College Station: Lyle Lovett at the Dixie Chicken

The Dixie Chicken kept throwing Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett out. It was 1976, and the two Texas A&M students showed up with guitars and started playing on the back porch. Nobody asked them to. The owners tossed them out more than once. Then the playing got better, and the Chicken let them stay.

Don Anz and Don Ganter opened the bar in 1974, two years earlier. They converted an old pool hall across from campus. They named it after a Little Feat album and hung swinging doors on the front. One ESPN writer later described the outside as “a honky-tonk as dreamed up by the Disney people who designed Frontierland.” Inside, it still smells like fifty years of spilled beer and Aggie bonfires.

A Porch Worth Writing Down

Lovett was chasing journalism and German degrees at Texas A&M, Class of ’79. He’d also started playing solo sets in the little bars around Northgate, the Dixie Chicken among them. But the real magnet stood two blocks over, a rented house on Church Avenue. Keen lived there, and friends stashed their guitars, fiddles, and banjos on his porch between classes.

That porch turned into “The Front Porch Song.” Keen wrote the first three verses, comparing the porch to a red-and-white Hereford bull and a steaming plate of enchiladas. Lovett added the final verse, calling the porch “70 years of Texas.” Keen cut the song on his 1984 debut, No Kinda Dancer. Lovett recorded his own version, “This Old Porch,” on his self-titled 1986 debut.

That porch is gone now, paved into a parking lot behind the Dixie Chicken. But Lovett had already photographed it, back in 1977, for a Texas A&M photojournalism class. His shot caught Keen and Sunny Fitzsimons sitting on the rail. Lovett posted the original on Twitter forty years later, in 2017, and noted that a magazine had cropped his version. The Dixie Chicken still runs that photo and story on its own blog today.

Keen sums up the porch’s fate in one Joni Mitchell line: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The Dixie Chicken, though, is still standing, still pouring beer two blocks from where that porch stood. Lovett and Keen kept writing and playing together for decades after their Texas A&M years.