Keep Gomorrah weird: the rest of Texas vilifies Austin as a breeding ground for long-haired hell-raisers. To me, it's an open-minded, open-hearted, magical little town--and always will be.

Texas Monthly, December, 2004 by Kinky Friedman

In the fifties I moved from Houston to Austin, which didn't seem like that much of a cataclysmic cultural leap at the time. Compared with Houston, Austin was a sleepy, beautiful little town in which I went to high school and formed my first band, the Three Rejects. It would take another decade or two for Austin to become fully vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking: hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western world. I never felt this way about Austin All I knew was that the music was great, the drugs were cheap, and the love was free. [paragraph] When I enrolled at the University of Texas, Willie Nelson was still a struggling songwriter and a pig farmer in Nashville and the Armadillo World Headquarters was just a gleam in Eddie Wilson's eye. In college...