Bill Arhos, 1935-2015: Austin City Limits Programming Pioneer

When Bill Arhos drafted a proposal to pitch to US public television for a live music program in the mid-1970s, he unknowingly inserted himself into Austin, Texas’s identity as “Live Music Capital of the World.” In 2016, the show that evolved from Arhos’s idea into an icon—Austin City Limits—entered its 40th season. The four-decade span marks television’s longest for a concert series, surpassing another Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) production, WGBH’s Boston Pops’ 34-year reign in 2010. The Austin City Limit(less) milestone will be commemorated without the in-person presence of its founding figure, behind-the-scenes force, and hall of famer Arhos, who died on 11 April 2015, at the age of 80.

Arhos, a native of the East Texas town Teague and son of Greek immigrants, was the program director at the University of Texas at Austin’s KLRN (KLRU since 1987) public television affiliate. (He was general manager and president of the station from 1986 to 1999.) In the wake of major studio and equipment upgrades that transformed the campus production space from a hole in the wall to a full-fledged television station in 1975, Arhos, in collaboration with some KLRN colleagues, producer Paul Bosner and director Bruce Scafe, was eager to pitch a music program to PBS.

Arhos’s vision was local, and fixated on the obvious—Austin’s most visible cultural product: music. A self-pronounced frustrated guitar player, Arhos attempted to translate the capital city’s burgeoning music scene, Jan Reid’s 1974 seminal chronicle The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and his own memorable live music experiences from his youth into an intimate, living-room performance setting. The projected one-hour, no-frills format would feature one band performing a set live in front of a studio audience, rather than the one-song standard of television variety and talk shows. The KLRN trio considered numerous titles for the proposed series, among them the Jerry Jeff Walker song “Hill Country Rain”; “Austin Space” as an echo of “Lost in Space”; “River City Country” and “Travis County Line” (after Arhos saw a movie marquee for Macon County Line), before settling on the Texas Highway Department city limits sign that they drove by on a daily basis.

PBS bought into the Arhos project, and the pilot episode launched in 1976 as part of one of PBS’s first national on-air fund drives. The premiere featured Willie Nelson and was a prelude to a 13-episode inaugural season, with Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues” the opening theme announcing each show. Primarily a country music showcase, the PBS production originating from Austin had little competition across television’s music programming landscape, the lone exception being the hillbilly hoot Hee Haw.

The earliest installments of Austin City Limits conjured a bar-band atmosphere with appealing authenticity. When artists forgot a lyric or hit a bad note, they kept playing. The Lost Gonzo Band led off a show with a song about dead armadillos. And there was Jerry Jeff Walker slouching onto the stage, shirt-tail out, looking up at one point and grinning at someone dancing in the crowd in a gorilla costume. Awkward camera shots were frequently cluttered with audience heads and shoulders in and out of the frame. Initially, drawing a crowd into the studio was surprisingly challenging, considering the surrounding music scene. Arhos recalled “begging people to come in off the street,” noting that his favorite was a “guy who'd been sniffing paint. You could see it on his moustache—silver. He had a terrific time” (Reid 281).

The show’s free-spirited nature may have climaxed early on in an episode that featured a sunglassed, cigar-smoking Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, whose profane and unruly set began with a song about Amelia Earhart’s plane crash and worked down to “Asshole from El Paso.” The episode never aired. Arhos, who was Austin City Limits’ executive producer until his retirement in 1999, astutely offered the episode as a “bonus” to stations. There were no takers, and the Friedman performance became a cult curiosity and loitering “lost episode.”

Austin City Limits introduced much of America to “progressive country” and “redneck rock,” a regional strand of rock and counterculture-colored lyrics by country singer-songwriters and “cosmic cowboys,” a conspicuous contrast to the traditional, mainstream country sounds of Nashville. Among the artists in the show’s initial wave were the Charlie Daniels Band, B. W. Stevenson, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Merle Haggard, Marcia Ball, and Western swingers Asleep at the Wheel and Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys. The exclusivity was not long-term, as the show’s line-up expanded beyond its country roots to include blues and bluegrass, folk, rock, and indie and alternative genres. The television series also spawned the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2002.

While Austin City Limits was at the forefront of live concert staging in television, the one-hour, small studio series was not groundbreaking. There was precedent, including another PBS production. WTTW-Chicago’s Soundstage, which originated in 1972 as Made in Chicago, began a 13-season stretch in 1974, then resumed between 2003 and 2010. In 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night Live’s small-scale, garage-like, after-hours setting featured a musical guest’s two-song set surrounded by satire and sketches.

Arhos’s Austin presentation arguably validated the format and emerged as a vanguard that would leave a lasting mark on television’s live music lineage. Virtually every concert vein and variation since Austin City Limits’ inception contains its imprint. In the late 1980s, the brilliantly obscure Sunday Night/Michelob Presents Night Music (1988, NBC; 1989–90, syndication) featured hosts Jools Holland and Dave Sanborn exploring and orchestrating mix-matched musicians performing together. MTV’s celebrated acoustic Unplugged, which commenced in 1989, prompted the mid-1990s Live from the House of Blues (TBS, 1995) and VH1 series—the short-lived, collaborative Duets (1995), which paired artists performing each other’s songs, and Storytellers (1996), which evolved out of the Kinks’ Ray Davies’s solo “Storyteller Tour” in 1996. The musical memoir performance concept featured artists illuminating the origins of their best-known songs with stories and anecdotes. The following year, Sessions at West 54th (1997), taped at the Sony Music Studios in New York City, enlisted hosts from Santa Monica’s renowned KCRW, Talking Head David Byrne and singer-songwriter John Hiatt, in its three seasons. Into the 2000s, Crossroads (CMT, 2003) paired country artists with musicians from other genres, song swapping and duetting, while cable’s Sundance Channel series Spectacle: Elvis Costello with… (2008) integrated talk-show conventions into the musical mutuality and experimentation. With Austin City Limits prevailing through to the present, public broadcasting has remained at the forefront of musical programming, adding National Public Radio/NPR.org’s delightful Tiny Desk Concert series to the live lineage, initiated with a Laura Gibson performance in 2008.

During its remarkable four-decade run, Austin City Limits has withstood numerous music marketplace movements, shifts, and trends, from disco, MTV, and music video, through to the download and digital domain, not to mention having weathered routine PBS funding crises and political entanglements. The iconic music series’s format and tone have remained faithful to the original, unadorned live concert concept conceived by Bill Arhos, an unsung hero both inside and outside Austin’s city limits.