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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Plenty Of Country ‘Austin City Limits’ Just Keeps On Plucking Away After Two Decades On Public Television

Pauline Arrillaga Associated Press

Improbable, it was - much like the name of the book that sparked its birth.

It was 1974, and public television program manager Bill Arhos was trying to come up with a new show. After reading “The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock,” his idea formulated: a music series spotlighting the growing country music genre.

Country music on PBS? Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

Twenty seasons later, “Austin City Limits” has become the longest-running popular music series on television.

“I didn’t just wake up one day and say I think we ought to do a country music program, although I am from East Texas and grew up on country music in Bryan, Texas,” said Arhos, executive producer of the show. “The timing was right and the topic was right.”

At the time there were 65 bands in Austin playing progressive country, or redneck rock. Arhos decided to capitalize on that sound.

He taped the pilot show using one of the biggest names in the business - B.W. Stevenson. There was just one problem: The big name failed to draw a big audience.

“The night B.W. was here, not enough people came. It looked like we had a big party and nobody came,” Arhos said. “There were big gaps in the audience, so we felt like we couldn’t use that.”

Arhos turned to a lesser-known singer for his pilot - Willie Nelson. The program aired on 55 stations nationwide. A show was born.

The first series was produced in 1975 and hit the airwaves in January 1976, featuring the original sounds of Asleep at the Wheel, Townes Van Zandt, Stevenson, the Charlie Daniels Band, Marcia Ball, Jerry Jeff Walker and more.

“Pretty soon we were on the road to doing bigger and bigger acts and gained more national prominence,” Arhos said.

By its third season, “Austin City Limits” had found a niche in the country music industry. Chet Atkins became the first of many major Nashville artists to perform on the show.

“It was a different kind of country music from the traditional country that was there at the time,” Arhos said. “You had this amalgamated, wonderful sound that eventually spilled over into the Nashville traditional sound and I think forever has changed the sound of country music.”

What made the show different and popular, Arhos believes, was the live audience and concert atmosphere.

“Very few people had live audiences,” Arhos said. “Suddenly, we had 600 or 700 people who were shoutin’ and hootin’ and stomping their feet, and it really was a happening. It was more of an event than just a television music concert.”

The live audience also caused its share of problems.

“The first year, the audience just came in off of the streets,” Arhos said. “In those days there were some pretty scruffy folks out there.”

Arhos recalled the time a man with a Rip Van Winkle-like beard sat in the middle of the audience floor, spraying silver paint up his nose.

“It wasn’t so much that anybody cared about him, but he was getting it all over everybody else. So, we had to throw him out.”

Then there was the night another man, who had had a few beers, started heckling Larry Gatlin, and Gatlin started heckling him back.

“Larry got red as a beet, and we knew we had to do something about it,” Arhos said. “One of the associate producers, who has since become an Austin police officer, picked this guy up, put him in the back of the room, gave him another beer and told him to sit there and be real quiet.”

Today “Austin City Limits,” produced by Austin public television station KLRU, is viewed in more than 300 markets around the country and world. While born as a showcase for country music, the show spotlights other genres, including blues, folk, Tejano, rock and jazz.

The 20th season kicked off Jan. 14 with a show starring two-time Country Music Association entertainer of the year Vince Gill and guitarist Junior Brown. (On Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7, the show airs Saturdays at 5 p.m., with replays at midnight beginning Feb. 5. In Idaho, it airs at 9:30 p.m. Saturdays on both KCDT-Channel 26 from Coeur d’Alene and KUID-Channel 12 from Moscow.)

Brown, who lives in Austin, said “Austin City Limits” has become tradition for the city that calls itself “the live music capital of the world.”

“It caters to the uniqueness of individual styles of music, and that’s indicative of Austin. It has a loose, laid-back atmosphere, but yet it’s very organized at the same time,” Brown said.

Also appearing during the year will be Alan Jackson, Tammy Wynette, Shawn Colvin, Robert Earl Keen and The Neville Brothers. The season includes a bluegrass special featuring Ricky Skaggs, Larry Sparks and Ralph Stanley, and a Tejano music special.

Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel will headline a early February concert celebrating the show’s 20 years on the air.

So at a time when proposed cuts to public television funding abound, how has “Austin City Limits” managed to stay afloat?

“A lot of luck, a lot of hard work. The increase in popularity of the genre that we’re in,” Arhos said.

“It’s been a wonderful experience for me. I don’t have to go out to clubs at night; all the people come here. Can you imagine being able to do that and bring it to you? It’s like a dream. It’s unreal.”