First thing I thought of when I heard that Billy Graham had died was Explo '72, held here 46 summers ago. The festival was otherwise known as "the Christian Woodstock" to people — like its star, Billy Graham — who clearly hadn't attended Woodstock. Second thing I thought of was the immortal song "Pancho and Lefty," which Townes Van Zandt always insisted he wrote in a cheap motel to which he'd been exiled because of Graham and "all this religiosity going on in Dallas."
After a reader reminded me of the song's (alleged) origins, I wondered if those two events were related — the Explo and "Pancho," a song covered by Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and anyone else with taste and talent. The short answer: Yeah. Pretty sure. Probably?
Let's begin with what we know for sure. The myths come later. Maybe that's why they last longer.
Explo '72 was a Campus Crusade for Christ wingding, announced in 1971 as a six-day "spiritual explosion" during which the God-fearing youth would be trained in how to spread the Gospel among the heathens.
It started on shaky ground — deep in debt, short on accommodations. But by '72 there were hundreds of staffers in Dallas, and all involved — the pastors, the performers, even the ad agency promoting the event — agreed to pay their own way. And so, from June 12 through June 18, 1972, some 100,000 kids poured into a downtown Dallas ill-prepared for the influx.
Most were college students; some, still in high school. They arrived by bus, in vans; according to our archives, some hitchhiked; a few even walked. They stuffed the Sheraton, swamped the Adolphus, drowned the Statler and camped around downtown when they could find no more rooms at the inns. By day they studied and prayed at places like Memorial Auditorium; at night tens of thousands poured into the Cotton Bowl for speeches from Graham, Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach.
Despite storms, stifling heat and the tent cities, Explo '72 went off without a hitch. A Dallas cop working the Cotton Bowl one night told The New York Times they were "great kids." His bar wasn't high: "I haven't been called a pig once."
Explo '72 climaxed on June 17 — coincidentally, the same day five men were nabbed while breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, the beginning of the end for Graham's dear friend Richard Nixon. A few kids passed out from the humidity; two were rushed to Parkland because of suspected overdoses.
Johnny Cash played, then introduced Graham. Kris Kristofferson performed, too, though he didn't seem to know why he'd been invited. "I have been to church only one time in 30 years," he told the crowd.
Around the time Graham's faithful were descending on Dallas, the Fort Worth-born Van Zandt was driving around Texas with his buddy Daniel Antopolsky in the Georgia native's Ford van. During that trip, Van Zandt had to make a prolonged stopover in Dallas: Our archives show he had a weeklong stint at the McKinney Avenue folk-music club the Rubaiyat beginning June 13 — just as the Explo was exploding.
On their way to town, Van Zandt and Antopolsky were told Graham's army had swamped Dallas' streets and hotels and were warned to seek shelter elsewhere.
"A police officer said, 'Son, if you wanna go to Dallas, it'll be a long wait,'" Antopolsky said Thursday from his farmhouse in France. "So we weren't in a big hurry after that. Back in those days, we weren't thinking about time. If we ran out of time, we'd try to go get some more time. That's all."
The pair wound up renting a room in a dump outside of Denton and decided to kill time by writing any kind of song — "a stupid song, a smart song, a short song, a long song," Van Zandt recounted in the book Telling Stories, Writing Songs: An Album of Texas Songwriters. Antopolsky went outside and sat beneath an oak tree and penned what would become "Sweet Lovin' Music." And his buddy stayed inside and wrote what would become his most famous and enduring song.
"I sat there for three hours, three and a half hours," Van Zandt, a lanky man who liked to spin tall tales, once told an audience, "and 'Pancho and Lefty' drifted through the window, and I wrote it down."
The next day they drove to Dallas for another show at the Rubaiyat, to play for "about nine winos," Van Zandt once said. The way Van Zandt always told the tale, his buddy was behind the wheel, swerving from side to side to keep from running over "all these young Christians hitchhiking in to see Billy Graham — hundreds of them, thousands of them all over the road."
A Dallas cop, wearing mirrored shades, pulled them over. Took one long, suspicious look at the two of them — Antopolsky with his long hair, Van Zandt resembling "a wild Indian." He asked for their IDs. Daniel only had an expired license; the best Townes could cough up was an album cover. They were cooked.
"Daniel, out of the blue, looks up at the policeman through the window and says, 'Excuse me, sir, do you know Jesus?" Van Zandt told that crowd. "And the cop looks at him, hands him back his driver's license, and says, 'You boys best be careful.'"
And that's how Van Zandt came to credit Billy Graham with co-writing "Pancho and Lefty."
