Unless you've got an old VCR tape around labeled "Waylon Jennings – ACL," chances are you haven't seen the West Texas outlaw's Austin City Limits performance since it aired on television 1989.
On Tuesday, you can own it once it hits stores as the latest installment in a DVD series. Austin City Limits executive producer Terry Lickona said it’s a heavy breath of fresh air for the musty old ACL archive room.
"We've been recording these great shows for 31 years, they air on PBS a few times and then they go on the shelf. And that's been the end of it. We've had calls from people begging for old programs, which we can't give to anyone off the street. With the arrival of DVD, that's the format. The quality is there, especially the audio quality. And the price point has come down to where it makes more economic sense to start rolling these out and we're doing it with a vengeance right now," Lickona said.
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Blast from the past
Classics from Austin City Limits will be released on DVD.
 
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Tuesday's release of new DVD's from Waylon, Merle Haggard and Tony Joe White will hit shelves that already include ACL performances from Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, and the man in black that Lickona said helped marked a dramatic turning point for the show.
"Johnny Cash was backstage the night of the taping pacing nervously. I asked him if there was something I could do. I can remember his response like it was yesterday. 'This is a real music show. This matters to me a lot.' That hit me right there that this wasn't your average music show. We'd suddenly taken a dramatic leap out of the stratosphere," Lickona said.
This summer, a classic Willie Nelson show will be added to the series. And like its predecessors, it will feature a batch of songs that were recorded but didn't air due to the show's one-hour format. These extras add depth to what's already a series full of revelations and rediscoveries.
"We've always known there was a reason to keep all these original masters. We've never erased a single tape from any show we've ever done. We've just about run out of space to store these tapes, but they've turned out be gems. We're proud of these old shows and we think they deserve to be seen by new generations of fans and people that have been fans all along," Lickona said.
