beer during Micah Nelson's set, but my enjoyment of Lukas Nelson would've been bolstered if I could've gone to pee during at least one of those 10-minute guitar solos.

Yes, Willie's boys opened the show. I've seen Micah in at least four different bands over the last decade as he has tried to find a sound for himself. Though not my taste, exactly, his musical chops seem fine to me, but it seems that it was Lukas who inherited most of the charisma. Half an hour of Particle Kid was generous. Lukas made the most of his hourlong set, opening and closing with "Breakdown" and "American Girl" in honor of Tom Petty. 

"Forget about Georgia" was the Lukas highlight to me. His voice slips in and out of eerie Willie likeness enough that I'll probably go see him at some point in my 60s when I get to thinking about how I miss the old man.

The old man was still there last night. At some points looking all of his years and then some, then at others he'd flash that Willie grin or that left-eye half-wink thing he does and he'd be the same guy I saw when I was 21 and looking for a musical hero. Every time is the last time. I cheered the Texas flag dropping down (he doesn't do that at the Picnics, so I haven't seen it in a long time). I yelled "Willie!" at least a half-dozen times. I watched Bobbie and Willie play together. I cheered a Mickey Raphael harmonica solo. I sang along with "Good Hearted Woman" and "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys" and "I Saw The Light."

Shannon and I don't get out much. We're indebted to our host (who probably just wants this eBay junkie to think of him next time I see something cool I can't afford). And we're indebted to Grandma and Grandpa Williams who came up to babysit on short notice. (You can't just get anyone to watch Ghostman.) Sure, there were crowds and lines and traffic and a lot of stairs for a woman who had four foot surgeries this year. But it was awesome. A fine, fine way to end 2017 on a rare high note.

And yes, that was our New Year's Eve. We ain't doing shit tonight.

Granny’s house was full of books like this. Great rows of octavo books with colorful, urgent dust jackets — usually showing signs of repeated readings — from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were filled with wry "comic" observations that were reduced to dry wheezes when boredom and curiosity had me sifting through them in the 1980s.

H. Allen Smith’s “The Great Chili Confrontation” would not have been out of place.

(I’m not dissing Granny’s library entirely. Among the books was “Johnny Got His Gun.” As a Metallica fan during these 1980s years that I’m referencing, this impressed me.)

Smith has been a background name for me since I learned about the Terlingua Chili Cookoff(s) in the mid-1990s, but I learned a bit more last year when I created a video about the history of the event.

I had already read Smith's self-indulgent magazine article that preceded the cookoff, but somehow, I was hoping that his book would offer a little more history and quite a bit less narcissistic blathering.

Nope.

This book could have been like having a know-it-all blowhard uncle who talks nonstop about everything and is usually a little much, but, hey, you have a few drinks and he takes it down a notch and you step it up a notch and all of the sudden you’re having fun together.

Instead, it’s that know-it-all uncle with a drinking problem and a Facebook account. And he is absolutely sure that he is the funniest person who ever lived and he wants you to know it at EVERY GODDAMN MOMENT.

Smith knows how to use the language, I’ll give him that. But — in the same way that you can start a chapter in a Kinky Friedman book laughing and end that chapter a few pages later ready to punch him in the face — Smith isn’t so much caressing the words as he is molesting them.

It gets worse. It’s not just the masturbatory prose, but his favorite subject that is hard to stomach: H. Allen Smith, himself.

Ah, the Yankee humorist in the mid-20th century. Do you have a way with words? Good, then be a dick nonstop to everyone and write tirelessly about your dickishness, either explicitly or by mocking everyone around you.

Not willing to commit the effort to writing a whole book about the Terlingua cookoff (though, that’s what the title suggests we’re getting), Smith meanders through half a book’s worth of “digressions,” none so painful as the tale of his Cantonese friend Sou Chan.

Sou Chan, as you might be guessing, tells people to “go fry a kite.” He has witnessed a “terrible exprosion.” His home has a “utirrity room.” There’s no context for any of this, of course. Smith just lists these “facile phrases” to … you know … wheeze.

And nothing gets me going quite like the Yankee writer who writes wide swaths of gibberish in the aim of sharing the Texan dialect. Seriously, fuck that guy. You can pepper in a word here and there to get the point across, but I don’t need your condescending bullshit.

The parts about the cookoff? There's nothing of value between the self-aggrandizing and the Texan-trashing. You could get more history from a poster.

“The Great Chili Confrontation” made quick and breezy Christmas-distracted reading. I’m glad I didn’t spend any serious garage time on it.

Upon completion, I felt the need to cleanse myself, so I went to the display bookshelf and found “A Bowl of Red,” by Smith’s rival Frank X. Tolbert. Tolbert was a newspaper columnist and his writing is as good as his subject matter. Sometimes it's an awesome character study. Sometimes the staccato chapters read like he was aiming to beat a deadline or greet a happy hour. But the book offers history and accuracy ... and it makes me happy.

Overall rating: 3 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 6 out of 10.

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: I didn’t learn a damn thing, except to trust my gut when it comes to Yankee humorists.

Will it make the bookshelf? This'll get me a quarter at Half Price Books. I'll be glad to make the exchange.

Editor's note: After attending the Kerrville Folk Festival in 2000 for the first time, I returned to San Angelo to write a story about it. It immediately became the only story I ever wrote to be rejected for publication. I set about trying to tone it down. Cutting out a few of the juicier bits. The features editor just laughed when I brought it back.

So this story has never seen the light of day. Unfortunately, the original version is lost to time. All that remains is the abridged version. Gone, for example, is the anecdote about the shamanistic woman who strode purposefully through the remnants of a midnight wedding to approach me, standing in my T-shirt and boxer shorts. She rubbed my belly in a Budai-like fashion and in short order I threw up in the bushes.

Anyway, this is my Christmas gift to you. It appears as I typed it 17 years ago. Mostly. Enjoy.

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KERRVILLE FOLK FESTIVAL — Four in the morning is my best guess as to the time, my watch being a late afternoon casualty of an all-day Lone Star Light appreciation fest.

Cameron is on the other side of the tent, snoring. I listen with envy: I can't sleep. The ground is hard as truth, I keep sliding downhill (more on that later) and the racket outside is astounding.

Somewhere, at a campfire to the east, a hippie woman is singing a "save-our-planet" song. How do I know she's a hippie? Her voice carries an urgency — and a volume — that no non-hippie could muster at 4 a.m.

"We have to learn / to take care of our mother

We have to learn / take care of each other"

Suddenly it strikes me that this is something I should see. Something I should witness. But my body, though refusing to sleep, won't allow me to get up, either.

I have to learn, the hippie woman would no doubt sing for me, to take care of my liver.

***

Cameron and I were 'Kerrvirgins' when we finally caught a glimpse of the Quiet Valley Ranch (a misnomer) at 7 p.m. on Friday. It wasn't what we expected.

No wide-open spaces of pasture interrupted by communes of tents. This was all mud and rock and tents crammed up against each other to the point that it was hard to make sense of it all.

It was hard to find a campsite at all.

We finally settled — out of desperation — to set up camp on a hill behind the Threadgill Memorial Theater. Not too far from the store/showers/bathrooms, though not nearly close enough to the bathrooms in the middle of the night.

Actually, we had a little space around us — a concept that apparently the hippies in the flatlands had no use for. And also because nobody else was dumb enough to set up a tent where the occupants would perpetually slide downhill.

Cameron wasn't optimistic about the weather, either. The storms that had hit San Angelo earlier that day were just now catching up with us. By midnight we would have a river running through the tent. Thankfully, the tent was big enough that we could sleep on either bank of the Rio Kerrville.

***

Third beer: Lone Star Light or Lone Star? These decisions are not easy at 8:45 a.m. Time is, especially at the Kerrville Folk Festival, an arbitrary concept. I've declared Kerrvile to be another time zone this Saturday morning and Cameron has embraced the idea.

Perched on lawn chairs on the side of the hill, we survey our kingdom below. By 9:30, only the trashbag (tied to the tent to keep it from sliding downhill) has kept track of our progress. A wedding procession walks down from the Threadgill theater to Chapel Hill (directly across from us). 

We toast the bride and groom.

At noon, we kings of the hill rise for a little lunch only to find that some scoundrel has stolen our Cool Ranch Doritos. 

Bastards!

Ham and cheese sandwiches do not ease our pain. Or sober us up. We decide a good, long nap would put us back in condition to see the music that evening.

We actually make it to the music festival that evening. But Cameron returns from a beer run to find me ill at ease with how things have developed. The first three acts have been entertaining and Micky Newbury is coming up next.

But I've overdone it. The hour 'nap' in the slanted sweatbox was several hours short of what I needed. I return to the tent and pass out.

Cameron — ask not for whom the beer tolls — celebrates having outlasted me by having another beer ... and falling asleep in the lawn chair.

***

This time, having succeeded in a four-hour nap, I rise from the tent in the darkness of Saturday night. What hour is it? I'm not sure. No watch — it has disappeared. 

I finish a bottle of Gatorade and return to my lawn chair. Cameron rises and presses a beer into my hand. I'm in no condition to turn down a bad idea.

We wander down the hill in search of a party and our momentum carries us up Chapel Hill, where we find the second wedding of the day.

A whole Kerrville orchestra and a legion of Kerrverts (the moniker of choice for our fellow festival-goers) serenade the newlyweds. I feel slightly out-of-place, but that's probably because I'm not wearing any pants.

Ah, but it's dark.

Wedding concluded, we make our way down to the hippie flatlands and explore the campfires. Someone wants to know "where in the hell is everyone going at 2 a.m.?"

"It's 2 a.m.?" I ask, answering his question at the same time.

After awhile —the best measurement I can come up with — I return to the tent and listen to the campfire songs from my semi-dry sleeping bag.

In one cosmic moment, two dueling singers from campfires probably 30 yards apart launch into their own choruses at the same time.

Two voices at once come together in an extended "oooooooooooooooo" before splitting into different words. Different worlds, probably.

***

We had given up. There was one real good reason to stay another 24 hours in Kerrville — Ray Wylie Hubbard was going to play that night.

There were a million reasons to pack up and go home that morning.

Reasons like: We were almost out of beer. And we didn't enjoy pain. We had not paced ourselves well. Or at all, for that matter.

With dawn's decision to leave came The Kerrvert With No Name.

Sunday morning, I was mustering the strength to actually get up when a pair of bloodshot eyes peered into the tent from under a cowboy hat and behind a massive moustache.

"Howdy," I said.

"Howdy," the moustache said back.

The Kerrvert with No Name wasted no time. He abandoned our small talk to walk around the tent and discover our ice chest.

He opened it.

"Oooh! Oooh! Ah! Ooh! Ooooah!"

I was about to tell him to stop having sex with the ice chest when he made clear that he was excited about our Lone Star beer. 

He seized one and asked us — politely — if he could have it.

Now who could refuse a man a beer at 7 a.m.?

He opened it, took a drink, and literally howled with enthusiasm. Well, maybe it was more of a bark. Either way, I've never heard a man appreciate a beer so fully.

Cameron — the gracious host — got up to have a beer with him.

After getting dressed, this time, I left the tent to get a good look at our guest. He was wearing a felt hat, blue rodeo T-shirt, some jeans of considerable age and a gient pair of boots. He was no hippie.

But somwhere, this man had obviously blown a fuse.

A bird sang in the distance.

He cocked his head at an improbable angle and told us it was an angry mockingbird.

When the mockingbird — as if on cue — flew to the nearest tree, he walked over and started cussing it.

"You want a piece of me?" he hollered.

The mockingbird didn't.

He wandered back over. Another bird sang.

"Redbird!" he snarled and staggered west, toward another camp.

We were just thinking we were rid of him when the marshmallow went flying by.

"INCOMING!" he yelled.

He had found another campsite's stash of marshmallows and was hiding behind a tent, throwing them at us.

In the face of such weirdness, Cameron and I opened another beer.

The man came back and we exchanged pleasantries. Yes, it was Sunday. Yes, we've been having a good time. We were about to offer him one of the last few beers when he cocked his head at a weird angle again.

A dog was barkin in the distance.

"That's my dog. I must walk this way." And he did.

The Kerrvert With No Name was gone.

Our Kerrville experience was done.

I knew two things about Indianola. I found it on the map when I lived in Victoria and thought it sounded cool. And Charlie Robison had a song about it that I liked pretty well.

What I don’t know is how a book about Indianola popped up on my computer screen. I don’t even remember what I was searching … eBay, Amazon, Google, whatever. But when I did stumble across it, the title was all it took: “Indianola: The Mother of Western Texas.”

For $10 on eBay, it was on the way.

It is not my policy to buy mystery 1977 history texts without checking out several pages first to see if the author can actually string words together in a pleasant fashion. But I took a chance.

As it turns out, it wasn’t all that bad.

It’s astonishing to think that a German prince (Carl zu Solms-Braunfels) could pick out a spot on the Texas coast, have three boatloads of German immigrants show up in December 1844 to an empty beach and within three decades there is a thriving port to rival Galveston, known across the globe and boasting every type of business one could want.

Then in 1875 an enormous hurricane nearly obliterated it. In 1886, another came to finish the job. And Indianola was gone.

Our author, Brownson Malsch (who wrote two other books, both about Captain Manuel T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers) does an excellent job at the beginning of the book, detailing the German genesis of Indianola (then Indian Point) and finishes strong with the outrageous devastation of the 1875 Hurricane.

In between it certainly drags in some points. You can tell where he found a great bit of source material and where he is piecing together a chapter with financial records. Worst is the jockeying over various railroads and would-be railroads. I just couldn’t keep track, so to speak, of the SA&MG, the GWT&P, the ISA&EP … it got tiresome after a bit.

And that title? Indianola was 'mother' of western Texas partly because she was the port through which many immigrants arrived, but mainly because the supplies that kept those settlers going — and the military personnel stationed in western Texas — came through Indianola.

In a bit of literary cruelty, Malsch saves the best descriptions of Indianola at the height of its power for the chapter immediately preceding the chapter on the 1875 hurricane. There are saloons and seamstresses and surgeons and custom tailors. A few pages later, he is telling us how these buildings were swept wholesale into the sea.

After detailing the 1875 hurricane, Malsch loses steam. The final eleven years before the next great hurricane is covered flaccidly in the final chapter, much of it dealing, again, with railroads. The postscript is a weak look at Galveston’s hubris in ignoring the lessons of Indianola. It didn’t work out well for them.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10.

Author’s language skills: 5 out of 10.

What I learned that will most likely stick with me: German immigration, coastal geography, how goddamn fast a town can rise and fall

Woodrow the cat died Monday after stubbornly refusing to do so during a long illness. At the end he drank a lot and often, staggered as he prowled the garage, pissed indiscriminately and complained loudly and often about the numerous things that upset him.

“That’s the way I want to go,” said owner Dave Thomas.

Woodrow was an asshole. Most of the time. He did not care for strangers. He didn’t care much about friends. He liked to pass his time looking sullen, but every once in awhile would be social. A little. For a short time.

“If you’re feeling uncomfortable about making that ‘pets resemble their owners joke’ about my dead cat, consider it made,” said Thomas.

Woodrow was born a poor feral kitty in the spring of 2002. An American-Statesman employee found him and emailed a picture to Thomas. The picture showed a cute, bright-eyed, black-and-white kitten gazing adoringly at the camera.

“Yeah, I bet the next photo is of him biting the shit out of your hand,” Thomas replied.

The coworker sent Thomas the next photo, showing the furball wrapped around her hand with his teeth sunk deep into a finger.

“I’ll take him,” Thomas said.

Thomas was hunting for a rental house at the time and while thinking about what to name that cat, he saw a bus stop sign that mentioned Woodrow Avenue. The cat was technically named after a bus stop, but it was clearly “Lonesome Dove” that gave the name resonance with Thomas.

After staying at the apartment just long enough to bite a gazillion tiny holes in the bottom of all the vertical blinds and cost Thomas his deposit, Woodrow moved into the rental house on Brentwood (just a block down from Woodrow Ave.) with Thomas, newly-engaged Shannon Williams and her elderly dog Annie.

Being a cat and having no clue about karma, Woodrow ruthlessly terrorized toothless Annie, relying heavily on a Foreman-esque punch (technically, it WAS a bitch slap) that could … “WHAP!” … be heard across the house.

“You’ve seen those old Tom and Jerry cartoons where the cat goes down to hell?” Thomas said. “That’s where Woodrow was clearly headed. Kitty Hell. He was a total jerk.”

The old house had a window-unit air conditioner and Woodrow soon learned that it would make a particular sound before the coolant kicked on. During the summer, he’d run up to the unit after he heard that noise and stick his head up there and bogart all the cold air.

He played tough, but all it took was a junkie burglar or a hyperactive little girl to reveal him for the coward that he was. After each episode, he hid under the bed in the spare bedroom for days.

After the family moved to their own house in Far South Austin, Annie passed on and Woodrow gained a new companion when the family inherited Meow Cows — who was older and having none of Woodrow’s shit. Ever. Apparently immortal, Meow Cows had already seen it all.

Woodrow inhabited a succession of rooms, getting kicked out of each by a new child, whom he learned quickly and terribly that he was not to fuck with either.

These were dark days for Woodrow. Though strangers came less often, extended family came more often. The kids kept multiplying. That other old cat was a real bitch.

Then came the little girl. And Woodrow softened. He had learned his lesson. And so she didn’t learn the lesson of tiny sharp teeth like her brothers had.

She followed him around. She talked to him. She put hats on him. And he stoically endured it. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he probably liked the attention. Just a little. Even if he didn’t, his look of resigned disgust was lost on the wee child.

And each time the little girl accidentally smacked him on the head in the course of pretending a plastic saucer was a fancy hat — and he patiently waited it out — a sin was absolved.

Karma came calling about a year-and-a-half ago when a new puppy named Lucy joined the family.

By this time, Woodrow was living out his last days in the garage. He had already had a mini-stroke and was weak in his hindquarters. But that didn’t stop him from coming inside every time he got the chance to drink from the toilet, which apparently had an appeal that his water bowl could not match.

Lucy was the unknowing agent of Annie. It took her little time to discover the joy of herding Woodrow around the house, the old cat too weak to jump to safety. And yet, every time Lucy stuck her cold nose where his balls would have been, Woodrow’s black soul came away a little lighter. A debt was being repaid, one awkward snuffle at a time.

When the end came, Woodrow was rail-thin and in pain. Thomas paid for his passage.

Woodrow died a little after 10 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 2.

He leaves behind Lucy, who might miss him, and Meow Cows, who, unmoved, has seen the last gasp of countless souls as she has journeyed through the ages.

He leaves behind a 7-year-old boy who might not notice he is gone, and Shannon, who didn’t dislike him enough to want to see him in pain.

He leaves behind a 5-year-old girl who doesn’t quite understand, and a 10-year-old boy who is taking this hard.

And he leaves behind Thomas, who held him on his lap in the old recliner one last time. Just a cup of coffee and SportsCenter short of the good old days. The man was relieved when he could tell Woodrow was no longer feeling any pain.

Thomas dug the grave. He told the kids. He went to work.

But he’ll miss that cat.

Just a little.

There you were on that front porch in Stonewall. One of those 22-ounce bottles of Lone Star Ice in your hand. An empty one at your feet. Lunch on the way to Luckenbach never happened and so you just drank away the afternoon on an empty stomach before heading this way while you still could.

You say that like it’s something strange. What I recall was that the mayor of Luckenbach showed up with a pizza. It was divine intervention. Jesus looks after drunks and fools.

And you were doubly protected. But Jesus had nothing to do with it. The mayor of Luckenbach lived there. And that pizza was probably for her.

And twenty-something years later, I’m still grateful. Hey, there’s that Chevron where I bought the Lone Star Ice. What’s that next to it?

“Stonewall Wine” something-or-other ...

Man, this whole place has gone to hell.

You’re the only guy I know who thinks scraping between gettin’ by and gettin’ high is a step up from a little bit of comfort and class.

Well, it was authentic.

You use that word like a velvet rope. Nobody wants in your private history club.

I ain’t talking about motels with new paint jobs and convenience stores with new names. Lookit this road: Fucking wineries and lavender fields, one after another. What the hell was wrong with peaches and beer joints?

Like you ever bought a peach.

Somebody had to keep the beer joints open. Speaking of … we’re early. Let’s turn here.

You’re not going to stop are you?

I don’t think they’ll sell me a drink at 8:45 a.m.

I don’t think you’d turn one down. All you have to do is think about poli…

Stop it. Not today.

Everyday.

Damn it, here we are. Here where everybody’s somebody.

And that’s why you don’t come here anymore? You used to be a little more somebody than the next feller. Now you ain’t.

Yeah, well … what the fuck is that?

Looks like a new outhouse.

Outhouse, hell, that’s a new building. I guess the old outhouse was too rustic for the lavender-and-winery crowd.

And yet, I don’t think Luckenbach is ruined.

Hell, I remember when I first saw an Internet address scrawled on the outhouse wall back in the late ‘90s. Funny how we had no idea that instant global communication and easy access to the wisdom of the ages would somehow fuck everything up.

That’s the only wise thing you’ve said today.

Screw you.

Seriously, there’s no real need for you to tilt at timepieces here. Sure, you’ve got a memory for every twist of road out here, but a little progress ain’t going to erase them.

No, that’s alcohol’s job.

So … why fight the future?

It’s instinctive. Like Peckinpah. Like Abbey.

Don’t flatter yourself. A pint-sized Peckinpah, perhaps. A Cactus Ed with all of the grizz and none of the guts. If you were as good as you thought ….

Yeah, I got it. Look who’s being mean-spirited now.

Seriously, don’t worry about the wineries. Better than refineries. At least they don’t spoil the land. And who knows, you might grow up some day …

All right, all right. I guess it’s OK. Whatever the hell keeps the bachelorette parties giggly and the land from sprouting up in condos.

There’s the spirit … hey, why are we turning here?

This is the destination. Fredericksburg Trade Days.

Sigh. After this little talk, you’re still gonna go in there looking for pieces of the past?

Got to.

I know.

I said I would write a song about a guy I heard about while living in San Angelo in the mid-'90s. So I did. This ain't how his story went. And his name wasn't Joseph Browning. And, hell, I guess without music it's just a poem. Still, here's one for Joesph and his short, but epic life.

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Fightin’ and fucking are fine, I guess, for ordinary men

But I got my uncle’s .250 and I’m adjusting for the wind

To tell the truth I’d be with Sue if she wasn’t born again

So it’s me and you, at the zoo, we’re going hunting friend

I shot the monkey, I blew away the bear,

I even shot the zebra, man I just didn’t care

I don’t know why, guess there isn’t much to do,

I’d have shot the sheriff, if he’d a been there too,

Yeah, I shot the hell out of the Pecos Zoo

The sheriff dragged me out of bed, and look, they got you, too

I hear it didn’t take much poking around before he found a clue

We left the shells, what the hell, man that’s something I would do

.250’s a rare gun, but I got one … damn we shoulda taken the .22

I shot the monkey, I blew away the bear,

I even shot the zebra, man I just didn’t care

I don’t know why, guess there isn’t much to do,

I’d have shot the sheriff, if he’d a been there too,

Yeah, I shot the hell out of the Pecos Zoo

Hey, remember we had that wreck — we both got thrown clear?

I guess we got that lucky with the judge, it’s been a helluva year

Christ almighty son, you can’t have a gun and not a sniff of beer

But I don’t drink and you know what I think? Monkey season’s here

I shot the monkey, I blew away the bear,

I even shot the zebra, man I just didn’t care

I don’t know why, guess there isn’t much to do,

I’d have shot the sheriff, if he’d a been there too,

The Judge asked me why’d you do it son, was it trouble at home or bullies at school?

I didn’t know why, shootin’ just makes me high, and I shot the hell out of the Pecos Zoo