Austin Roots

"The 1960's Underground" with Alice Embree and Thorne Dreyer "And so to me, one of the stories is to look back at that time and go, "Look, there was a lot of crossover that younger people don't know about," right? And when I tell people about it, they're like, "Oh, I had no idea." … These narratives tend to live in textbooks and not come from people's lives, it seems like sometimes… if you pay att...

"Developing Austin" with Perry Lorenz "We all got liberal arts degrees, and a whole lot of my friends are, you know, are casualties in one way or another. Either, either drug casualties or lifestyle casualties, and never quite made it through school, although that's the reason that they came to Austin. And again, it was so inexpensive… People weren't having to work three jobs to figure out how to...

"Outstanding Stories in the Criminal Legal System" with Dick DeGuerin "Well, I accept a lot of cases. Basically, my criteria is something that needs to be challenging. So you get some tough cases that way, and if you get the reputation for trying tough cases, people come to you. Growing up, I was younger than all my classmates…and I was smaller. But what I learned was the law and the rules of evid...

"Music Journaling" with Kevin Curtin "The Austin Chronicle, it's just like, is so fiercely loyal to the local scene and willingly ignores opportunities to interview national artists in favor of a local artist. I think that means something in terms of where we put the quality of the people in our community in comparison to people in the national picture. You know, we wanna treat them on the same le...

"Early Club Scenes" with John Toad Andrews  Forming The Wigs with Boz Scaggs, The Chelsea with George Kinney, and joining Tracy Nelson & Mother Earth, to his unlikely second career restoring and selling antique ceiling fans, John "Toad" Andrews' story weaves through some of the most important threads in American rock, blues, and country history. In this episode of Austin Roots, hosts Eddie Wilson...

"Pioneering the Family Traditions" with John Lomax III "So grandfather would lie in bed at night and hear the, uh, cowboys nearby. They would stop off and just spend the night nearby, practically in their yard, and he'd hear 'em singing songs, which they would do to keep the cattle calmed down. So sooner or later he started sneaking out of the house and hanging out with the cowboys and writing dow...

"Archiving The History of Austin" with Leea Mechling "Prosperity doesn't always mean dollar signs. Sharing music and sharing art really expands your heart." (Leea Mechling) Leea Mechling grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, where her earliest music experiences ranged from Czech dance halls to an Ike & Tina Turner backstage pass at age 11. After moving to Austin to attend UT, Leea fell in with the cro...

"A Cartoonist's View of Underground Characters" with Gilbert Shelton "Chet Helms and Jack Jackson and some others, and then I bought a printing press. It was our idea to print rock posters. That was a big thing at the time. Nobody knew how to run our new printing press and our posters were really crappy, but then we discovered that printing on the comic books didn't have to be good printings. We s...

"Austin's Early Art Scene" with Danny Garrett "The San Francisco posters sort of resonated with everybody and I mean everyone across the country, across the world. Of course, there was a very strong connection between Austin and San Francisco. There was direct feedback from that, from what was going on in San Francisco, especially with Gilbert (Shelton) and (Jack) Jackson out there. There was a re...

"The Contemporaneous Armadillo" with Woody Roberts (January 10, 1941 - May 20, 2023) What does a Top 40 DJ, the Armadillo World Headquarters, a failed but ambitious TV and radio show project, within Austin City's limits, have in common with Horse Racing? The city's original influencer in media, Woody Roberts.  This episode of Austin Roots features Woody Roberts, a veteran of Texas radio and the Au...

"Keeping the Heart in the Music Community" with Emma Little "I think I learned that a lot of the guys who were successful generally had a woman backing them up at home, helping them out. That's the thing is you have to have somebody, and I think that that's where the women came in most… they could also run anything. We were the invisible matriarchy." (Emma Little) Emma Little shares her unique per...

"The Underground Comix Movement" with Dave Moriaty "The cartoons never made any money, in my opinion… we became the default printer for the revolution from the beginning. We printed family dog posters, we printed straight theater posters. I still have all the pamphlets that we did for the Berkeley Revolution, various types and, we also printed lots of pamphlets and books for people that were frank...

"The Real Deal in Austin Food" with Hoover Alexander Food, Community, and Austin's Culinary Legacy, breaking bread with Hoover Alexander. In this deeply personal conversation, Hoover Alexander shares his journey from East Austin neighborhood kid to restaurant proprietor, weaving together stories of food, culture, and community. Growing up in a "small village" within Austin, Hoover describes a tigh...

"The Vulcan Gas Company" with Don Hyde "I never had the idea of making money. That wasn't the point. I don't think there were many clubs anywhere that had that as a premise. Utopia… it was one of the first countercultural clubs run by the counterculture itself." (Don Hyde) This episode of Austin Roots features Eddie Wilson and Dr. Jason Mellard in conversation with Don Hyde, a pivotal figure in Au...

"Famous Texas Legislation" with Dave Richards   "What I remember is Eddie coming by one time and asking Ann (Governor Ann Richards) and I to go with him to see this old armory he'd found. He was thinking of making it into a music venue. And we went down to this dusty old place and uh, I suppose we were encouraging." (Dave Richards on the Armadillo World Headquarters)   David Read Richards (June 10...

"The Austin/San Francisco Connection" with Travis Rivers From underground publishing to music management to technology adoption, Travis Rivers' life exemplifies counterculture entrepreneurship. "I've remarked that my entire life's career has been noticing a need and filling it." (Travis Rivers) This episode of Austin Roots features Travis Rivers, a pivotal figure in the Texas-California music conn...

"Early Folk Singing" with Powell St John Powell St. John (September 18, 1940 – August 22, 2021 ) Episode recorded in 2020 Wednesday night hootenannies, Peyote, and Janis Joplin, brim the surface of Powell's contributions to folk music and Texas songwriting. This episode explores the vibrant Austin folk music scene of the 1960s through the eyes of two key figures: Powell St. John and Eddie Wilson....

"We have this idea now of Austin being this liberal, communist bastion, but a hundred years ago we were one of the most conservative cities in Texas." - Richard Zelade.  Richard Zelade, author of  Austin and the Jazz Age , shares fascinating details about how UT Austin became the epicenter of early jazz culture in Texas, producing influential musicians like Jimmy's Joys and pioneering figures in c...

Bank burglaries, prostitution, and gambling, the hidden layers of Austin history. "Everybody knew who all the tough guys were... every couple of years there was a new super bad guy." In this episode of Austin Roots, hosts Eddie Wilson and Dr. Jason Mellard sit down with Jesse Sublett to explore the hidden criminal history of 1960s Austin. Sublett, a musician-turned-author, discusses his research i...

In March 2020, when Threadgill's and the world shut down, we found ourselves in a reflective mood with time on our hands. Eddie Wilson compiled an eclectic list of Austin artists, authors, movers, and shakers who defined the city's cultural scene in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Novice podcasters, we did what we could to get them on Zooms and in rooms to tell their stories. In their words,...