KLRU Makes “Austin City Limits” A Reality (Part 2 - Oct 27, 2024)

by Scott Sosebee

This is the second part of the story of “Austin City Limits”

By the early 1970s, the new “Outlaw Country,” or “Progressive Country,” as its performers had come to prefer as its moniker, had begun to find an audience in the live music halls around Central Texas, and some play on Texas country radio stations. The fresh approach and melding of different genres had also attracted the attention of some recording executives who presciently saw that such a sound had the potential to sell records. However, it needed a bigger push to make it more “national” and to draw in the mass appeal of a broader audience. What it needed was a medium that drew potential fans to its style, and in the 1970s, the most direct way to accomplish such a feat was through television.

While the “outlaw” sound was making its mark, there were changes afoot in some of the delivery of the nation’s broadcast channels. For decades, the United States’ concept of free-market conveyance of public television signals had relied on private enterprises using their airwaves to deliver content. It was a system that worked in a broad sense, but also limited that content to whatever appealed to a very broad, very diverse market. Critics pointed out that such an approach resulted in an often bland and, at times, intellectually limited product that—in the minds of the most extreme detractors of the industry—had a deleterious effect on the nation as a whole. For that and other reasons, Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which strengthened and committed more public resources to forming a system that, relying on donations and public funding, was free from the influence advertisers placed on for-profit outlets. The first station of what would become the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) began in Boston in 1969 (it would sign onto the air in 1970), and it set a model that would use the support and resources of local donors and the region’s universities to produce content. Eventually, by the mid-1970s, it would truly begin to form as a “national system” by using content produced and funded by member stations.

That same pattern took place in Austin. Station KLRN (which would eventually become known as KRLU) had come online as a PBS affiliate, largely through funding that the Texas legislature had authorized to the University of Texas Communications Department. KLRN built offices and studios and hired staff but was looking for local programming. One man in charge of finding such content was program director Bill Arhos. He had cut his teeth as a station intern in the early 1960s while a UT student and then worked for the Texas Microwave Project, an early pilot program designed to produce educational programming in the state. By 1974, Arhos had risen to program director, and he became tasked with finding content to put on the air as a new PBS affiliate.

In an interview, after he retired in 2000, Arhos said that when the concept of “Austin City Limits” began to percolate, it was a simple vision: just re-create the same type of show he and others had seen at Armadillo World Headquarters. All he wanted was a performer in an intimate setting with an audience. In his words, “Just put a rug on the floor and have a concert.” Arhos and his staff had created content, much like many other PBS stations, centered on children’s educational programming, but his board of directors wanted something that had adult appeal and also could attract a national audience. He admitted that the board had in mind something like “NOVA,” the science series that WGBH in Boston had pioneered, not a music show, but that was a charge he could not make happen. WGBH had a yearly budget of $100 million; KRLN had one of $6 million. That made a series such as “NOVA” out of the station’s reach.

Arhos knew that Austin was seeing a musical revolution and that the growing live music scene was an innovation he should find a way to reproduce. Besides, a live music show such as the one he envisioned—a “rug and a concert”—would be inexpensive to produce, especially given the sheer number of talented musicians who were currently making a base in Austin. He applied for a $13,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and prepared to shoot two pilots. He would shoot the shows in Studio A of Communications Building B on the University of Texas campus. He found—for cheap—a four-person crane camera that was so old it had been used to film “The Wizard of Oz” in 1937, and he borrowed surplus microphones from KUT, the public radio station on the UT campus. Perhaps most amazingly, taking a cue from the long-running Ryman Auditorium show “Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, performers—no matter their level of fame—were paid just union scale, a tradition that continues throughout the program’s fifty-year run.

Arhos had a vision, but would it have appeal? Music programming was a risky venture, and one that could spark initial interest but, like a bright-burning comet, fades quickly. He also would have to build his program not just on the cheap but around acts that perhaps the remainder of the nation had never heard of. It had to be innovative, for sure, but also “mainstream” enough to appeal to a mass of viewers. Arhos has credited an impressive cast of people who helped make “Austin City Limits’” first and subsequent broadcasts a success: Writers Jan Reid (who wrote the impressive The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock) and Joe Gracey helped with the concept of the show. Paul Bosner and Bruce Scafe signed on as producer and director, respectively, of the first season. Arhos had worked with Scafe on an ill-fated radio broadcast show from the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1973, and he had a notion of how to direct a live-music show. Bosner was an Austin music aficionado and helped Arhos and Scafe through his contact with and knowledge of the live music scene in Austin.

Arhos took the whole idea to the head of special projects at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He had little budget, not much more than a concept, and few people who had ever worked on such a project. No one at the national office had even an inkling about how a show centered on live music in Austin, Texas, could even possibly find an audience. But the PBS officers wanted programming, and so they decided to just give Arhos his shot. “Austin City Limits” was about to go on the air.

Next Week: “Austin City Limits hits the airwaves, but will it be able to find an audience and last?

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.