Keep Gomorrah weird: the rest of Texas vilifies Austin as a breeding ground for long-haired hell-raisers. To me, it's an open-minded, open-hearted, magical little town--and always will be.

In the fifties I moved from Houston to Austin, which didn't seem like that much of a cataclysmic cultural leap at the time. Compared with Houston, Austin was a sleepy, beautiful little town in which I went to high school and formed my first band, the Three Rejects. It would take another decade or two for Austin to become fully vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking: hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western world. I never felt this way about Austin All I knew was that the music was great, the drugs were cheap, and the love was free. [paragraph] When I enrolled at the University of Texas, Willie Nelson was still a struggling songwriter and a pig farmer in Nashville and the Armadillo World Headquarters was just a gleam in Eddie Wilson's eye. In college I distinguished myself by managing my friend Ken Jacobs's nearly successful campaign for head cheerleader, in which our slogan was "I can jump high." I also formed my second band, King Arthur and the Carrots. I met folksingers, poets, political radicals, and women who loved other women. None of these life choices were in mainstream fashion, of course. (Back then I never could have used one of the slogans for my white-hot gubernatorial campaign: "No lesbian left behind.")

In my bright college days we pretty much took for granted that Austin was far more progressive than the outlying provinces. Looking back, I'm not so sure that was entirely true. In the early sixties there was a place called the Plantation Restaurant at the corner of the Drag and what was then Nineteenth Street. It was open 24 hours, many of which were spent by me and my friends drinking endless cups of blue coffee and solving the problems of the world as we knew it--and I think that, at times, we very possibly knew the world better then than we know it now. One thing that didn't really seem to register at the ol' Plantation, however, was that, among the bikers, fraternity boys, and square-dance clubs, there were no black patrons. It took me awhile, but as a card-carrying member of Students for a Democratic Society, I finally lamped upon this inequity. With my fellow SDSers, we picketed night after night, at last forcing the restaurant to change its policies. Today the Plantation, which I both loved and protested against, is gone, and the street where it used to be is no longer known as Nineteenth Street. It is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. In a world of shopping malls and glass towers, that, my friends, is real progress.

After graduation, I left Austin for three years to work for the Peace Corps in the jungles of Borneo. By the time I returned there was an almost palpable new spirit in the air, what Jack London might have called the "smoke of life." Not that Austin wasn't an exciting place before I left, but now it really seemed to rock. I blame this transformation mostly on Willie. He likes to say that he just "found a parade and jumped in front of it." The truth is that when Willie began playing the Armadillo in the early seventies, the union was finally consummated between the long-haired, dope-smoking hippie ...