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And appreciated it (Willie's music in Texas) certainly was, not only by country music fans, but also by the growing number of 'country rock' fans. In the 1970s, cosmic cowboys from across the southwest and up and down the west coast started heating up the FM airwaves with a hybrid of country and rock that set people's radios on fire. The Byrds with their SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO album, Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Poco, Doug Sahm & the Texas Tornadoes, Dick Damron, Billy Cowsill & Blue Northern, Jerry Jeff Walker, Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Eagles. When I met many of these country rockers as they came to town, they would tell me their hero was Willie Nelson. On his home turf, Willie was more than merely a hero. "Willie was like a god in Texas," Waylon Jennings remarks. "People there believe that when they die they're goin' to Willie's house." The music world seemed rife with 'Willyisms'. "Where there's a Willie, there's a way" and "Matthew, Mark, Luke and Willie." Bumper sticker slogans, to be sure, but the gospel according to Willie made sense to many people.
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The difference between Austin and Nashville, as Willie has suggested, was the difference between live players and session players. The live music scene in Austin has attracted many talented people over the years, including Ron Cote, a Canadian recording engineer who got his start working with Billy Cowsill in Vancouver in 1979. Cote soon migrated to Long Island, New York to mix a Doug & the Slugs record at Kingdom Sound Studios and hung around for five years working with Joan Jett, Eddie Jobson, Blue Oyster Cult, and Aldo Nova at many of the area's top facilities like the Power Station, Electric Ladyland, and the Hit Factory. After spending a year on the road in the U.S. and Europe with the hard rock bands Blue Oyster Cult and Aldo Nova recording live material, Cote was asked where he'd like to mix a live album and some radio shows. He chose Dallas Sound Laboratory. Cote remembered Billy Cowsill's enthusiastic endorsement of the live music scene in Austin. So, with a ticket to mix anywhere in North America, he chose Dallas because of its proximity to Austin, and eventually found himself recording artists like Leon Rausch, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Willie Nelson, in both Dallas and Austin.
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