Rock And Roll Museum To Host ACL Show's Archives
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) – What started as a Texas music program for Texans funded in part by a Texas beer company will finally have its history archived and stored by a certain Cleveland-based popular music institution.
On Friday, Austin City Limits and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced the long-running show's past will be digitized, encompassing nearly four decades of live performances, video footage and photographs into a searchable, usable archive.
The show dates back to 1974, when Willie Nelson became the first artist to stroll onstage Studio 6A at the University of Texas for the pilot. It aired in 1976, however.
"Whiskey River" was the first song played on the public television show. And while it started as a way to promote local music, the rapport and camaraderie between artist and audience made it apparent to PBS that this little Texas concert show had some serious potential.
Fast forward 38 years –– Austin City Limits has hosted more than 800 artists, many Texan and many not, and has now found a virtual home on a giant chunk of hard drive owned and operated by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Take a gander at what's being housed in Cleveland, as told by the show's longtime producer Terry Lickona: "Hundreds and thousands of hours of original video master recordings, audio master recordings, hundreds of thousands of photographs of all the performances, copies of artist contracts and various other production information from our files."
"Pretty much the entire record of Austin City Limits' 38 years worth of history, and counting," he told 1080 KRLD's Mitch Carr.
Lickona says the current state of the show's archive has kept him up at night. The majority of it is on video and audiotapes, he says, forms of media prone to deterioration over time.
"We had all of our original master recordings in one room in the basement of our building where the studio is located," Lickona said. "What if something happened to that room? Everything would just be gone –– a priceless treasure, really, a document of 38 years of American music."
Those recordings include artists as diverse as David Allen Coe (1984) to David Byrne (2002, 2008); bands from Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble (1983) to Guided by Voices (2005). There's nary a genre the show hasn't touched in it history, and Lickona said he hopes historians and fans alike will find the archive useful.
"Every bit of it will be digitized and stored at (the Hall's) brand new $20 million archive facility in Cleveland," he said. "It will be available for posterity for music writers, researchers and hopefully the public to have access to."
In 2002, the show helped spawn one of the state's most recognizable music festivals –– the two share a name. In 2010, the show and its original home in Studio 6A were formally welcomed into the Hall. It moved to ACL Live at Moody Hall in downtown during the 2011 season.
Now, the digitization finalizes things, of sorts. The end isn't near, however.
"Country music in Texas is very much alive; there are a lot of young indie rockers creating music of their own. And everything from hip hop in Houston and Dallas to jazz and Latin music, of course, in South Texas and beyond," he said. "So, I'd say music, as always, is a vital part of Texas culture and we'll try to continue to capture it as long as we can."
