Fifty years ago, Willie Nelson and his band walked into a squat, beige brick building in a nondescript industrial park in Garland, located northeast of Dallas, and changed country music forever.
It was January of 1975, and Nelson had left Nashville in the dust. The ink was still drying on a fresh contract with Columbia Records, and he had a $60,000 advance on his next album. The singer wasn’t a star yet—as biographer and Texas Highways senior writer Joe Nick Patoski put it, he was then “an outsider appreciated mostly by insiders,” and his next release would make or break him. So, he arrived at Garland’s Autumn Sound Studios and walked out five days later with a sparse, stripped down concept album about a preacher-turned-fugitive called the Red Headed Stranger.
This month, the city of Garland will host a one-time-only event commemorating the anniversary of Red Headed Stranger—the seminal album that gave Nelson his first number one as a singer with, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” catalyzing the budding outlaw country movement, and inspiring countless artists for decades to come.
The two-day celebration on May 16 and 17 will bring together Texas artists like Ray Benson, Rhett Miller, Joshua Ray Walker, and Max & Heather Stalling for a live performance of the album. (Tickets can be purchased here.) With support from The Band of Strangers, led by event organizer and music producer John Pedigo, the artists will also share stories about their connections to Nelson and the album throughout their set.
“I remember when Willie recorded the album,” Benson told Texas Highways. “He told me all about how he and [his ex-wife] Connie thought of the concept as they drove down from Colorado. Getting to recreate it on stage with an amazing cast of musicians and singers, where it was recorded, is a testament to its longevity and relevance today.”
To younger artists like Walker, Red Headed Stranger changed the relationship between songwriters and labels forever,. “We’ll always have a successful example to point to when the powers that be say our artistic vision is not financially exploitable. Willie inspired generations of songwriters and storytellers to be the artist on the front of the record. He helped give us the power to create our own path in the music business.”
The event will also feature performances from other North Texas artists around downtown Garland, as well as a special exhibit of Nelson-related memorabilia from Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections, and photo opportunities with the singer’s Red Headed Stranger tour bus. Actress Morgan Fairchild will also participate in a panel discussion alongside Patoski following a screening of the 1986 film of the same name based on the album.
Ahead of the headlining show on May 17, representatives from the Texas Music Office will officially certify Garland as a “Music Friendly City,” in part for its contribution to country music.
When organizer Jeff Ryan started planning the event last year, he found that the locals and musicians he reached out to all knew and loved the album, but none of them had any idea it had been recorded in Garland.
“The birth of outlaw music was literally in our backyard,” he says. “I think it’s important that people know about North Texas, and our cultural relevance when it comes to the history of music, because it mostly gets thrown to Austin.”
Now called Audio Dallas, the studio where Nelson recorded Red Headed Stranger is still largely the same. “It’s the best sounding room in the area,” Pedigo says. “It’s a place of magic, and it’s barely changed since 1975. If you go right now into the center of that room, and take a gut string guitar to sing ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,’ it’ll be the exact same sound. It’s surreal.”
But how exactly was it that Nelson wound up in Garland all those years ago? At the time, it had only been open for three months. “It was cheap,” jokes Amy Rosenthal, Garland’s Cultural Arts Director. The price was a motivating factor, but so was the fact that the studio was home to the first twenty-four track recording console in Texas.
In an effort to woo Nelson there, lead engineer Phil York promised him a free day in the studio. Nelson didn’t want the fuss and overly-produced sound he’d been subjected to as an artist in Nashville, so they kept the production pared down. Some tracks stretch out into 4 or 5 minute meditations, while others amount to quick, 25-second interludes. When Nelson turned the record over to the label, they initially thought it was a demo.
“Obviously, they were proven wrong,” Pedigo says. “It’s everybody’s favorite country album now, but when you really think about it, it’s just so unusual. We wanted to put on an event that honored that.”
