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Welcoming dawn at Tommy Alverson's Oct. 9-11 festival.

After a short debate they decide to let the old guy sleep in peace. They pass another campsite where a couple inside a sheer tent is lying asleep beside two large dogs that begin barking madly. The guy inside the tent sluggishly tries to shush his dogs, but they only bark louder.

"Sorry we bothered your dogs; we'll go a different way next time," one of the young men says with courteous concern, even though moments before he was keen on setting a stranger's crotch ablaze.

Finally they reach their camp -- two tents pitched beside Squaw Creek. Several thousand people are staying at the campground, but most are bushed from a long night and have bedded down in air-conditioned RVs or neatly organized tents. But the Burleson fellows are wound tight, and they drink beer and assault one another with curse-filled but good-natured verbal attacks until the sky gently changes from black to navy blue and the cicadas come alive.

The year before, they attended Alverson's festival for the first time, had a blast, and told all their friends. "I'll be coming back the rest of my life," one of them says. "A bunch of our friends are coming later today. There will be about 25 of us here tonight."

These self-described "Burleson rednecks" from the University of Texas at Arlington have jumped a fast-moving train, a Texas Music festival scene where events have exploded in number, size, and frequency in recent years, barreling toward an unknown future. The mixture of young and old fans is causing clashes, and the growing number of attendees at some festivals has introduced a new level of obnoxious behavior, petty crime, and violence. Still, the growth spurt of multiple-day Texas Music blowouts is indisputable, and most people couldn't be happier.

Putting a festival together requires sweat, brains, and risk, but Tommy Alverson was as relaxed as a man could be two days before the gates opened for his Oct. 9-11 Family Gathering. Crewmembers and volunteers were preparing the stage area at the 55-acre campground on a cloudy afternoon while Alverson sat down at a picnic table to discuss Texas Music festivals and the future. Alverson dubbed his the "Family Gathering" to emphasize music and family over nonstop partying. As if on cue, granddaughter Baleigh Alverson, 6, wandered up and sat beside him.

"Can I go play on the playground?" she asked.

"Sure," Alverson said. "Don't hurt yourself, and holler if you do."

Alverson was pleased by a promising weather forecast -- he's hosted more than one festival ruined by rain. Sure enough, the upcoming weekend would prove to be picture-perfect: Attendance hit 4,000 compared to the 2,500 he drew the year before, and the crowd stayed in line.

Alverson entered the festival hosting business in 1998 after performing for years at Larry Joe Taylor's annual shindig in April. "People kept telling me they liked Larry Joe's in the spring, but they wanted another one in a different time of year," he said. "I took the bait."

Taylor almost single-handedly introduced a new generation of Fort Worth-Dallas folks to the joys of Texas Music festivals, which had been around for years but were either far away or were one-day events that didn't involve camping. The Terlingua International Chili Championship and its music festival were a 13-hour drive from the Metroplex. The Kerrville Folk Festival was only six hours away but had become overrun by stuffy folk-purists playing lame-ass original songs and then sneering at amateur guitarists who might have the gall to play an old George Jones tune around a campfire. Harder-bitten Texas Music fans felt out of place. Willie Nelson's July 4 picnics and Robert Earl Keen's Texas Uprisings were a hoot, but each lasted only one day.

Taylor combined the best of everything -- camping, stage music, campfire singalongs, chili cook-offs, around-the-clock partying -- and stayed within an hour-and-a-half's drive of Fort Worth. A hundred people showed up at Taylor's first festival in 1989 at a two-acre Mingus pasture, and the event slowly grew over the next few years. Those early lineups consisted of Outlaw pioneers such as Gary P. Nunn and Ray Wylie Hubbard, plus lesser-known older artists, such as Taylor, Alverson, and Joe Pat Hennen, who were having trouble finding a following in the club scene. By the 1990s, the festival was drawing a few thousand fans, and Taylor stretched it to three and later four days, found bigger venues, and hired more bands. He added young and unknown artists, such as Pat Green and Charlie Robison, and they attracted the college crowd that had latched onto Keen's rough-hewn music. College kids, especially those from Tarleton State University, have been attending the festivals since the beginning, although they used to arrive in smaller numbers.

By the mid-1990s, the crowd was getting younger, and they liked to bunch up close in front of the stage and sing along with equally new artists. The older folks scooted their chairs back and kept out of the fray. Everyone enjoyed the loose and wild ambiance, but each year Taylor's festival got larger, younger, and wilder, and the older folks were shoved farther back and became more prone to complain. Thefts and fights, once so rare, began occurring with frequency.

Three years ago, when Taylor's festival was still in Meridian, food and booze were stolen from me and other nearby campers. After a couple of days, police officers were seen handcuffing a couple of young guys beside a tent. Inside was a huge bounty of stolen potato chips, bread, meat, beer, and bottles of whiskey. "Look inside, find what's yours, and take it," the police told me.

That year, attendance had grown to 7,000. In 2002, about 10,000 showed up -- so many that Taylor moved this year to the 450-acre Melody Mountain Ranch near Stephenville, where in April more than 20,000 people swept over the grounds like floodwaters past a broken dam, finally forcing police to turn away people at the gate. The chaos inside created controversy over the direction the festival was heading. Some older patrons vowed never to return, younger fans declared they'd return every year until the day they died, and Taylor wondered what in the hell he had spawned.

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