Willie & Waylon Walk Into a Room

All They Did Was Change Country Music Forever: 1978

It seems like half the people I know, at least on social media, have been in Austin at South by Southwest (SXSW). I was only there once, about 30 years ago, when people were already complaining that it was too big, too corporate. I was invited to appear on a critics panel. I remember two things, well, a few things. After the panel, the owner of a small local label asked if I liked basketball. Sure, I said. He gave me a pair of tickets to that afternoon’s games at the Frank Erwin Center on the University of Texas campus in Austin, one of the cities where the March Madness Sweet 16 round was being held, leading to the Final Four. I ran into my pal Lonesome Bob Chaney, a basketball-tall singer-songwriter, and we went to see two of the greatest games of college hoops ever played, overtime thrillers that made the rest of the SXSW music dull by comparison. That is, until the closing night party, held in a vast hotel ballroom, where the Joe Ely Band played for at least four or five hours, an…