Lickona credits the show’s success to a unique taping format. Typically a performer comes in the studio and tapes a 60- to 90-minute concert in front of around 450 people. The atmosphere is intimate enough to allow for a certain amount of give-and-take between an artist and audience, and the ACL crew has become very skillful at capturing that relationship on screen.
“It’s really well-run,” says Kelly Willis, who has appeared on the show twice. “The rehearsal they have beforehand puts you completely at ease. Everybody from the cameramen on down rehearses their parts, so that by the time you go on, even though it might be a little scary, the odds are high that you’ll have a good performance.”
The resulting tape is then edited and the set list re-ordered. Lickona, who has a big hand at this point, takes special pride in arranging the program to his way of thinking, re-creating the ebb and flow of a live performance. He feels this editing is an important component of the program, one that makes it appealing to the television audience.
Vince Gill sums it up best in the just-published book Austin City Limits: 25 Years Of American Music (Billboard Books): “‘Austin City Limits’ is hip because they let musicians be musicians.”
Picking out particularly memorable moments from among 25 years of them is not easy. Lickona mentions the first appearance by Leonard Cohen, which, he says, produced a tremendous amount of viewer response. It also led Cohen, a Canadian, to claim the show revitalized his career in the United States.
Lickona also points to an appearance by Robbie Fulks. At the end of Fulks’ performance, he was given a standing ovation, a surprising response for a relatively unknown performer. Fulks, in turn, says that “doing the show was the height of coolness. I have been watching it since I was a little boy. It introduced me to artists like Doc Watson and Delbert McClinton. It had a big effect on me. Until I was around 16, I wanted to be Delbert. I still do actually.”
One other intensely memorable night was the tribute to Townes Van Zandt, filmed eleven months after his death in 1997. Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Peter Rowan and Rodney Crowell, among others, gathered to perform Townes’ songs and tell stories. It was an evening of powerful emotions.
Some PBS stations have dropped the show in recent years, reflecting economic pressures and recent competition from “Sessions At West 54th”, a live-music show filmed in New York City. “All of that is about to change when our 25th season premieres in February,” Lickona says. “Over the last four or five years we’ve had quite a bit of erosion, where only about 60 percent of the PBS affiliates were carrying the show. It really had nothing to do with the quality of the show. It was purely about economics.
“Every year at PBS meetings, programmers would approach me and tell me they loved the show but they couldn’t afford the fee that it cost to broadcast it. The audience is loyal but diverse. We just don’t get a very big rating that justified the cost. So we made a decision this year that the only way to deal with that problem was that starting with the 25th anniversary, we are offering the show for free to any and all stations that want to carry it.
“Currently we’re back up to about 92 percent of all the stations will start scheduling the show again starting in February. We’re thrilled about that. We had some competition from ‘Sessions At West 54th’, which has been free from the beginning. They are in New York and were able to raise $3 million almost immediately, where our total budget has never exceeded $1 million. They also had a ton of publicity and advertising. But we’re both free now, so we are no long competing among the affiliates.”
So the 25th anniversary of “Austin City Limits” can be seen as a turning point of sorts. This season will feature performances by the Texas Tornados, Wilco, the Mavericks, the Warren Brothers, Marty Stuart, Susan Ashton, Robert Cray, Doyle Bramhall, Bela Fleck & Friends, Joe Ely, Willie Nelson & Family with Leon Russell, Clint Black, and Garth Brooks. In addition, Emmylou Harris will host a songwriter’s special featuring Buddy & Julie Miller, Dave Matthews and Patty Griffin.
There are also plans to sell shows from the archives on video, and to release full-length shows on CD. Both should be available in the late spring of 2000, according to Lickona. He also has ideas on using the internet to access the show’s archives, but that is further down the road.
