The ZZ Top La Grange Concert: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago this week probably the biggest concert in the history of this area was held when ZZ Top played at the Fayette County Fair in front of an estimated crowd of 18,000.

People from all over the nation came to town to hear the iconic song “La Grange” played in La Grange for the first time.

Dr. Larry Hatfield is quick to credit an army of local volunteers for helping make the concert possible, but the whole thing was his idea, and he’d been working on it for at least five years before it happened during his run as Fair President.

We caught up with him last week for a wide-ranging interview about how that concert came together.

Here are some highlights: “It started about five years before and my connection was through the drummer – Frank Beard. His best friend, his name is Tim, and my brother actually played in a golf tournament together. When I was telling my brother Kenny about this concert idea, he said, ‘well, I just played with Frank’s best friend.’And so he gave me his number, and then I talked to Tim, and Tim talked to Frank, and the guys wanted to play.

“I said, ‘How much is it going to cost? It was like $125,000. And it’s like, well, we don’t have that much money. So it was on the back burner for a while. And then we did really well financially with the fair before them (Merle Haggard played the fair in 2014 before a huge crowd)..... So we had enough money to talk to them and I said, ‘Yeah, we can do this.

“They gave me a number of, I guess, their business manager in L.A., so I called out to L.A., and this guy had just been to the Grammys the night before. I don’t remember his name, but he said ‘they are on a flight to Chicago. This is their number, they know who you are, and they want to talk to you.’ So I visited with them and then I just kind of let it drop because I didn’t know what to do next.

“Well, out of the blue, I get a call from these two guys (Lavon and Brad) in Oklahoma and they had produced ZZ Top shows for a number of years.

And so the one guy, his name’s LaVon, he calls me, and he goes, ‘Larry,’ he said, ‘I got a strange call.’ He said, ‘I’m in the business of you call me and you want ZZ Top and I go get him.’ He said, ‘this worked the opposite. They called me and said, we want to play La Grange, make it happen’ ...

“So anyway, I met them the first time in Oklahoma and got to visit with them. And they knew about La Grange and so they were excited. I had taken some kolaches because they like kolaches.

“You know like, when you want to deal with the old American Indians, you would bring them beads and stuff. But we’d already had everything set up ...

“The band cost us like $125,000, but by the time you added production, fencing, security, buses, we were probably in the area of $300,000, which scared me, but we were already into it.

“It was our first year, I think, to do online ticket sales. And so the online ticket sales more than covered our costs so we were very profitable before the fair started, which was good.

...“Then the day arrives where ZZ Top’s coming. We have all these things set up. We had so many people helping, so many volunteers. And whenever you do these things, there’s people who are helpers and there are people who are anchors – trying to hold you back or get in your way. But anyway, we had plenty of volunteers that it took a lot of work off of us, but still, I mean, it was work.

“So they get there. Each band member has his own bus. Pablo (one of the concert organizers) has his own bus.And then the rest of the crew has a bus. So there are like five buses back there. So (band mebers) Frank and Dusty were there. And Pablo was there. But Billy Gibbons (the band’s lead singer) hadn’t gotten there.

“And then in a couple of minutes, here comes this bus. So they get Billy parked. And I walk up and he looks at me and goes, ‘Hey, Larry, I need to talk to you.’

“I said, ‘Okay, Billy, what do you want to talk about?’

“Because normally if somebody wants to talk to me, we’re in trouble for something, okay? He said, ‘you and I need to talk about making this an every year occasion, you know, a festival.’

‘Wow,’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, we can talk about that.’ But unfortunately, we never really have gotten to do that.

So they’re all there (the day before Saturday’s show). Billy goes over to the livestock area. And he’s not hard to pick out because he’s wearing that velvety kind of warm-up suit with the little rhinestones and his little beanie cap. And so he’s standing there watching livestock, and a lady walks up to him and asks him if she could take a picture with him. Because at first I think everyone just kind of stayed away, intimidated, a little worried. He said, ‘Sure, it would be $5.’ And she said, ‘Okay,’ and they took the picture, and then he looked at her and he said, ‘I’ve got to go back to the bus and get the $5 because I don’t have any cash on me.’

“So it was fun. And then, during the day, Pablo, I ran into him and he said, ‘Hey Larry, let’s go for a ride. I want to see what your fairgrounds is like.’ So here we go. And, we’re riding the fairgrounds and he’s looking at the old Marge Rosenberg stage and all this stuff. And I’m telling him what’s going to happen, we’re gonna have like closed circuit TV there for the folks who can’t get out into the venue because of wheelchairs and they can’t walk, stuff like that. And we talked a while, and he said, ‘you know,’ he said, ‘these guys are nervous.’I said, ‘what do you mean they’re nervous?’ He said, ‘they’ve been wanting to play La Grange for so many years and tomorrow’s finally it. We get to play La Grange.’ So they were a little nervous. And it’s like, oh, that’s awesome.

“That was Friday night. And so then Saturday rolls around, and everything’s going smoothly.

“We had, per their specs for the concert, we had rented a couple of generators from Stewart and Stevenson (electrical products out of Houston), and they were to be prepared a certain way. Well, Ray Goehring was in charge of that, so Ray got two plus one. So we had one they would use, a spare one, and he even got a spare for a spare.

“So this opening band is playing before ZZ Top called ‘Goodbye June.’

“And the audio is breaking up. It’s like, it’s not playing well. And I just didn’t think too much of it. I thought, you know, whatever, they’re going to get it all straight.

“Well, then we have our VIP tent that the McCourt and Sons had put together for us. And so we had, like, U.S. Representative Michael Mc-Caul, State Senator Lois Kolkhorst. I can’t remember if we had a state representative there at the time. But anyway, Judge Janecka was there, and Mayor Moerbe and others.

“We’re talking, and I get a call from LaVon and Brad. And Brad said, where are you, Larry? I said, I’m in the VIP tent.

“He said, ‘I need you to come over here. Do not walk. Run.’ I said, ‘okay.’And I told them, ‘I’ve got to go. Because, like, U.S. Representative Mc-Caul was going to introduce them.’And, so I go over there. Well, these generators are all failing. Their brain is a computer. And so when a computer detects that something is wrong, it starts to shut them down so that it won’t create some big problem or ruin them. So the first one shuts down. Well, then the second one is shutting down and the third one is shutting down. So now we have no generators for power. And so we’re getting closer to the concert and as we get closer to the concert we can’t tell the people out there that we’re having technical problems because we don’t have any speakers that are working because we have no power.

“So we roll into gear. We had an electrician from Stewart and Stevenson who was there on hand for the day $188 an hour. But he’s not an IT guy, so he couldn’t do this. But he had phone numbers. So he was able to reach someone in San Antonio on Saturday night on Labor Day weekend who could drive a truck, load a generator, and bring it to La Grange. That’s all kind of miraculous.

“Well, in the meantime the generator that McCourt and Sons had provided for our VIP tent would fit what we needed. And so also in the carnival, Mary Talley of Talley Amusements, she was going to shut down some rides and bring that generator, so we could use it. So we took the VIP tent generator first, and some guys did some wiring on it, and it came up.

“The one from Stewart and Stevenson from San Antonio, it showed up about five or six songs into their show.

“So our show was late, at least an hour maybe an hour and a half.

“By far one of the longest hours of my life because we’ve all worked hard to get this here and it’s here and that looks like it’s not going to happen. So anyway, they get it all going, and the guys doing the production got the sound where they needed it. And so then Brad and LaVon were talking, and Pablo, and they’re a little concerned that maybe the guys don’t even want to do the show anymore because it’s been so delayed.

“So Pablo said, ‘I’ll go get them. He said, ‘they’re going to do the show.’ And, uh, they came back and I talked to Pablo beforehand. I said, you know, I’ve got like a US representative here and State Senator to introduce them. He said, I’ll see what they want to do.

“When Pablo returned he said we’re not going to do an introduction. They’re just going to start playing. And so I thanked Representative Mc-Caul for coming and Senator Kohlkorst. And Representative McCaul said, ‘Look, Larry,’ he said, ‘when they come back, I’ll be back to introduce them.’

“Everything goes off really well. I saw them sing ‘La Grange’ on a TV monitor because I was out doing stuff.

“I saw about the first two or three songs ... They told me that during the concert, several different times, three times, Billy mentioned about doing this again in La Grange. Brad and Lavon, they said, ‘we have seen him dozens of times. He’s never, ever mentioned about going to a place again ... but that night he did. He wanted to be in La Grange.’

“And so then the show was over, and we got them off stage. And then chaos broke out with getting people out of the fairgrounds. We had a system, but it wasn’t fail-proof. It was so slow getting out of the fairgrounds and people were walking on the highway and police officers would come up and turn their sirens on a little bit just you know a couple of times so people would move over and they would but as soon as the cop car went by they moved back on the road so the shuttle buses were traveling at one or two miles an hour, and it really slowed down people getting out of the facility but there was no one there the next morning that got left behind.

“The thing I think we could have done better is have made a more regulated line for people to go through to get out because it was just mass chaos, they came out and they just went to buses. The biggest thing we were scared of was somebody’s going to get run over. It was just so many people that the buses couldn’t do their job because it was just a crunch of people.

“The preparation work – I would meet really almost weekly with the sheriff’s office and the city police and we would go over numbers because they needed numbers as best I could give them so they knew how many people they needed. They had actually other county law officers covering our county while they were on site.

“But it was exciting. It was a lot of hard work. I mean, a lot of hard work. And a lot of people put a lot of hours into making it happen. And so, you know, was it worth it? Oh, yeah. In a heartbeat. Yeah. In a heartbeat. I think everybody will agree on that.

“I think, out of 18,000 only three people were brought into the area where the police officers were. Law enforcement had worked hard to put this together because they wanted it to go really well. And they did a great job.

“It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And I’d love to do it again, you know? For the last few years, the guys out of Oklahoma, Brad and LaVon, we’ve talked about it.

“COVID kind of messed us up. The thing is they would like to do, just have it outside of the fair, just have it a single weekend of music. And then possibly have ZZ Top bring some of their memorabilia trailers down and some of the cars, you know, the roadsters or whatever, the little sleek cars they have and do a show. So we’ve talked about it. Just getting it off the ground has been hard to do.

“We missed a little window of opportunity a couple years ago because it was their 50th anniversary of making music ... And the thing is you have to almost be probably two years out to make it happen.

“I know Dusty has now passed away a couple of years ago but they’re still playing and it would be great to have them back one more time.

“Brad and LaVon, I talk to them fairly often and they tell me that this was still one of the better concerts that the rock and roll world has seen. It was special to a lot of people.”