By Jan Reid | Dec 09/Jan 10 | City Portrait

Showtime in Austin

If you love music, food, and football—and really, what else is there?—the Texas state capital knows how to put on a show

The Big Picture

I know I have some dear old uncles who say about me, “Well, he went down there to Austin and got stuck.” It’s a fair charge; perhaps I should have had the ambition and fortitude to strike out for New York, Paris, or San Sebastián, places I now wish I’d lived for a while. But when I was twenty-three, I was just trying to get out of my Texas hometown. Austin is the adopted home of scores of people like me. We got here as fast as we could because parts of the city are beautiful, and because here we could sow some oats that would have gotten good and trampled in the burgs and oil-pipe towns we came from. ¶ Austin is not perfect, not by a long shot. The lovely springs are followed by summers when TV forecasters bark out strings of hundred-degree days like they’re mileposts in A-Rod’s hitting streak. Some years ago the traffic jams started to become obscene, and the sprawling suburbs bear no resemblance to the Austin Billy Lee Brammer captured in his 1961 novel on the city and its politics, The Gay Place. A capital known for Ann Richards and other feisty liberals and the long, complicated shadow of Lyndon Johnson is still largely segregated, forty-five years after Johnson pushed civil rights acts through Congress. George W. Bush, who positioned himself to seek the presidency by upsetting Richards in the 1994 governor’s race, is likewise a major part of Austin’s legacy. Both Johnson and Bush were pseudo-ranchers as presidents, but Johnson liked to roam about his pastures in a Lincoln convertible and titillate his Eastern guests by showing them a prize bull trying to diddle a heifer.

The ongoing lionization of our almost-gone cowpokes raises the question of how much Austin belongs to the South. Our ancestors did permit slavery, and they chose to secede and fight on the losing side in the Civil War. But the last wayward stand of the Southern pine forest is twenty-five miles east of our Eden. Austin has as much in common with Tucson as Tuscaloosa.

LBJ’s “Texas White House” informed the rest of the nation that our Hill Country exists. No place else in Texas has such a wealth of wooded hills and ravines, meadows of bunchgrass prairie and spring-fed streams. My dad drove our family down to Austin one time to visit some kinfolks, and we went out to see the ranch house where he was born. It had two stories, with screened-in sleeping porches and a spiral staircase. My great-grandfather built it for two thousand bucks just after the turn of the last century, then lost his eyesight and the ranch during the Depression. Later some people in Austin would think enough of it to dismantle it and truck it into town and restore it. While my relatives prowled the onetime home place, I had a fine time skipping rocks on the San Saba River. It was the first time I’d seen flowing water that wasn’t the color of mud.

Another thing that beckoned me then was football—the University of Texas Longhorns and a handsome, charismatic young coach named Darrell Royal who arrived in town in 1956. He turned out three national champions and sent to the pros a slew of stars that included Earl Campbell and Tommy Nobis. Royal was a quipster from a Dust Bowl town in Oklahoma, and for me, a hero. But by the time I finally got to Austin in 1970, I didn’t give two hoots about football. This was the heyday of storied music venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon. One afternoon I watched Willie Nelson and his band climb on a flatbed trailer and play for free in a Ford dealership owned by one of Willie’s pals. Lubbock rock and roll poured in straight from the heart of Buddy Holly, and another bunch of musicians from Dallas, foremost among them Stevie Ray Vaughan, scorned the cowboy hippies and liked to play big-city blues and work on cars. The San Antonio wunderkind Doug Sahm contributed a song verse that went “You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul.” That line became a counter-conceit, Austin’s answer to the Texas yahoo wearing snakeskin boots and a diamond pinkie ring.

When oil went bust in the eighties, it took the Austin economy along, but in recent years high tech has more than compensated. People arrived with huge salaries that they packed into garish mansions in the limestone hills. But the computer giant home-grown by Michael Dell and friends has given the city back a delightful children’s museum, among other acts of civic generosity. A few years ago a San Francisco cabdriver told my wife and me that we had to experience this fabulous new grocery store called Whole Foods. Born in a drab, low-ceilinged Austin structure now occupied by a used record store called Cheapo’s, Whole Foods has since moved its corporate headquarters and opened a showcase market just a few blocks down Lamar Boulevard.

But nothing has changed this town like music. South by Southwest is a massive festival that began as a whim of the founders of our alternative weekly, the Austin Chronicle. In the seventies, musicians liked the cheap rent and baggies of smoke. Now bands come from all over the world to Austin and South by Southwest, hoping to get discovered by industry heavyweights who slip around among the kids who race from one bar and show to another. And the music market found plenty of room for a fall outdoor festival that draws acts like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and stokes revenue into its sponsor, the PBS weekly program Austin City Limits. Produced in a University of Texas studio, the show began with a rough 1974 pilot featuring Willie Nelson; this year the show is being designated a historic landmark by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Willie is Austin music’s international icon, but its hottest commodity at the moment is the indie rock trio Spoon.

The community of writers is both friendly and daunting. Oscar Casares (Brownsville, Amigoland) is among the best of the young fiction writers. Lawrence Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and winner of a 2007 Pulitzer for his thunderous chronicle of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, has made his home in the Tarrytown section of Austin for two decades; his avocation is playing piano in a long-lived rock garage band. The magnetism of Austin tugs at artists in all fields. Today the crew of the critically praised TV series Friday Night Lights uses a high school gridiron out by the airport. Sandra Bullock has moved to town and has quietly contributed a couple of stylish small restaurants and a New York–worthy deli.

Through all this urban pressure and dash, Austin continues to find its way. Lady Bird Johnson took it upon herself to beautify the nation’s capital when her husband was president, and she committed the same artistic resolve to Austin when they came back home. The dammed-up Colorado River lake that now bears her name announces spring with a breathtaking display of blooming trees along its running and hiking trails. And her National Wildflower Research Center and wildflower seeding project have extended her legacy and created a canvas of color along hundreds of miles of Texas roadsides.

Austin takes bows for its food. You’ve long been able to find good steakhouses—it’s a Texas thing. Near kin to this is the cult of barbecue. I enjoy a helping of brisket and sausage now and then, but if I ever move somewhere else, I’ll miss our Mexican food more than the barbecue. Austin began to get superior restaurants in the eighties. World-famous chefs tinker with menus and recipes here now. Uchi, Jeffrey’s, Fonda San Miguel, 34th Street Café, Vespaio, and Enoteca are among the restaurants that live up to their reputations. But when my wife and I are in a particular romantic mood, we look to an old favorite—a French bistro called Chez Nous, which is owned by Pascal Regimbeau and Sybil Reinhart-Regimbeau.

As young Parisians they came to the States carrying backpacks and steered their route through Austin because they were fans of Texas music. They liked what they found here and in 1982 opened a downtown café that’s steeped in the companionable style of Austin. All these years they’ve provided the best prix fixe in town—plus good wine and, now and then, a waitress who looks and sounds like Brigitte Bardot. Pascal drives a vintage black 1959 Cadillac, sports the classiest ponytail of any man I know, and has a consuming interest in Native America. All of this variety adds up to a place we treasure and close friendships that, for my wife, go back as much as half a century, to her freshman dormitory. Forget where we came from—good and bad, that’s another Texas, another story. Almost on first arrival, we looked around and knew that here would be a life’s worth of home.