With the success of the Armadillo and Austin's burgeoning music scene, KLRN (now KLRU), the local PBS television affiliate, created Austin City Limits, a program showcasing popular local, regional, and national music acts.

The Armadillo Christmas Bazaar began in 1976 at the Armadillo, and is still held annually during the Christmas season. The bazaar was another attempt to improve cash flow for the hall. When the Armadillo closed, the bazaar changed locations every year, as it leased whatever large empty retail space might be available at the time. In 1995, the bazaar settled at the Austin Music Hall, its current home. The bazaar has become one of the top-ranked arts and crafts shows in the nation with a long waiting list of artisans who wish to show their work.

On August 19, 2006, the City of Austin dedicated a commemorative plaque at the site where the Armadillo once stood. Co-founder Eddie Wilson was on hand and stated:

"It is still on the lips and minds of a lot of people 26 years after it closed. This is noteworthy for me because of the zero-tolerance mentality, and now the city erected a memorial that glorifies the things of the past that are not accepted today."

Some acts that played at the Armadillo

• AC/DC
• Asleep at the Wheel
• Austin Ballet Theatre
• The B-52's
• Balcones Fault
• Count Basie
• Elvin Bishop
• Tommy Bolin
• The Boomtown Rats
• David Bromberg
• Roy Buchanan
• Budgie
• Jimmy Buffett
• Ray Charles
• Charlie Daniels Band
• Cheech and Chong
• The Clash
• Jimmy Cliff
• David Allan Coe
• Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen
• Ry Cooder
• James Cotton
• Rick Derringer
• Devo
• Dire Straits
• Jon Emery
• Joe Ely
• Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys
• Flying Burrito Brothers
• Greezy Wheels
• HaHaVishnu Orchestra
• Emmy Lou Harris
• John Hartford
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The blend of country and rock music performed at the hall became known as "The Austin Sound," "Redneck Rock," or "Cosmic Cowboy." Many upcoming and established acts such as Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, and ZZ Top played the Armadillo. Freddie King, Frank Zappa, and Commander Cody all recorded live albums there. Bruce Springsteen played five shows during 1974. The Australian band AC/DC played their first American show at the Armadillo with Canadian band Moxy in July 1977.

Despite its successes, the Armadillo always struggled financially. The addition of the Armadillo Beer Garten in 1972 and the subsequent establishment of food service were both bids to generate positive cash flow. However, the financial difficulties continued. This predicament was blamed on a combination of large guaranteed payments for the acts, cheap ticket prices, and poor promotion. The club finally had to lay off staff members in late 1976 and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1977.

Another factor in the club's demise was that it sat on 5.62 acres of prime real estate in what soon became a prime development area in the rapidly growing city. The Armadillo's landlord sold the property for an amount estimated between $4 million and $8 million.

The final concert at the Armadillo took place on December 31, 1980. The sold-out New Year's Eve show featured Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Some reports say the show ended at 4 a.m., while others claim that the bands played until dawn. The contents of the Armadillo were sold at auction in January 1981, and the old armory was razed for a high-rise office building.

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I use to skate there! I was 6-10 years old living on W.6th... Sandy's Ice Cream is still across the street to date!

...the rest is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ArmadilloWorldHQ.jpg

In 1969, Austin's flagship rock venue, the Vulcan Gas Company, closed, leaving the city's nascent live music scene without an incubator. One night, Eddie Wilson, manager of the local group Shiva's Headband, stepped outside a nightclub where the band was playing and noticed an old, abandoned National Guard armory. Wilson found an unlocked garage door on the building and was able to view the cavernous interior using the headlights of his automobile. He had a desire to continue the legacy of the Vulcan Gas Company, and was inspired by what he saw in the armory to create a new music hall in the derelict structure. The armory was estimated to have been built in 1948, but no records of its construction could be located. The building was ugly, uncomfortable, and had poor acoustics, but offered cheap rent and a central location. Posters for the venue usually noted the address as 525 1/2 Barton Springs Road (Rear), behind the Skating Palace (approximate coordinates 30.258 -97.750).

The name for the Armadillo was inspired by the use of armadillos as a symbol in the artwork of Jim Franklin, a local poster artist, and from the building itself. In choosing the mascot for the new venture, Wilson and his partners wanted an "armored" animal since the building was an old armory. The nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) was chosen because of its hard shell that looks like armor, its history as a survivor (virtually unchanged for 50 million years), and its near-ubiquity in central Texas. Wilson also believed the building looked like it had been some type of headquarters at one time. He initially proposed "International Headquarters" but in the end it became "World Headquarters."

In founding the Armadillo, Wilson was assisted by Franklin, Mike Tolleson, an entertainment attorney, Bobby Hedderman from the Vulcan Gas Company and Hank Alrich. Funding for the venture was initially provided by Shiva's Headband founder, Spencer Perskin, and Mad Dog, Inc. an Austin literati group.

The Armadillo World Headquarters officially opened on August 7, 1970 with Shiva's Headband, the Hub City Movers, and Whistler performing. The hall held about 1,500 patrons, but chairs were limited, so most patrons sat on the floor on sections of carpet that had been pieced together.

The Armadillo caught on quickly with the hippie culture of Austin because admission was inexpensive and the hall tolerated marijuana use. Even though illicit drug use was flagrant, the Armadillo was never raided. Anecdotes suggest the police were worried about having to bust their fellow officers as well as local and state politicians.

Soon, the Armadillo started receiving publicity in national magazines such as Rolling Stone. Time magazine wrote that the Armadillo was to the Austin music scene what The Fillmore had been to the emergence of rock music in the 1960s. The clientele became a mixture of hippies, cowboys, and businessmen who stopped by to have lunch and a beer and listen to live music. At its peak, the amount of Lone Star draft beer sold by the Armadillo was second only to the Houston Astrodome. The Neiman-Marcus department store even offered a line of Armadillo-branded products.

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Predominant is the use of narcotics, particularly marijuana but also numerous other stimulants and hallucinogens. Most stories in the canon use drugs, or the attempt to purchase them, for humorous effect, although heroin is notably missing from the list of drugs that the Freak Brothers would condone the consumption of. The theme of foreign travel is often explored, most notably in the three-part Idiots Abroad series. Food is a commonly recurring subject. These stories most often involve Fat Freddy and his marijuana-induced "munchies" (increased appetite). The squalor engendered by the Brothers' indolence is often highlighted; several strips feature the household's cockroach population, ruled over by a fascist monarchy. Several stories satirise governments, particularly the U.S. government. These stories invariably show politicians and their agents as corrupt, incompetent, or both.

It is common for the storylines to begin with an air of realism, but rapidly descend via surrealism into complete insanity, often explained by use of the "...it was all a dream..." device.

Some of the best-loved Freak Brothers stories include:

• Grass Roots: The Brothers find a "year's supply" of cocaine and move to the country with the proceeds
• Chariots of the Globs: Fat Freddy's Cat is abducted by aliens
• Mexican Odyssey: The Brothers holiday in Mexico, are thrown in jail and escape with the help of shaman Don Longjuan, in a partial spoof of the Carlos Castaneda books
• The Idiots Abroad: The Brothers go their separate ways; Fat Freddy accidentally joins a group of nuclear terrorists, while Phineas becomes the world's richest man after founding a new religion
• 
  Freddy, with his cat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Brothers

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The Freak Brothers are a threesome of hippies (hippies were commonly known as "freaks" in U.S. slang) from San Francisco: Phineas Freak, Freewheelin' Franklin, and Fat Freddy. The trio are anti-heroes, taking large quantities of drugs and consistently defying authority. They are lazy (several storylines revolve around the "horror" of one of the brothers having to find work) and unreliable — particularly in the case of Fat Freddy.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, from left to right, Phineas, Freddy and Franklin

The three Freak Brothers have very different personalities:

• Freewheelin' Franklin, although laid-back, is the most street-smart of the trio. He has no known last name, and apparently has always been on the streets. In one story, he reveals that he grew up in an orphanage and never knew his parents. Tall and skinny, he has a big bulbous nose, a waterfall moustache, and a ponytail, and wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.

• Phineas T. Freak is the intellectual and idealist of the group; he can and has created new drugs, takes an avid interest in politics, and is the most committed of them to social change. He hails from Texas, and while his mother is relaxed and openminded, his father is a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society. He is the hairiest, tall and skinny with a thick bush of black hair, a beard and glasses.

• Fat Freddy Freekowtski is the least intelligent, and can be seen as an embodiment of pure appetite. He regularly gets "burned" on drug transactions. He comes from a large, quite ordinary family in Cleveland. He is fat, or at least plump (hence his name) with curly yellow hair.

Other regularly occurring characters include:

• Fat Freddy's Cat, who appears mainly in his own, separate strip at the bottom of the one-page Freak Brothers strips, but who also has several multi-page stories devoted to him. Many of his strips parallel a storyline in the corresponding Freak Brothers story, and often have themes of a scatological nature. The Cat is usually known as "Fat Freddy's Cat", but his name is "Fat Freddy Scat" (See Freak Brothers #2) and has been known to use the alias "F. Frederic Skitty", a variation on "Fat Freddy Scat." His "nephews" refer to him as "Uncle F." He often finds himself confronting an army of cockroaches and a huge tribe of mice who share the apartment with the Freak Brothers. A sort of hippie "Garfield", he is far smarter than his owner (whom he frequently refers to as "the obese one") and regards the Freak Brothers with amused contempt.
• Norbert the Nark, an inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest the Freak Brothers.
• Country Cowfreak, a hippy who grows vast quantities of marijuana at his isolated farmstead.
• Dealer McDope, one of the trio's dealers. He is often name-checked in the magazines but rarely appears "in person". 

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I was just writing someone today with the samed words... how much Austin was not "weird" ~~~ it was 'was way cool', super laid back! SAFE.

The beauty of the hills, lakes, all the diverse music, with now a generation we raised!

Nice to meet you! Glad to see you here posting!

Dixie

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Fastened to telephone poles and hoardings, or hanging in galleries and museums, concert posters chronicle the evolution of popular culture with a unique and conspicuous eloquence. In Austin, Texas particularly, poster art provides a formidable counterpoint to a thriving live music tradition. Austin posters and popular music are each manifestations of the same maverick urge - the urge to buck the system and to define reality on one's own terms. And in the same way that rock & roll itself is a progressive, persistent defiance of the status quo, from the days of The Vulcan to the 'Dillo, and then Raul's, and now the Black Cat, the poster art of each succeeding generation has consumed its progenitors. As such, Austin's poster tradition is reborn in the rambunctious vision of every new guitar slinger or renegade garage band. For postering in Austin is largely an act of creative solidarity and a labor of love, and as long as live music flourishes, uncompromising and original, so too will the poster art that celebrates it.

Copyright © 1991 Nels Jacobson. [This article first appeared in OFFtheWALL: 1991/Volume No. 1/Issue No. 2; 1992/Volume No. 1/Issue No. 3]

http://www.jagmo.com/articles/index.html

*fair use*

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Over the years no Austin printer has been as consistently involved with Texas music graphics as Terry Raines. Fascinated by caves and underground exploration, he originally began printing in the mid Sixties as a means of disseminating information to other caving fanatics. A couple years later he was printing Vulcan handbills, and eventually printed many of the Armadillo posters, including Jim Franklin's four-color grand opening design and Priest's memorable "Last Dance" poster. Endearingly eccentric, he printed from '71 to '73 in a derelict bus which he had parked on 33rd Street and had proudly emblazoned with the cryptic battle cry "Transportes Espeleol-gicos." Raines' enthusiasm, meticulous attention to detail, and creative flair have made him a favorite of Austin posterists for twenty-five years. Long ago he retired his primitive Multilith 1250 press and moved out of his dilapidated old bus. Currently using state-of-the-art Heidelberg presses, Raines continues to churn out a confusion of fine concert posters and esoteric caving publications.

For today's fledgling generation of poster designers, there is rarely budget enough for them to see their work actually printed, and they must rely instead on xerography. As a logical consequence of technological advances and a pervasive lack of promotional funding, the trend toward photocopying, which gained popularity with the advent of punk, is ever more prevalent today. This is especially true for many of the promising young artists who have produced posters for the Cave/Cairo/Cannibal Club concatenation: Malice, Roy T., Schneider, Mather, Austin, and Hardy.

Seth Spicker Maxwell, a.k.a. Malice, moved to Austin from Indiana in 1985 and spent time at Bee-Bop Printing. A couple years later he was booking bands into "The Loft" above the Cannibal Club and creating his own posters. Resplendent with hairy letters and steroid-crazed eyeballs, his posters were a common sight on "the drag" until he moved to San Francisco in 1989. Malice often collaborated with Roy T(ompkins), who had begun designing odd co-op posters about 1984. Roy T. renders his humorously gruesome subject matter in a broad, distinctive style. He is best known for giving life to his lovable lantern-jawed offspring, Harvey the Hillbilly Bastard. Bob Schneider moved to Austin in '87 and spent the better part of a year at Bee-Bop. Lead singer of the band Joe Rockhead, he has produced a multitude of posters for his own group and others. Schneider's style is bold, clean, and less sleaze oriented than the look espoused by many of his contemporaries. Richard Mather began doing macabre posters for the Cannibal in 1990. A fan of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and Robert Williams, he has experimented with a handful of different styles.

The most productive of Austin's young poster artists is Jason Austin. Born on Long Island in '71, he moved to Texas in 1978, and designed his first poster ten years later. His earliest pieces were signed "J. Wichrowski," and for a time he used the allonym "Zebulon Woodhull." Often approximating a neo-psychedelic look and using quasi Sixties era lettering, Austin nonetheless shares the penchant for gory and horrific imagery currently favored by many alternative posterists. He often works with Lyman Hardy, who began creating posters in Houston about '85 and moved to Austin in 1990.

Another talented Bee-Bop alumnus, Paul Sessums, a.k.a. Martian, is closely associated with the Black Cat, a 6th Street club ingeniously fashioned out of a funky little space across from the Cannibal. A gifted cartoonist, Martian has mastered a clean and simple style that, while irreverently contemporary, still owes more to 'Dillo era illustrators than the thrash and slash school of today. In addition to Martian and the rest of the aforementioned posterists, there are many other newcomers currently producing street graphics. Among them are David Lewis as d.n.l., Daiv Fisher, Kool Pop, B.A.D., Mark Shaw, Bungee, and countless unnamed purveyors of ocular rock propaganda. From pillar to post, they promote live music, with energy and imagination, true to the spirit of Austin postering that has persevered for more than twenty-five years.

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While Bee-Bop and a small assortment of other screen printers produced quite a few silk-screened music posters, the vast majority of posters were off-set printed. Most of the large format Vulcan posters were printed by Johnny Mercer on his 29-inch Harris single color press. Typically, after the artist furnished him with black and white board art, Mercer would shoot a negative and then a reverse negative for the second color run - usually a split fountain. Normally only 100 posters were printed; yet, because The Vulcan had trouble covering printing costs, Mercer remembers often being paid with coffee cans full of coins and wadded up bills. Two printers who worked extensively with poster artists in the Seventies are Mike Morgan and Benny Binford - first at Express Press and later at Calico Press. Printers often had to deal with artists running behind schedule on rush jobs; Morgan swears that Priest would usually be adding the finishing touches to a poster design even as the press was printing it. Morgan and Binford went their separate ways in 1980, and a short time later Binford helped greenhorn printer Junior Franklin get started in the business.

Junior Franklin is easily one of Austin's most unusual poster personalities. Born in Austin, he moved to L.A. in 1956 and became a founding member of the Might Clouds of Joy. For 18 years Franklin performed with this trend-setting gospel quartet and also served as manager of the group. After returning to Austin in '79 to be with his ailing mother, he had the same dream on three consecutive nights - a dream about posters. Though he knew absolutely nothing about printing, Franklin was convinced that The Lord wanted him to become a printer. So he enlisted the aid of his friend Reverend J.T. Stewart, and soon the Franklin & Stewart Poster and Printing Co. became "the country's first black owned poster printing business." With a book on printing borrowed from the library, and by tapping into his extensive gospel circuit connections, Franklin started printing day-glo colored placards for gospel, soul, R&B, blues, and rock shows from Beaumont, Texas to Chicago. Possibly his most memorable poster for a gospel tour features a photo of Siamese twin sisters joined at the head. Sadly, in 1985, the business was closed by the Treasury Department as a consequence of a baffling alleged counterfeiting scandal.

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The Art Maggots wriggled out of Eugene, Oregon's fecund punk underworld about 1980. With a hankering to express themselves visually and no illustration experience, they used a conglomeration of odd images to produce handbills for the fictitious Foam Lords. Three of the Art Maggots, Billy Haddock, Paul Sabal, and Tony Carbonee, relocated to Austin in the early Eighties, where they were joined in their twisted visual mission by Andy Blackwood and Frank Kozik. From '81 to '84, in addition to a succession of humorously subversive "guerilla" handbills, they produced a number of increasingly imaginative and well-rendered posters for Club Foot. In 1983, Club Foot was renamed Nightlife; a few months later it was closed for good and the building demolished.

El Paso born Paul Sabal earned an architecture degree at the University of Oregon and as such had a considerable amount of graphic experience compared to the other Maggots. In the mid Eighties he worked closely with The Austin Chronicle, Austin's current and most long-lived alternative tabloid. Founded in 1981 by Nick Barbaro and Louis Black, with help from Bob Simmons and others, The Chronicle supplanted the Austin Rag, the Austin Sun, and Rumors as a news source with a progressive, arts oriented point of view. Ardently supportive of local music, The Chronicle sponsors the annual Austin Chronicle Music Awards and co-sponsors SXSW. Just as The Vulcan, the 'Dillo, and Raul's were in their day, The Chronicle/SXSW nexus has become the hub around which much of Austin's creative counter culture currently revolves.

Frank Kozik was born in Spain and by 1981 he had found his way to Austin. Much of his earliest work was done with the Art Maggots. In 1987 Kozik began designing posters for the Cave Club, which was eventually relocated by owner Brad First to 6th Street as Club Cairo, which begat in turn the Cannibal Club. Kozik's raw early style, often calculatedly offensive, became popular with bands such as Austin's Butthole Surfers. A Poison 13 concert was cancelled by University of Texas officials, reportedly in response to Christian students complaints about the poster Kozik had designed for the show - an unflattering rendering of Baby Jesus roasting on a "Char-Boy" barbeque grill. Though Kozik was very active locally during the late Eighties, he has been working primarily on West Coast projects lately, often in conjunction with California's L'Imagerie. Under its auspices he now has his own shop for screen printing, a process he was exposed to while working at Bee-Bop Printing in 1987.

More than merely serving as Kozik's temporary home base, Bee-Bop Screen Printing has played a key role in Austin postering for more than a decade. A number of other talented young poster artists, including Martian, Malice, Schneider, and Justin Hess, have cut their teeth doing overlays in Bee-Bop's art department. In 1977, at the age of 15, Marty Bebout founded Bee-Bop Printing and began selling his prints on "the drag." As a student at Austin's Anderson High, Bebout studied art and then screen printing under Southwestern artist Amado Pe'a, and then spent three years working with him. Though he has worked with every major poster artist in town, Bebout enjoys an especially close professional relationship with Juke. Beginning in 1983 with the 1st annual Austin Chronicle Music Awards poster, Bebout and Juke have collaborated on several dozen magnificent screen prints. Edd Patton is another artist closely associated with Bee-Bop in the early Eighties. Born and raised in Austin, he produced several posters, the most memorable of which is his 1984 Offenders piece, a 28x36 inch tour poster featuring World War II fighter planes amid exploding flak.

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Three venues important to counter culture postering were Duke's, which closed in the early Eighties, and the Continental Club and Liberty Lunch, both of which are still very popular. For punk bands, the most viable early alternative to Raul's was Duke's Royal Coach Inn, located on Congress Avenue in the same building that had housed The Vulcan Gas Company. Also on Congress, the Continental Club has been supportive of alternative music and additionally books blues, roots rock, tex-mex, and just about anything else. During the early Eighties, Gary Oliver created an entertaining series of poster calendars for the Continental. These calendars, signed "Golliver," featured elaborate cartoons and were an extension of the work he had produced for the One Knite, popularly known before its untimely extinguishment as "the joint that won't go out." Liberty Lunch, a generous patron of poster art during the Eighties, is a large open-air club particularly suited to third world and alternative bands. Built over the site of an 1870s wagon yard and home to Tony's Sanitary Tortilla Factory in the 1940s, the Lunch has been covered since 1981 by a partial roof erected with steel framing salvaged from the Armadillo.

In mid 1980, a cavernous warehouse, which heretofore had housed a run of undistinguished rock clubs with silly names, emerged as heir apparent to Raul's punk legacy. Dubbed Club Foot (no connection to the San Francisco venue of the same name) by owner John Bird, this night club could comfortably accommodate upwards of a thousand patrons in its corrugated metal-sheathed, multilevel interior, riddled with stairways and catwalks, large spaces and secret rooms. It hosted an eclectic array of touring acts, from U-2 and R.E.M. to James Brown, B.B. King, and King Sunny Ade; and was also, in its day, Austin's most important showcase for local talent. Complementing the music at Club Foot was a four-year avalanche of posters and handbills. Established artists such as Wilkins, Juke, and Kerry Awn contributed pieces; NOXX designed the logo. Novices such as Charles Webre, a.k.a. Towie, Field Gilbert, me as Jagmo, the Art Maggots including Paul Sabal and Frank Kozik, and an amorphous army of band members, fans, dabblers, dopers, pranksters, and hangers-on produced posters.

Shortly after Club Foot opened, I joined the staff as bar manager. Eventually my responsibilities were expanded to include advertising and promotion. Because I had been collecting the work of Franklin, Juke, et al. since moving from Chicago to Texas in '78, I found it especially exhilarating when my duties at Club Foot allowed me to commission posters, and even to experiment with designing some myself. It was at this point that I began to sign my work "Jagmo." After leaving Club Foot in 1983 I embarked on a freelance career specializing in posters and other music industry art. Since then, as Jagmo, I've had the privilege of working extensively with many of my favorite performers, promoters, and clubs, Liberty Lunch in particular, and serving as art director for challenging endeavors such as the Texas-U.S.S.R. Musicians' Exchange in 1987 and, since its inception, the annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference - SXSW.

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By the late Seventies, with the cosmic cowboy era on the wane, many 'Dillo era poster artists began to expand stylistically. Influenced by the punk movement, Rick Turner and Guy Juke shed the elaborately crafted illustrations associated with the Armadillo and began experimenting with a simpler more spontaneous look. Turner's engraving collage posters, adorned with ransom note typography were timely and powerful. Yet Juke, more than any of the 'Dillo veterans, captured graphically the straightforward, streamlined feel of the new music. He perfected an angular minimalist style that in time evolved into a sophisticated faceted look. The perverted popularity of his "House of Wax" and Joe Ely "Live Shots" designs are indicative of how well Juke apprehended the spirit of the times. The shadowy skulker of his "House of Wax" illustration was inspired by a still photo from the classic horror film. Shortly after the design appeared as a full page Raul's ad in the November 1980 issue of New York Rocker (for which Juke created also the B-52's back cover art), a shabbily bootlegged facsimile showed up on the Ramones' "Pleasant Dreams" LP. Juke's cowboy hated, besunspectacled Joe Ely portrait featured on Ely's 1980 "Live Shots" LP was surreptitiously appropriated for the cover of a pirated "new wave music" [sic] cassette sold on the Saudi black market.

Despite the advent of punk and new wave sensibilities, Austin's music scene has remained diverse enough to support, even demand, a continued variety of poster styles. The blues tradition, for example, has been fostered by clubs such as the Victory Grill, Rome Inn, One Knite, Ernie's Chicken Shack, Brook's, and Antone's. Often incorporating a playing card as an embellishment, the Antone's posters of Danny Garrett remain traditionally realistic in style. The work of Todd Green, as well, is consistently free of punk effects. Having moved to Austin in '68 from Kentucky, Green is most closely associated with "the drag's" venerable Hole in the Wall tavern.

Another artist whose style has been essentially unaffected by the punk movement is Dale Wilkins. Born in Long Beach, California, Wilkins spent his freshman year at Rick Griffin's alma mater, Palos Verdes High School. Griffin was an early influence but Wilkins had moved to Michigan before he saw his first psychedelic poster in 1967. Soon thereafter he was dabbling in poster design himself and by 1969 he had settled in Austin. Wilkins created a few posters for the Armadillo World Headquarters but he really hit his stride working for the Austin Opry House in the early Eighties. It was about this time that he worked out of Sheauxnough Studios, with Priest, Juke, and Garrett. Sheauxnough was an arts collective founded in '76 by Priest, Sam Yeates, and John Rodgers to fill the void created two years earlier by the dissolution of Priest's Directions Company, Austin's first counter culture ad agency.

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Mike Nott lived next door to Raul's and became closely associated with the punk movement. Tipping over the last two letters of his surname, he signed his work "NOXX." Though he cites Panter's screameresque portrait of Tomata du Plenty as an influence, NOXX' early style tended to be scrupulously geometric. Two of his most popular posters are more visually substantial than the skeletal early work but retain his trademark simplicity. The first, promoting a 1983 King Sunny Ade concert, was inspired by African woodprints, and the second, announcing a performance by New Order, incorporates the floor plan of a medieval cathedral in red and black.

Two other neophyte designers closely associated with Raul's and the early days of Austin punk are Ric Cruz and Control Rat X. San Antonio born Ric Cruz began designing posters and handbills for The Huns and other Raul's bands in 1979. His elaborately detailed pen and ink illustrations reflect the common ground he shares with his Armadillo antecedents. Yet Cruz' sci-fi themes are more than merely a personal preference; they represent a definitive rejection of 'Dillo hippie/cowboy clichŽs. John Slate, using the colorful moniker Control Rat X, began producing handbills in 1980, including a series for his nonexistent "poster band" Bodily Funktions. Though his work occasionally lured small groups of confused Bodily Funktions fans to Raul's parking lot, he is best known for the punkish periodical, Xiphoid Process, which he published from '79 to '82.

In Austin, as elsewhere, there has always been some overlap between performers and designers. During his first few years in town, De White was known more for his guitar work with Doak Snead and Butch Hancock than for the graphics of his alter ego, Guy Juke; today he occasionally fronts his own band, Blackie White and the Halftones. Armadillo high priest Jim Franklin performed with Ramon Ramon and the Four Daddios. And Kerry Awn is a founding member of the Uranium Savages parody band. Beginning with the punk movement, however, an increasing number of musicians were coaxed into the do-it-yourself poster process. Cam King, guitarist for the proto-wave threesome the Explosives, created a number of posters and signed them "Flathead." Guitarist Byron "Siren" Scott, drummer Rock Savage, Larry Seaman of Standing Waves, Glass Eye's Kathy McCarty, Bodysnatchers' guitarist Chris Bailey, Bad Mutha Goose's Billy (Prahblem) Pringle and Terri Lord, a.k.a. P.F. Flyer, Ace Bondage, et al., Chris Wing of Sharon Tate's Baby, David Yow of Toxic Shock and now with Jesus Lizard, accordion player Bert Crews, and the Big Boys' Randy "Biscuit" Turner and Chris Gates have all proven themselves talented and prolific designers.

In contrast to the urban punk phenomenon prevalent in larger cities, Austin's punk movement was, for the most part, devoid of safety pins and violent overtones; it was characterized rather by a mix of irrepressible enthusiasm, sacred cow bashing, and garage band bravado. Nonetheless, like the common music of the punk era, local posters and handbills were intended to shock and challenge traditional standards. Very often musicians produced the most outrageous and controversial street visuals. Their handiwork sometimes evoked strong reactions, as when Bert Crews, of the acoustic punk band the Re*cords, became the target of an aggressive F.B.I. manhunt in 1979 after he used the Sluggo punk-zine press to run off several hundred Raul's handbills on I.R.S. forms. Or when a hapless Steve Hayden was arrested in 1980 because of a Big Boys handbill put together by Biscuit. Entitled "Hot and Bothered Men," it featured the unexpurgated photo of an oily stud sporting only a cowboy hat and a hard-on.

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Like rock & roll itself, Texas rock graphics had become, by the mid Seventies, predictable - even respectable. As the punk movement became a rallying point for those betrayed by mainstream rock, poster art began to reflect the spirit of the new music. In contrast to the Sixties, when Austin posters promoted Vulcan Gas Company psychedelia, or the early Seventies when the 'Dillo and its cosmic cowboys set the tone, posters in the late Seventies began to embody the unpretentious exuberance and simplicity of early rock & roll. What follows is the second installment of a two part piece on Austin postering; it will focus primarily on what has happened in central Texas since the watershed advent of punk esthetics.

What The Vulcan was to Austin's psychedelic heyday, Raul's was to the punk era. Located on "the drag" directly across the street from the University of Texas, Raul's opened its doors on December 31, 1977 as a Tejano night club. One week later Austin music was changed forever, and shortly thereafter so was Raul's booking policy. Many local music fans had been following for quite some time the new sounds coming out of places like London, Cleveland, and New York. The Ramones and Iggy Pop had been through town, and Neil Ruttenberg, as the Rev. Neil X, hosted a new wave program on KUT-FM. Yet it was the January 8th Sex Pistols' show at Randy's Rodeo, a converted San Antonio bowling Alley, that galvanized Austin's new music makers and new music lovers into a rampaging aggregation of revolutionaries who would take the city by storm. New bands burst out of the shadows, evolved, dissolved, re-grouped, and matured with amazing ferocity. And during the next five years, at clubs like Raul's, Duke's, the Continental Club, and Club Foot, traditional musical boundaries were eradicated in a sustained explosion of creative outrageousness.

Raul's owners, Joseph Gonzales and Roy "Raul" Gomez, booked their first punk show for February '78 and by summer they were scheduling punk and new wave bands on a regular basis. In September, during the debut performance of The Huns, jockstrap fancier and lead singer Phil Tolstead, now an evangelist, was wrestled from the stage by four overzealous police officers. A near riot ensued, 17 squad cars converged, arrests were made, and by the time the smoke cleared Raul's had been baptized Austin's most exciting new nightspot. After presiding over two years of such excitement, Gonzales and Gomez sold the club to Steve Hayden in early 1980. One year later, on April Fool's Day, having spawned a generation of art/punk activists, Raul's was closed for good.

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Cliff Carter, Bill Narum, and Sam Yeates were also valuable artists on the Armadillo roster. Carter moved to town in 1971 and produced several posters for the 'Dillo, including three colorful Balcones Fault pieces. His primary contribution to the venue, however, was as head recording engineer from 1973 until its closing in 1980. Narum was born in Austin and raised in Houston; he began producing posters in junior high. During the late Sixties he worked with Houston's underground newspaper Space City News, and was active as a poster artist and political cartoonist. Narum returned to Austin in the early Seventies and produced several posters for the Armadillo. His most well-known designs are the album covers he created for ZZ Top. Beginning in June 1988, Narum produced a series of designerly poster calendars for the popular Austin nightspot the Continental Club; and most recently he has specialized in art for LPs, CDs, and cassettes. Sam Yeates graduated from North Texas State in 1974 with a degree in drawing and painting, and then moved to Austin with the intention of attending graduate school. The 'Dillo intervened and he was wooed away from academic life and into postering. One of his most spectacular pieces was created for a Bob Seger concert. He brought the art, rendered in pencil on cold press illustration board, to printer Terry Raines and together, by using a split fountain technique and running the poster through the press from top to bottom and then from side to side, they engineered a very powerful effect. The finished poster features the head of a tiger, a la Ringling Brothers glaring at the viewer out of a ferocious vortex of red and orange, mouth open and the curling neck of a guitar for a tongue.

Many other artists contributed to the torrent of posters that flowed from the Armadillo World Headquarters during the ten years it rocked and rolled with the cultural tide. Among these were Jim Harter and John Shelton from the Vulcan days, Clark Bradley, John Rogers, Michael Arth, and Coy Featherston, Ken's bother. Also contributing were Cindy Weberdorfer, Gary McElhaney, Jose Carlos Campos, Dale Wilkins, Henry Gonzales, B. Attwell, Monica White (who also created the cover art for Willie Nelson's celebrated Red Headed StrangerLP), and Jimmy Downey, whose name is spelled incorrectly on page 386 of The Art of Rock under a reproduction of his 1970 New Year's Eve poster.

Though the Armadillo dominated the Austin music scene for many years, scores of other clubs also contributed to the plethora of music available to the public during the Seventies and to the richness of the Austin poster bonanza. Some of these venues have outlived the Armadillo, and since its closing, many more clubs have come and gone. Part Two of this article will tie up any loose ends from the Seventies and then focus on the Eighties and Nineties. Poster artists like Dale Wilkins, Mike Nott, Edd Patton, me as "Jagmo," and the Art Maggots (including Frank Kozik) will be covered, plus the dozens of other provocateurs like Jason Austin, Lyman Hardy, Robert Schneider, Richard Mather, and Roy Tompkins. Nightspots such as Raul's, Club Foot, Liberty Lunch, and the Cannibal Club and poster patrons such as the Austin Chronicleand SXSW will be introduced, plus the important printers from the Vulcan era and succeeding periods will be credited for their contributions. The Vulcanand the Armadillo are gone, but the spirit that created and enlivened them survived throughout the Eighties and thrives in Austin, Texas today.

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Rick Turner did few posters for the Armadillo because he found the dominant style too time consuming. Along with Awn and fellow posterist Tom "Tommy Bee" Bauman, Turner journeyed to San Francisco in 1971 to try and sell Shelton's Rip Off Press an underground comic they'd produced called Neigborhead. Unsuccessful, they re-named the book Austintatious and published it themselves with help from the Armadillo's legendary Big Rikki the Guacamole Queen. Turner is responsible for the "Burgers from Heaven" design for Daryl Rhoades & the Hahavishnu Orchestra - a phalanx of hamburgers floating in formation above the Texas State Capitol. This design proved so popular that it was used not only as a poster and an album cover but later reproduced by Turner as a mural in New York's Max's Kansas City. Possibly Turner's most readily identifiable work is that done in the punk collage style. During this period he often collaborated with local artist Debra Ingram (a.k.a. Deb-X and Deb X-it), and their collaborative designs were signed with the anagram "drastic" as seen in their unattributed poster on page 439 of The Art of Rock.

Returning home from Vietnam in 1970, Danny Garrett, like Awn, was first introduced to Franklin's art in Houston. In 1971 he moved to Austin, looked up Franklin almost immediately and jumped headlong into the Austin poster melee, producing a number of exquisitely-crafted posters for the Armadillo. Garrett also worked extensively with Castle Creek and the Austin Opry House. Some of his most memorable and sought-after work may be found in the series of posters he has created for Antone's, Texas premier blues venue. The delicacy of his pen and ink stippling and his tendency to traditional or classically realistic illustration contrasts sharply with the surrealist tendencies found in many of the other Austin posterists. In his most recent posters for Antone's, Garrett has favored black prismacolor on coquille.

One of the most gifted young artists drawn to the Armadillo World Headquarters was Ken Featherston, who had grown up in Corpus Christi with 'Dillo muralist Henry Gonzalez. Though he worked predominantly with delicate stippling and crosshatching, Featherston occasionally combined airbrush and pen and ink techniques in a single piece. His work often has a gentle, spiritual feel to it. Among his most well-known designs are the Marshall Tucker Band'sSearchin' For a Rainbow album cover, and the illustration of an ethereal locomotive floating above its tracks in the star-spangled blackness of space, which he created for Austin's archetypal head shop, Oat Willies. Tragically, in 1975, after working security for a Pointer Sisters show at the Armadillo, Ken Featherston was shot and killed by a deranged patron.

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In contrast to The Vulcan era posters, which owed much stylistically to their San Francisco brethren, the posters generated for the Armadillo World Headquarters began to evince a homegrown, distinctly Texas style. The 'Dillo designers, following Franklin's lead, began to appropriate over-used Western visual cliches, twisting and stretching these traditional symbols into interesting, even subversive, new configurations. Lettering was typically less ornate and "trippy" than the West Coast look. Production costs were kept to a minimum by printing in only one color and by foregoing halftones in favor of crosshatching and stippling. And running consistently throughout the body of work produced for the Armadillo was a pervasive playfulness and irreverence - part of the Shelton/Franklin legacy and in keeping with Texas' time-honored tongue in cheek tradition.

While Franklin's influence cannot be overstated, several other important artists emerged during the Armadillo era. After Franklin himself, the most influential of these is Micael Priest, who succeeded Franklin as the Armadillo's art director. More than any other artist, Priest has captured on posters and handbills the spirit of the cosmic cowboy years. With pieces for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Kinky Friedman, the September 1972 Willie Nelson and Michael (Martin) Murphey concert at the 'Dillo, and for the 1973 Murphey shows (for which he created an especially tasty illustration of a longhaired mustang rider in space lassoing a comet), Priest has given us a vantage point from which to view a colorful cultural phenomenon. With a fondness for horses, a gift for life-like, action-packed caricature, and a formidable facility for lettering and typography, Priest created the graphic landscape out of which one cannabis-toking cowboy after another stepped into the real world.

De White, better known as Guy Juke, moved to town in 1973, and by 1974 Priest had enlisted his help at the Armadillo. Blessed with an effective mastery of form, an enviable command of color, and an indefatigable imagination, Juke produced some of the finest Armadillo designs. More than any other Austin poster artist, his work exhibits a strikingly broad cross-section of styles - from realistic portraits to Merrie Melodies takeoffs, from old-style ersatz woodcuts to new wave minimalism. Particularly noteworthy is his 1976 series of two dozen or so Butch Hancock handbills displaying an assortment of the many styles at Juke's disposal and indicating the predisposition Juke has to wry twists and visual puns that rivals Franklin's own. Juke dominated the Austin poster field during the early Eighties; and his series of colorful screen prints begun about that time and created for the Austin Chronicle Music Awards is worth seeking out.

Kerry Awn, like Shelton, Franklin, Priest, and Juke, has a distinct tendency to comic touches. As Kerry Fitzgerald, he moved to Austin in 1970 in search of Franklin, whose posters for the Armadillo he had seen and admired while living in Houston. Within a year Awn was creating posters for the Armadillo, but it was as a political cartoonist for UT's Daily Texan that he adopted the nom de guerre "Kerry Awn." He tends to a broader, more cartoonish style than most of his 'Dillo contemporaries; and through his work with the country radio station KOKE-FM he helped visually define the cosmic cowboy/roper doper persona. Although he did work for the Armadillo, Awn is best known for the series of poster calendars he created for Soap Creek Saloon. Surviving a change in ownership and three location shifts, Awn's calendar series spanned more than a decade. It was inaugurated in February 1974 and the calendars that followed soon gained a reputation for their lusty eccentricity. The first one in the series features an intricate illustration of Big Brother & the Holding Company's James Gurley, penned from a Bob Seidemann photo that had coincidentally been used as the centerpiece for the 1967 Avalon Ballroom poster FD-48 by Kelley and Mouse.

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After his first exposure to the psychedelic art movement during a San Francisco trip in 1967, Lubbock-born Jim Harter returned to Texas and was recruited by Franklin for Vulcan poster duty. His work from that period often features extensive psychedelic-style lettering and a simple photo, as with two of his nicest pieces - Poco and the Texas Rangers. One of his designs appears uncredited on page 248 of Paul Grushkin's The Art of Rock. Moving to San Francisco in '74, Harter, who is primarily a collagist, sought out and became friends with Wilfried Satty and David Singer. Since then he's traveled extensively and published several collections of visionary collages, as well as a popular series of engraving source books for Dover Publications.

Several other artists designed posters and handbills for The Vulcan, including Tony Bell, John Shelton (no relation), Don Evans, and Robert Rush. In the three years it was open, The Vulcan Gas Company played host to scores of local bands, and touring acts from Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Turner, and Canned Heat to Moby Grape, the Fugs, and the Velvet Underground. Yet mid 1970 saw The Vulcan close its doors for good. There was little time to mourn the loss of this seminal alternative venue, however, because in three months, just across the river, the Armadillo World Headquarters would begin its breathtaking ten-year run.

One poster artist, uncommon by even Austin standards, is Robert A. Burns, who produced 135 posters during the late Sixties and early Seventies, not one of which was for The Vulcan or the Armadillo. No longer an active posterist today, he is best known for his work with fellow Austinite Tobe Hooper, and as production designer and art director on films like The Howling, Re-Animator, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes. As a student at the University of Texas, Burns was introduced to screen printing in the Drama Department. He was supervisor of the Ranger during its last two years, and eventually created a poster and design business which he dubbed "the RH Factor." Deliberately bucking the prevailing style of the day, his hand-cut screen-printed posters have a clean, mainstream feel that makes them unique among the posters produced during these psychedelic and cosmic cowboy years.

In August 1970, almost two years to the day before Michael Murphey composed the song "Cosmic Cowboy" during an engagement at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Texas' most fabled dance hall came to life in an old South Austin armory. Named the Armadillo World Headquarters by Jim Franklin and owner Eddie Wilson, it occupies a preeminent place in the hierarchy of Austin entertainment institutions. With its eclectic booking policy and hippie-idealist ideology it launched a substantial musical and cultural movement, the most clearly-defined manifestation of which was the cosmic cowboy phenomenon. In illustrating this movement, the Armadillo artists created a powerful and singularly appropriate iconography that helped to unite performers, flower children, and rednecks in an on-going common celebration. As with Willie Nelson's 4th of July picnics, the 'Dillo facilitated a triumph over deep-seated prejudices and an abolition of previously inviolable aural and visual taboos. More significantly to the Austin poster panorama, however, the Armadillo offered artists an inspirational and nurturing environment, a supportive fraternity, and a mission. It became during the Seventies quite possibly the single most important poster patron this side of Haight Ashbury.

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Shelton is generally regarded as Austin's first modern poster artist because of his extensive work with The Vulcan, including the logo and the grand opening poster. Best known today as the creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Wonder Wart-Hog, and Fat Freddy's Cat, in the early Sixties Shelton was an editor of the University of Texas student humor magazine, the Texas Ranger. At the Ranger, he met Tony Bell and Lieuen Adkins, both of whom collaborated with him over the years on assorted posters and comic strips. In 1968, after creating a couple dozen colorful posters and handbills, and producing an underground comic entitled "Feds and Heads," Shelton followed Austin adventurers like Chet Helms, Janis Joplin, Travis Rivers (The Oracle, Big Brother and the Holding Company), Bob Simmons (KSAN, Soundproof), Powell St. John (Mother Earth), and Jaxon to San Francisco. It was there in 1969, with Jaxon, Dave Moriaty, and Fred Todd, that Shelton founded the Rip Off Press.

Beyond his association with the Rip Off Press, Jack Jackson, a.k.a. Jaxon, was a major contributor to the counter culture movement in both Austin and San Francisco. Also an editor at the Ranger, and a talented cartoonist, Jaxon authored in 1964, with help from Lieuen Adkins, what is regarded by many as the first underground comic. Printed in the basement of the Texas State Capitol Building and entitled "God Nose," a takeoff on The Austin Iconoclast strip "The Adventures of J(esus)" by Foolbert Sturgeon/Frank Stack, it sold briskly on the street for 50 cents a copy. Jaxon moved west in July of 1966 and was recruited by Chet Helms in early '67 to set up a poster distribution system for the Family Dog. The phenomenal popularity of San Francisco posters and Jaxon's business acumen helped finance the Avalon Ballroom concert operation for a while; but disenchanted by the glut of derivative posters flooding the market, Jaxon left the operation after 18 months or so.

Back in Austin, Jim Franklin had taken over as artist in residence at The Vulcan. After brief stints in San Francisco and New York, Texas-born Franklin was lured to Austin in the mid-Sixties by a chance encounter in Galveston with some of the Ranger crowd, including Travis Rivers and Bob Simmons. Soon after his arrival he helped open The Vulcan Gas Company. Much less inclined to imitate the prevalent San Francisco style than his peers were, Franklin began to evolve a distinctly Texas poster look through his de-emphasis on stylized lettering, and his pen and ink renderings rife with crosshatching, absurd juxtapositions, and an army of beatific armadillos. Contrary to popular belief, however, he was not the first to use the armadillo as a symbol of counter culture puckishness; after a prank letter convinced a faculty overseer that any armadillo appearing in a college publication suggested something perverse, Glenn Whitehead and Robert A. Burns had liberally sprinkled 'dillos throughout the Ranger, beginning in 1966 with the tastefully tardy "Late October" issue. Nonetheless, it was Franklin who populated posterdom with an unending parade of the lovable local mammalian worm-eaters. He floated them over highways, orbited them in space, squeezed them from tubes of acrylic paint, and mated one with the State Capitol Building. Though not all of Franklin's illustrations contain armadillos posed compliantly in unorthodox positions, his penchant for surrealist satire is inescapable, as in the '71 Flying Burrito Brothers poster in which he's depicted Wilbur and Orville launching a heavier-than-air craft with colossal enchiladas for wings. From the late Sixties through the Seventies and into the Eighties, Franklin was a major force in Texas music art, and when he's in town he still produces the occasional street art drollery.

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THE MAVERICK TRADITION: POSTERING IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
by Nels Jacobson

Part One

No serious poster enthusiast would question San Francisco's supremacy as the Mecca and mother lode of rock & roll art. And as the psychedelic explosion in Haight Ashbury reverberated across the country and around the world, other cities began to produce posters in homage to the original Sixties esthetic that drove the poster renaissance in San Francisco. Yet arguably, after San Francisco, no city can boast as rich a music poster tradition as Austin, Texas, where from the mid-Sixties until today a fortuitous combination of factors has spawned a mind-boggling barrage of posters and handbills. It has been said that Austin has more live music venues per capita than any other city in the world; though this may or may not be true, it is undeniable that Austin's energetic music community and cornucopia of small clubs and honky-tonks has generated an imposing abundance of music art.

This article should provide a brief introduction to some of the major personalities and institutions involved in producing Austin music posters over the last quarter century. The Vulcan Gas Company, the Armadillo World Headquarters, Castle Creek, Antone's, Soap Creek Saloon, the Continental Club, the Austin Opry/Opera House, Raul's, Club Foot, Liberty Lunch, the Cannibal Club, the Ritz, and countless other clubs and concert halls have served as benefactors in the proliferation of Austin poster art. Part One of this article will focus on the two most prominent of the venues - The Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters.

In the beginning was The Vulcan Gas Company. Opened on October 27, 1967, it was Texas' original counter culture dance hall and the first major patron of poster art. The Vulcan was the brainchild of Houston White, Gary Scanlon, and Don Hyde. For a year or so, as the "Electric Grandmother," White and Scanlon had been organizing concerts that featured local and psychedelic pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators and Conqueroo, and from these first shows have survived several posters and handbills. It was for The Vulcan itself, however, that Austin's most spectacular early posters were created. Though considerably larger than their San Francisco counterparts, Vulcan posters were often rendered in the psychedelic style popularized by Bay area artists like Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, and Victor Moscoso. Typically each of these 23x29 inch posters advertised two or three events with free-form lettering and several bright split-fountain colors. Achieving a stunning overall effect was more important than using a specific image on any one particular piece. At least 36 posters, 58 handbills, and two postcards were created during this era - the vast majority by either Gilbert Shelton or Jim Franklin (JFKLN).

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References

• Gonzalez, Henry. (1990). "The Armadillo Years: A Visual History".
• Zelade, Richard. (Winter 1985). "The Armadillo's Last Waltz". Texas Times, pp 46-49. (from the Austin History Center collection)
• "The Decade of the Dillo". Official Website of the Armadillo World Headquarters. Retrieved Jun. 20, 2005.
• "History". Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. Retrieved Jun. 20, 2005.

External links

• Official Website of the Armadillo World Headquarters
• Austin City Links
• Armadillo Christmas Bazaar

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Legacy

With the success of the Armadillo and Austin's burgeoning music scene, KLRN (now KLRU), the local PBS television affiliate, created Austin City Limits, a program showcasing popular local, regional, and national music acts. Austin City Limits is still in production as of 2005.

The Armadillo Christmas Bazaar began in 1976 at the Armadillo, and is still held annually during the Christmas season. The bazaar was another attempt to improve cash flow for the hall. When the Armadillo closed, the bazaar changed locations every year, as it leased whatever large empty retail space might be available at the time. In 1995, the bazaar settled at the Austin Music Hall, its current home. The bazaar has become one of the top-ranked arts and crafts shows in the nation with a long waiting list of artisans who wish to show their work.

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The blend of country and rock music performed at the hall became known as "The Austin Sound," "Redneck Rock," or "Cosmic Cowboy." Many upcoming and established acts such as Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, and ZZ Top played the Armadillo. Freddie King, Frank Zappa, and Commander Cody all recorded live albums there. Bruce Springsteen played five shows during 1974. The Australian band AC/DC played their first American show at the Armadillo with Canadian outfit Moxy in July 1977.

Despite its successes, the Armadillo always struggled financially. The addition of the Armadillo Beer Garten in 1972 and the subsequent establishment of food service were both bids to generate positive cash flow. However, the financial difficulties continued. This predicament was blamed on a combination of large guaranteed payments for the acts, cheap ticket prices, and poor promotion. The club finally had to lay off staff members in late 1976 and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1977.

Another factor in the club's demise was that it sat on 5.62 acres of prime real estate in what soon became a prime development area in the city. The Armadillo's landlord sold the property for an amount estimated between $4 million and $8 million.

The final concert at the Armadillo was held on December 31, 1980. The sold-out New Year's Eve show featured Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Some reports say the show ended at 4 a.m., while others claim that the bands played until dawn. The contents of the Armadillo were sold at auction in January 1981, and the old armory was razed for a high-rise office building.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_World_Headquarters

The Armadillo World Headquarters (usually called simply The Armadillo) was the premiere music hall and entertainment center in Austin, Texas between 1970 and 1980.

In 1969, Austin's flagship rock venue, the Vulcan Gas Company, closed, leaving the city's nascent live music scene without an incubator. One night, Eddie Wilson, manager of the local group Shiva's Headband, stepped outside a nightclub where the band was playing and noticed an old, abandoned National Guard armory. Wilson found an unlocked garage door on the building and was able to view the cavernous interior using the headlights of his automobile. He had a desire to continue the legacy of the Vulcan Gas Company, and was inspired by what he saw in the armory to create a new music hall in the derelict structure. The armory was estimated to have been built in 1948, but no records of its construction could be located. The building was ugly, uncomfortable, and had poor acoustics, but offered cheap rent and a central location. Posters for the venue usually noted the address as 525 1/2 Barton Springs Road (Rear), behind the Skating Palace (approximate coordinates 30.258 -97.750).

The name for the Armadillo was inspired by the use of armadillos as a symbol in the artwork of Jim Franklin, a local poster artist, and from the building itself. In choosing the mascot for the new venture, Wilson and his partners wanted an "armored" animal since the building was an old armory. The nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) was chosen because of its hard shell that looks like armor, its history as a survivor (virtually unchanged for 50 million years), and its near-ubiquity in central Texas. Wilson also believed the building looked like it had been some type of headquarters at one time. He initially proposed "International Headquarters" but in the end it became "World Headquarters." In founding the Armadillo, Wilson was assisted by Mike Tolleson, an entertainment attorney, Bobby Hederman from the Vulcan Gas Company, and Jim Franklin. Funding for the venture was initially provided by Shiva's Headband founder, Spencer Perskin, and Mad Dog, Inc. an Austin literati group.

The Armadillo World Headquarters officially opened on August 7, 1970 with Shiva's Headband, the Hub City Movers, and Whistler performing. The hall held about 1,500 patrons, but chairs were limited, so most patrons sat on the floor on sections of carpet that had been pieced together. The Armadillo caught on quickly with the hippie culture of Austin because admission was inexpensive and the hall tolerated marijuana use.

Soon, the Armadillo started receiving publicity in national magazines such as Rolling Stone. Time magazine wrote that the Armadillo was to the Austin music scene what The Fillmore had been to the emergence of rock music in the 1960s. The clientele became a mixture of hippies, cowboys, and businessmen who stopped by to have lunch and a beer and listen to live music. At its peak, the amount of Lone Star draft beer sold by the Armadillo was second only to the Houston Astrodome. The Neiman-Marcus department store even offered a line of Armadillo-branded products.  

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Well, I told you my brain was shot...

I had the name and date wrong.  Below is a link to the two obits for Jacobs, former member of Balcones Fault.  Sorry I gave you a bum steer.

Patricia

http://obits.mysanantonio.com/index.cfm?date=03-12-2006

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This old hippie biddy's memory ain't what it used to be.  Just this past Sunday (03/05/06) in the Obits of the San Antonio Express-News were two obituaries of a guy named Jackson.  (His full name escapes me.)  He played with Balcones Fault back when.  The longer obit was well written and left a real impression of the man.

Just thought I'd pass this info along for fans.

Patricia

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Martin's Kumbak Dirty Burgers, yup, I've had those. Smoked and snorted my way through the Armadillo also. Great job Dix! My other personal fave places were The Club Foot, The Backroom, The original Threadgill's, another joint on Riverside thats lost in my brain somewhere....Steamboat and of course, Mother Earth! Austin was the best place to be "bad", cause if you mostly behaved, nobody cared!

My late Godfather Frito, who introduced me to East Austin, black hippies, cool lesbians, and REAL Mexican food!

His "pad" the coolest place on earth in 1978-me in my afro-phase against the wall in a flannel shirt...

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I needed something to smile about!

Dixie

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Dixie,

Thanks for posting all of this. For someone like me who was too young at the time, it gives me a chance to peek into another world. I really enjoyed this!

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Shiva's head band... Janis with Big Brother, Johnny Winter:

These are Vulcan Gas Company hand bills...

*fair Use*

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We have seen so many places  - weallofus - torn down, gone by ways sides, boarded up, or just plain made into a parking lots.

The neat thing about the location of the Dillo was that Sandy's ice cream stand is right across the street...AND IT IS STILL THERE.

Way before it was the AWHQ, the building housed a skating rink - personally I grew up in! The Dillo should not have died! 6th street now pays tribute to many of the new music/mucisians in Austin.

There was a picture of Zappa holding ice cream - I just had to wonder if that was from Sandys or not (yep, it's real custard!)

Dixie

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http://www.sixtiesposters.com/texaspage1.htm

THE GRAND OPENING

DIXIE

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http://www.sixtiesposters.com/images/dillo02241976.jpg

Dixie

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 Known for its eclectic musical bookings, The Armadillo World Headquarters was also known for its production of unique concert posters. Poster artists such as JFKLN (Jim Franklin), Ken Featherston, Micael Priest, Guy Juke, Danny Garrett, Sam Yeats and Kerry Awn dazzled the eye with works of perfection. Their work was as individualistic as each artist; however, upon occasion they would mimic each other's style or collaborate on a single piece.

 These original concert posters have become as collectable as those from the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco and continue to increase in value. Additional poster titles are available through YOTEX.

For more information contact Nancy at (512)891-8686 or e-mail at ncoplin@austin.rr.com.

GEORGE THOROGOOD  

COUNT BASIE

TALKING HEADS

SAVOY BROWN

EDGAR WINTER

FREDDIE KING

FREEDIE KING

Dixie

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http://awhq.com/cgi-bin/newsboard/newsboard.cgi?start_number=98

a point of historical accuracy added by Ramsey Wiggins

I was recently directed to this site by my friend Carlotta Morris. I had to search thru a lot of Eddie Wilson promotion to find it, but as Eddie says, perseverance furthers.
Your 'anonymous Pixie' quote is in large degree lifted from a blurb I wrote for a tape-box brochure we put out in 1975-6. Here is the copy I wrote:
'Armadillo World Headquarters is a concert hall, restaurant, and beer garden. On occasion it is also a ballet theatre, art gallery, and center for the performing arts.
It is also a musician’s referral service, a music publishing company, and a media consulting firm about which “We were afraid you’d never ask.”
It is also a business, complete with executives, accountants, bookkeepers, secretaries, and at least one documented case of ulcers earned as part of the over a million dollar gross recorded in 1975.
We are also over a hundred barkeepers, security men, waitresses, maintenance people, audio engineers, lighting specialists, cooks, food handlers, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, musicians, actors, artists, and stage crew, as well as several people whose function has never actually been determined, but who are nevertheless considered indispensable to the operation of the world’s largest full-service honky-tonk.
Finally, we are a community within ourselves. We care for each other and love each other. We firmly believe that any hurt to any of us diminishes us all, and that all of us together can do anything that needs doing. We’re something that has never happened before. We are the Armadillo.'
Some of this blurb is still on view at Threadgill's south and other places. Micael Priest supplied some ungrammatical interpretation when he lettered it.
I mention this only because I wouldn't want anybody to think that I copied someone else's stuff. I suspect the Pixie is a journalist, and his sampling is understandable. All journalists steal, and at least this one stole the good stuff.
Yr Hmbl & Obdt Svt,
RB Wiggins
BA MA Esq

Former Patron & Employee. added by Tony Maddox

When the AWHQ first opened it's doors, I started hanging out there, ( as apposed to the skating rink ), trying to discover what the 'Hippie Thing' was all about. Fond memories of Baking Buttered Whole Grain Bread smells in the air, great music and awesome people just doing their thing. ( Was about 13 to 14 years old ), and will always remember this place as one that helped me become the person I am today.
Have a few cool stories, will send out on request.
Thank you!
Tony M.
U.S.A.F. ( Ret. E-7 )

Dixie

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http://www.honkytonktx.com/texasmusic/futurelegends.html

T

Originally from Itasca, Texas comes Tommy Alverson to contribute a vital role in maintaining authentic Texas Music. Often appearing at Luckenbach, Coupland Dance Hall, and Texas' other great Dance Halls, Tommy’s mixture of hard core country with an occasional humorous offering, creates treasures which have become standards over the past 20 years of touring.

GR.C. Banks is a true Texas music pioneer. For over thirty-five years, he has been instrumental in laying the foundation and paving the road that has led to the worldwide acclaim of Texas music.
He is a well-known singer/songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Joe Ely, Linda Ronstadt, Charlie and Will Sexton, Mary Welch, Kimmie Rhodes, Ronnie Lane, and others.
R.C. has released his fourth album, "Conway's Corner". Artists contributing includ Butch Hancock, Jesse Taylor, Townes Van Zandt, Booka Michel, and others. A great CD, especially Track # 8, "Those Days Are Gone". Lots of great Ponty Bone noise, too.
Pick up on R.C.. He's one of our great ones.

"One of the most accomplished singer-songwriter collections recorded by anyone in years. Slaid Cleaves is working with folk and country music's richest themes, and with his unerring sense of melody and incisive lyrical touch, he makes them totally fresh again. Folk singers of 1997, take note - this is the one to beat." --Bob Cannon
"Balancing traditional rock rhythms with introspective lyrical musings, Slaid Cleaves seems like the sort of guy who probably champions Buddy Holly and Woody Guthrie equally. At times convincingly rowdy and at others openly vulnerable, he captures nuances of character in a way that makes his story-songs come alive." --Michael McCall
"He's got a melodic sense to match his narrative skills and he draws as much from Rockabilly and Hank Williams as he does from Vintage Bob Dylan....his sharp perspectives and sharper hooks distinguish him almost as much as his name." --Peter Margasak

Dixie

ary P. Nunn, who has recorded several of Tommy's fine songs, says he’s "One of the best Texas country music songwriters in the business today," and Gary should certainly know. Tommy has recently released another great CD "ME ON THE JUKEBOX". It's re-mixed by Lloyd Maines (Dixie Chick Daddy), has Tommy's son on lead guitar, Maines on Dobro, and a host of other excellent musicians. Alverson
A TRUE & REAL Texas Honky Tonker

Tommy is undoubtedly one of the best singer/songwriters that keep emerging out of the grit and culture of Texas, although he's been around quite awhile playing at most Honky Tonks worth their salt. Pick up some of his stuff, and by all means go see him if he's within traveling distance! You be glad you did.

ommy

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http://www.scarletdukes.com/st/tm_austin.html

All contents ©2003 Ernie Gammage

1966: Austin's Thirteenth Floor Elevators
View a video clip of "You're Gonna Miss Me" from the October 31, 1966 American Bandstand TV show. You must have RealPlayer to view this clip.The Sweetarts and other local Austin bands rose to regional prominence on the crest of an unbelievably vibrant fraternity party and club scene in mid-60s Austin, Texas. Playing three parties a weekend was not uncommon, and this didn't include club dates. The musical variety was an incredible hodge-podge of styles that mimicked what was heard on the Top Forty radio stations of the day. It was all rock 'n' roll!

Because the party scene demanded that the bands know the latest songs, it was not unusual to find Sam and Dave, the Beatles, Little Johnny Taylor, Johnny Rivers, the Beau Brummels, The Byrds, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, and Sly and the Family Stone all in the same set, not to mention Smokey Robinson, Rufus Thomas, Manfred Mann, or Eddie Floyd. It was just a great time to make music, and the original music of that period reflected all these styles.

As the decade matured, the music became more adventurous with the advent of Cream, The Band, Jimmy Hendrix, the Doors and a host of other legends. For the Sweetarts, it finally meant finding a lead guitarist capable of playing what the music demanded and so Gammage became one of two out-front lead singers, replaced on guitar first by Steve Weisberg from Dallas, then later by Austin native, Johnny Richardson. At the same time, Galbraith was replaced by singer Randy Thornton from Lubbock. Tom Van Zandt beefed up his keyboards by replacing the Farfisa with a Hammond organ and Leslie.

The Jade Room in AustinThe clubs in San Antonio and Austin offered a rich experience, both from a musical and business perspective. In Austin, Club Saracen, the Jade Room, Swingers A Go Go (later the Action Club), and the New Orleans Club led the pack. House gigs were coveted. When the Sweetarts ended a yearlong Wednesday showcase, they were replaced by the Thirteenth Elevators. On the heels of these clubs came the nascent Vulcan Gas Company, precursor to the infamous Armadillo World Headquarters.

Of note were the many clubs on Austin's "east side", the real "home of the blues." The IL Club, Victory Grill, and Charlie's Playhouse (where the Jet's held forth) all provided woodshedding opportunities for musicians from the west side. Many a frat gig ended with the bands visiting Ernie's Chicken Shack for the late show and pint bottles of bourbon whisky passed under the table.

Sweetarts business cardBands of the day were remarkable. A common occurrence was a Sunday afternoon jam session at the New Orleans Club that featured the regional bands from Dallas, Houston, West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley who were in town for frat gigs. Austin provided The Fabulous Chevelles, the Wig, Baby Cakes, New Atlantis, Strawberry Shoemaker, Leo and the Prophets, Conqueroo, The Mustangs, Cavaliers, The Rhythm Kings and Lavender Hill Express. Felicity (from which Eagle Don Henley came), would drive down from East Texas. The Briks, Beefeaters and Chessmen were staples from Dallas. The George, Fugitives, The Chevelle V, the Sparkles, and Pumpkin swept in from West Texas, along with the Playboys of Edinburg from that city in the Rio Grande Valley, the Thingies from Miami, and John Fred and His Playboy Band from Tyler. They all thrived in the Austin music scene. It was also during this time that Janis Joplin got her start. Add to this the Georgetown Medical Band, South Canadian Overflow, Mariani, and Eric Johnson from Austin's late 60s and as the scene became more competitive, the music got more progressive.

As the decade progressed and the Summer of Love (1967) came and went, counter culture accoutrements including drugs because more prevalent. Cheap Mexican marijuana became a staple of the bands along with Nehru jackets! The hard drugs of the late 70s had yet to find their way to Austin, with the exception of a variety of psychedelics. Mescaline, the drug of choice of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, psyllicibin and LSD all influenced the bands and music. The Beatles certainly led the pack in this regard!

Dixie

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http://www.frommers.com/destinations/austin/0003021118.html

South By Southwest

 The appearance of country-and-western "outlaw" Willie Nelson at the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1972 united hippies and rednecks in a common musical cause, and is often credited with the birth of the live-music scene on Austin's Sixth Street. The city has since become an incubator for a wonderfully vital, crossbred alternative sound that mixes rock, country, folk, and blues. Although the Armadillo is defunct and Sixth Street is long past its creative prime -- with some notable exceptions, it caters pretty much to a rowdy college crowd -- live music in Austin is very much alive, just more geographically diffuse. There's always something happening downtown in the warehouse district and on the stretch of Red River between Sixth and Tenth streets. Some venues, like the Continental Club, have long been off the beaten path; others, like the Backyard, more recently expanded the boundaries of Austin's musical terrain. Poke around; you can never tell which dive might turn up the latest talent (Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore all played local gigs). If you're here during S*SW, you'll see the town turn into one huge, music-mad party.Dixie

Note: Categories of clubs in a city known for crossover are often very rough approximations; those that completely defy typecasting are dubbed "eclectic." Cover charges range from $5 to $15 for well-liked local bands. Note, too, that in addition to the clubs detailed below, several restaurants, including Threadgill's and Manuel's, offer live music regularly.

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http://www.freewebs.com/teejo/disco2/29scat1fz.html

I could not "steal" photos from here, Zappa was very significant here in Austin...

Dirty's is still alive serving kick ass burgers with very cold beer

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Dixie

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I didn't know it until years later, but my father had known Waylon slightly during his Odessa period. My Dad loved "Waymore's Blues," and we were listening to it at his house one afternoon when he told me one of the best Jennings stories I've ever heard.

Dad was an oil well service crew chief. He and his crew were leaving a rig out in the middle of nowhere about 4 a.m. one morning, dog tired and heading for town when they encountered a set of headlights coming their way up the one lane dirt road. When the car pulled alongside, Dad recognized the company field salesman. They got out and talked about how the job had gone, when the next work on that rig might be, the usual oilfield market intelligence. The salesman was an old school oilfield peddler who "covered all the bases," meaning he kept a Bible on the front seat of his car but kept a case of whiskey in the trunk for customers who preferred a nip to a prayer. He'd honky tonk until closing time with some customers and he'd go to church with others on Sundays, whatever it took to get the next job on that client's well. After discussing the status of the oilfield, he told my Dad, "You know, I didn't know what a good friend of mine old Waylon was until last night." Dad said, "What'd he do, Bill?" Bill replied, "The sonofabitch left out for Nashville. And he took my old lady with him." Now this may well be apocryphal, but it makes a damn fine story about the original "Nashville Rebel." It fits the outlaw image so well, I prefer to believe that it's true.

© clink magazine 2002

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Dixie

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Some were so dusty it was obvious they hadn't been moved in years. Ross subscribed to every available service, so we often had multiple copies. Most of it was dreck and dross, but seldom a day went by that I didn't discover a diamond or two. And then one cold, windy day I hit a motherlode -- two 45 rpm Waylon rarities that I'd never seen, never heard, never heard of. Recorded on Wendy Bagwell's Trend label in Lubbock in 1961 and 1963, the only place I've ever seen these 4 sides is on the recently released 6-disc German Bear Records anthology called Journey: Destiny's Child. The 1961 disc (# 102-45) had two Jennings originals, "Another Blue Day" and "Never Again." These were typical moody Waylon ballads and I seldom played them. But on the 1963 disc (#106-45), Waylon let loose with a raucous countrified Bo Diddley-ish romp called "My Baby Walks All Over Me." Waylon turned his guitar up and took a blistering solo on the track. And the lyrics, although written by B. Mize, are pure Waylon.

The flip side was written by Bill Tilghman and was called "The Stage." The fine print notes the track was previously titled "Stars In Heaven." This song, which at 3:53 was rather long for that period when everyone was looking for a two-minute hit, eulogizes Buddy Holly. It is a dirge-like piece delivered in that same tone and tempo that Waylon used so well on his cover of "MacArthur Park" later in his career. It would never have made a hit, but given the well-known fact that Jennings was somewhat haunted throughout his life by the fact that by a twist of fate he wasn't on Holly's plane when it went down, as a piece of history the disc is certainly a unique rarity. As best I've been able to determine, other than the two tracks Waylon recorded just prior to Buddy Holly's death in 1959 at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico and some live tracks later released as Live at J.D's, these were his earliest official recordings. I've never had them appraised - 'cause they ain't for sale - but I doubt there are more than a few hundred copies in existence.

There's always dust to be dusted in Odessa, and Ross decided I needed to dust the control consoles one Sunday. I was down on my hands and knees cleaning as best I could around all the wiring when I saw what looked like a stack of 8-track tapes on the floor way back in the dark, cob-webbed corner under the auxiliary board that we seldom used. I reached back and pulled out some 4-track cartridges, which is what we recorded commercial spots on. These were old. But there in Ross's squiggly handwriting were the words "Waylon/Tower Foot Market Ad." I put one in a player, pushed the start button, and out came Waylon's voice over an acoustic guitar, singing a jingle. After the short jingle intro finished, Waylon read the weekly grocery specials. I played all the tapes and they were all the same. When Ross came in, I showed him what I'd found. He listened to one. Then he gathered them up and threw them in the trash. I didn't have sense enough to take them out and keep them.

In all, Waylon Jennings spent a little more than a year in Odessa after the Buddy Holly tragedy and over the years since I've heard the occasional Waylon story from folks who knew him during his stay. My brother's best friend was a guy named Lindle. Lindle's dad, Tommy, had at one time during his childhood lived on the same street as Waylon and Roy Orbison (I can't recall whether this was in Wink or Wickett). Tommy became the premier jeweler in West Texas and over the years occasionally lent Waylon flashy gig jewelry. Waylon also had free run of Tommy's place whenever he "couldn't go home" or flat couldn't make it home for whatever reason. Lindle had several stories about waking up in the morning and going outside to find Waylon asleep on the screened back porch. Odessa is on Interstate 20, and Waylon often stopped by their home as he criss-crossed the county on tours. My brother was playing pool with Lindle one afternoon in the late 1960's when they heard a loud engine from the street. The doorbell rang and when they opened the door, there stood Waylon, his bus was parked in the street running. He asked for Tommy, but Tommy had gone downtown on an errand so Lindle asked Waylon if he wanted to come in and wait. But Jennings said he didn't have time, he'd heard that Tommy had built a new house and he wanted to just stop by and "see how the old home folks were making out." 

cont

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http://www.clinkmagazine.com/features/other_feature5.html

Waylon
by William Michael Smith
(originally appeared in Fresh Dirt #12, Apr/May 2002.)

I never met Waylon Jennings and only saw him play live once in May, 1976 at Gregory Gymnasium on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin, but he's had a certain status in my entire adult life. I seemed to keep crossing Ole Waylon's trail. Or walking in his tracks. Or sitting in his chair.

Like most folks from the Flower Power era, I made several changes of major -- usually precipitated by an anemic grade point average -- during my extended college days. In August 1972 I made one of those changes, switching from Psychology to Communications. My wife had just graduated from nursing school and we decided to return to my hometown of Odessa, Texas, where she would work at Medical Center Hospital and I would attend Odessa College to repair my GPA and get a radio operator's license. Radio was my new career enthusiasm. I would do two semesters at OC, then we'd be off to Austin.

I completed the course that entitled me to travel to the FCC office in Dallas to take the test and by December, 1972, I was a licensed operator. Shortly after, Mr. Wallace Jackson, longtime communications department chairman at OC, called me into his office and told me there was a job opening at KOYL and he'd recommended me. He gave me a number and told me to call Edward J. Rosskelly.

Growing up in Odessa, I'd heard of "Ross The Boss" all my life it seemed. KOYL was the big kicker station in the oil-rich Permian Basin and was certainly not my first choice for employment (or listening) of the dozen stations in the Midland-Odessa area. Highly uncool among my generation, it ranked just above the classical station and the Jesus station in my employment hierarchy. But I needed the job, which I was given to understand would arrange itself around my course work, so I made the appointment. The next day I put on my best shirt and my bluest jeans and my just-polished boots, pulled my hair back with a rubber band to make a neat ponytail, and drove out to The Radio Ranch on the outskirts of Odessa in my 1962 Galaxy 500, fully expecting to encounter the usual West Texas redneck and to be rejected within minutes as an unsuitable dope-smokin' hippie.

It turned out that Ross The Boss was … a Yankee, educated at Cornell. He'd come out to West Texas like other Ivy Leaguers (such as George H. Bush) in search of opportunity and founded a radio station. He'd even gone so far as to procure the rights to an additional FM station, which in 1959 seemed like a folly. But the late '60's suddenly saw a boom in the clear, music friendly FM signal, and Ed Rosskelly was looking pretty cagey and visionary.

I'd been at KOYL a few weeks when Ross announced he'd just learned that in a few weeks Waylon Jennings would be playing at the Stardust, Odessa's biggest and rankest night club ("if you can't get your ass whupped at the Stardust, you ain't got no ass to whup"). I was to make certain to remind him on the day before to set up an interview. I asked Ross how he'd gotten the Jennings contact and that's when he told me, "Didn't you know? Waylon used to work here."

This was an electrifying piece of news. Willie and Waylon had just done the first Armadillo World Headquarters gigs in Austin. Jerry Jeff Walker's groundbreaking cosmic cowboy album had just been released, along with John Hartford's "Aereo-Plane." "Country" music was moving into directions no one had foreseen. And here I was working in country radio, right in the belly of the slumbering beast of what was sure to turn the whole "hip" music world upside down. I must have asked Ross 20 times if he needed me to do the Jennings interview, but he wouldn't let me. On the designated day, I dutifully reminded him of the call and Waylon agreed to meet Ross the next afternoon.

I was on station duty when Ross came in just before dark and handed me the cassette with the Jennings interview. I asked him how it went and he said, "Man, Waylon looks bad." He told me to run the interview in pieces, with breaks for a few Waylon tracks and some commercial spots. All I really remember of the interview is that Waylon just couldn't quit talking about Jack Jordan's BarBQ, where the interview had taken place. "We were coming into town and I asked the boys if they were hungry and they said yeah, so we headed the bus for the best BBQ in the world."

Now Ross The Boss didn't give a damn about country music (or any music, really), but The Radio Ranch had whole rooms full of records piled to ceiling with no system of organization at all. We were an automated station (the first one in Texas) 95% of the time, so once the "personalities" had recorded a song onto tape, we had no further use for the vinyl. As the low man on the totem pole, I worked noon to midnight every Saturday and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Sunday. At an automated station there isn't much to do but watch the tape reels whir, occasionally put a new one on one of the computerized tape machines. I've always had a love affair with records, so my usual routine involved getting all the tapes checked and running, then making a trip to one of the record rooms. I'd gather up a double armload and carry them back to the control room, then sit and carefully go through them.

cont

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By Marc Savlov

SEPTEMBER 15, 1997:  In the beginning, there was music. And damn, it was yummy. Trouble was, no one seemed to know who was playing where, when. Was Janis at the Soap Creek Saloon, or the Armadillo? Cornell Hurd at the Hole in the Wall? Nah, that can't be right. Where the hell was Eddie Wilson's pager when you really needed it? Nowhere to be found -- at least not back in the mid-to-late Seventies when the Austin music scene, fueled by the Cosmic Cowboy movement and a seemingly unlimited supply of talented musicians and good reefer, broke through and rivalled the burgeoning San Francisco/Haight Ashbury/Fillmore psychotrip.

Pagers, radio spots, even semi-inspired print ads for shows were few and far between back then, and the resultant information vacuum created by too many popular venues booking amazing bills with zilch advertising almost single-handedly spawned what people today think of as Poster Art. That $50 Frank Kozik print you've been ogling at Sound Exchange has its roots not only deep in the heart o' Texas, but also in the music explosion that rocked the Capitol City in the Seventies and made sideline superstars out of a struggling band of artists and cartoonists (frequently one and the same) that included such now-legendary names as Gilbert Shelton, Jim Franklin, Ken Featherston, Guy Juke, Danny Garrett, Sam Yeates, Micael Priest, Kerry Awn, Gary McIlhenny, Henry Gonzales, Jack Jaxon, and a few others. Twenty years later, not all of these guys are as famous as they ought to be. Twenty years later, not all of these guys are as alive as they ought to be, either.

While Shelton moved to San Francisco and let the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers run amok, others hung onto Austin's nascent poster art business as long as possible, eventually forming a locally owned and operated poster art ad biz, Directions Company -- by the hippies, for the hippies. Like all good things, that fell through before too long, and the "Armadillo Art Squad" (as most of the local artists who designed posters and handbills for Eddie Wilson's Armadillo World Headquarters were known) fell by the wayside, with the artists receiving less and less money for less and less work. The bottom, apparently, had fallen out.

Cut to the tail end of the Seventies: Punk Rawk explodes, flier art makes a resounding comeback, and Tim Stegall gets his spikey-haired clock cleaned almost daily down south in Alice, Texas. Randy "Biscuit" Turner, head Big Boy and all-around art-upstart proclaims, "Go start your own band! (And while you're at it, why not do your own fliers, too?)" By the early Eighties, Paul "Martian" Sessums, Jr. and Richard "Dicko" Mathers prick up their ears and pull out their Rapid-O-Graphs and do just that. Meanwhile, Flipshades motormouth Frank Kozik skulks around Atomic City and impresses The Artist Formerly Known as Jim Hughes with his startling ability to mimic classic EC Comics art (most notably Wally Wood). For a while, that section of Guadalupe affectionately referred to as "The Drag" is a mind-bending cornucopia of slapdash flier and poster art; Xeroxed handbills and four-color offset poster art vie for attention on every available telephone pole and lightbox. The ground itself is literally covered with flour/sugar/water-pasted exhortations to Go! See! Do!, shrieking at passersby in a delirious riot of gaudy shades.

Then, suddenly, punk dies, Kozik heads out to the City by the Bay (see accompanying story), and everyone chills out while waiting for the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Around this same time, the Austin City Council decides it might be a good idea to deprive a few more people of their artistic livelihood and passes an ordinance making it illegal to place posters of any kind on public property. The old work, inches thick by now, is cautiously peeled from the poles along the drag and nonchalantly tossed in the nearest dustbin. The poster art scene is again in hibernation. Beginning to sense a trend here?

These days, it's tough going for the current crop of Austin poster artists. Lyman Hardy, late of Ed Hall, has resorted to calling poster art "a fine art thing these days," and Jason Austin is desperately craving a move to the more artistically relaxed atmosphere of east of the Atlantic. Longtime scene stalwart Lindsey Kuhn has moved to more profitable shores in the Big D, and former Blondie's scion and heir apparent Craig Oelrich is pulling day shifts at Mama Mia's.

While the San Francisco poster scene has blossomed in the past few years, generating generous payoffs for Kozik, Coop, and others, our sister scene has apparently withered and died on the vine for the third time in as many decades. Remnants of the old days remain: The interior of Danny Young's Texicalli Grill is a virtual time machine, the walls plastered with sun-faded Jukes, Franklins, and Garretts, and the Green Mesquite Barbecue is similarly themed, but all in all, you're far more likely to come across the real deal behind a record-store counter or rounding out the ambience quotient at your local brew pub.

Which asks the question, "What Happened?"

I am

Dixie

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Punk Rock & the Xerox KidsThings fell quiet for several years. The Vulcan was long since a faded memory, the Armadillo was on its last legs, and the poster art scene seemed effectively dead. It took another musical revolution and a twisted new breed of artists to shake things up, which is exactly what happened. Punk rock invaded not just New York and Los Angeles, but also Austin, birthing Raul's on the Drag, and bands as diverse as the Next, the Skunks, and the Big Boys. As suddenly as they had vanished, the posters were backtaped, stapled, glued, and smashed onto every available (and unavailable) surface.

Frank Kozik

Priest remembers the sudden influx of new art vividly: "About the time we all thought [poster art] was going to die, here come the Xerox kids. This was around the late Seventies, the time of Raul's and the punk rock kids. They took it to an even more homegrown level than we had, because they would make 'em themselves without any fear of ever being paid for them. They'd make five or six or 10 or however many Xerox copies they could afford with what little money they had in their pockets, and go out and staple them up just to promote the shows. And I went yeah, because it finally got back to where it started from, you know? All we were ever trying to do was get across to people that rock & roll was supposed to be a participatory sport, a spectator sport. The more people there, the better."

For want of a better term, many people -- collectors, fans, etc. -- view this late Seventies/early Eighties tumult as the beginning of "The Kozik Years" (see accompanying story). There were plenty of others working at the time, notably Martian Sessums and Richard "Dicko" Mathers, both of whom played in the nascent Oi! band Criminal Crew and spent their days hanging out on the front stoop of Atomic City with Jim "Straight Edge" Copenhaver and Kozik.

Love him or hate him, though (or both, as most people do), Frank Kozik revolutionized postering in Austin and beyond, taking it off the street and holding his work and that of his contemporaries up for validation. There was a dawning realization that this poster art could trigger some serious cash flow. It had value, merit, and above all, financial worth. To this day many people in the art community resent the fact that Kozik apparently stumbled over this seemingly obvious truism and in the process became the most successful modern poster artist anyone had ever seen.

Priest: "Kozik did the poster that got banned by UT. It was Joseph and Mary barbecuing in their aprons with the baby Jesus on the grill, and it said, `Everyone serves the Lord in his own way.' So the University of Texas bans the poster, and they then ended up running it on the cover of the Daily Texan, distributing thousands of copies all over the world just to show everyone what they didn't want anyone to see! [laughing] That made us kind of proud of Frank.

"Through the Club Foot era, Frank and Andy Blackwood, Paul Sabal, and another fellow started the Artmaggots [a poster artist collective], and they were doing a similar thing to what we had done with the Armadillo a decade before.

"To a great extent, their arrival meant that we didn't have to bust our asses and try and make a living doing this anymore because we had viable replacements now. For a long time, we probably did it because it still needed doing and there was no one else to do it. But with Martian, and Jason Austin, and those guys, when they came on the scene, it really made it fun and exciting again."

And then, towards the end of the decade, the process repeated itself, winding down under the weight of its own inertia as the Austin poster scene dried up once again -- right about the time Green Day started getting attention from people other than Lawrence Livermore (make your own judgment call on the implications...).

cont

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"Jim Franklin was kind of the guy who showed us that you didn't have to play guitar to be a star. A lot of the early Armadillo posters that Jim Franklin did were just handbills, but there were a couple -- Janis Joplin in San Antonio and so on -- that were done with really psychedelic, mutually contrasting colors. But that was real expensive to do, and in those days they didn't do shows very often, so they could kind of afford to mount a pretty good promotion."

Michael Priest

"We were the first alternative ad agency, and we were all just young guys," says Priest. "The oldest guy in the company was 24, the youngest 19. We handled alternative businesses -- Oat Willie's, the Armadillo, all the underground businesses. While we set out to be the first hippie ad agency, we in fact became the first hippie savings and loan, thanks to the fact that we had to extend 90 days credit to everyone. Everybody owed us money, and eventually we went out of business. The Directions Company broke up in 1974.

"The perception all around the country," Priest continues, "was that in Austin, the art was just as important as the music. When you put the two together, it really made big, serious juju magic. That was because the audience was introduced to the act before they ever got there. Our job was to take some of the experiences of the music into places where you couldn't hear it.

"You have to remember, at that time, most of those acts were not getting played on the radio at all. Maybe in the middle of the night, on KUT, and there would be brief stints where stations would try and do some progressive programming, but invariably they'd get slapped down by the numbers and the commercial aspect, right?

"For most of its history, Austin has had incredible live music and no radio supporting it. Except for the hardasses at KUT, you know? They always managed to get some in there and boy, were they proud of it. And we owe 'em, because how else were you going to get to hear new music if it didn't get played on the radio? You couldn't go to the record store and even hope to play a sample of everything that came in. There was just too much, and even then you're the only one who gets to hear it. So the posters really made a difference, and as the media began to catch up, they weren't as necessary, but clubowners still thought they were a nice touch. And the bands enjoyed it a lot."

Art and commerce rarely mix -- this was as true then as it remains now. The money just wasn't coming in for the amount of work the artists were doing.

Franklin: "At first [when I started], you're anticipating a future, you know? You get responses to the artwork, people love it, and you think that sooner or later the money's going to come your way. But then you just end up becoming aware that you're just another - and I hate to use the term -- %#&!*% in the field."

Franklin still bridles at the less-than-thrilling monetary rewards. "After so many years of inspired creative activity, seeing no payoff from it, and finding that the few places that are willing to pay you today are only going to pay the same price that we should've gotten back in the Sixties, well, again, the artist is the %#&!*% of the publishing business."

"As far as the advertising aspect of it," says Garrett, "it ceased to be an effective advertising medium before the show or for the venue in general a long time ago. When I started at the Armadillo years ago, there really was no way to promote a show; they didn't have much money, and there was no radio promotion. Posters were a good, cheap way to do it.

"It was something that people could relate to, because of that San Francisco connection. After the Armadillo got better off financially, the dynamic of the whole thing changed a lot - it became more cost-effective to put ads in the paper or even on the radio. But the days are long gone -- probably since, say, 1977 -- that posters were an effective form of advertising."

"Over time," recalls Priest, "it got littler and littler and skinnier and skinnier, and posters would only come out for the really big shows, and then on top of that you'd have hell just trying to collect all your money. We loved doing it and being a part of it, but after a while, it just became impossible to make a living at it."

cont

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http://weeklywire.com/ww/09-15-97/austin_music_feature1.html

"The Vulcan Gas Company was really the first place in Texas of its kind," says Jim Franklin through a mouthful of Thai buffet. "It had light shows, music -- it was a psychedelic haven. We booked original music, no copy bands, which was the big thing at the time. The Vulcan was why I started doing poster art in the first place."

Jim Franklin

Scrapping his original idea, Franklin came to Austin and before long found himself doing poster work for the nascent Vulcan Gas Company. "Gilbert Shelton did the original posters for the Vulcan," recalls Franklin, "but when he moved to San Francisco with the Freak Brothers, that kind of left me to fill the void. It was pretty much all left in my lap. I'd sit up all night, draw a poster, and take it to the printer. I never had to pacify anybody, and that was really one of the magical things about that time.

"[Doing music posters] was a way for me to overcome my loathing of advertising by turning the advertising around into a point of celebration rather than promotion. Celebrating the music with a piece of art."

Payment was arranged by the Vulcan in the form of studio space for Franklin. "I was the artist in residence, literally, in the Vulcan building. The $10 a week they gave me was not good enough -- even in the Sixties -- to rent a space, so they just let me live and work out of the building. I was, oh, 24 at the time, and it was cool. No bosses, we were contradicting everything, and I was making art without having to attend the University of Texas. My art was all over town. In fact, someone who was teaching art at UT told me once that there was a discussion in the faculty lounge about whether or not I had attended UT, and somebody said, `Well, not only did he attend UT, he taught here, too.' Which of course wasn't true at all."

During his tenure at the Vulcan, Franklin hit upon an inspired idea that has followed him (and the Austin music scene itself) to this very day: the armadillo.

"I had a little handbook of zoology of North America," recalls Franklin, "and it had a painted illustration of an armadillo in it. I was looking at that one day, and I thought the armadillo would be the perfect symbol for what I was doing. So, I drew one smoking a joint for a free concert in Woolrich Park. And that's what launched the whole deal. I started drawing them and it became kind of a theme. I got responses, everyone connected with it, you know. They got the connection between the hippie and the armadillo, so I started drawing them fairly frequently and it just continues from there."

Continues is one way to put it. Checking out the eaves outside Eddie Wilson's new Threadgill's location on Riverside Drive (conveniently located on the sight of the old Armadillo World Headquarters) makes it seem like more of a community obsession. Those little, plated weasels are all over this town, their corpses littering the highway outskirts. Franklin, I think, had no idea what he was starting.

Neither did Micael Priest, who entered the scene post-Vulcan, pre-Armadillo. Priest arrived in Austin for the same reason most young people do -- to attend UT. Here, he found The Rag, Austin's underground weekly newspaper, then being published out of the basement of an abandoned YMCA on the Drag. Franklin and Danny Garrett had already tried their hands doing covers and illustrations for the mag, so Priest figured he might as well give it a shot, too.

"In 1969," he says, "we had the first explosion of pop festivals, where you could see all these acts on one bill for a $7 or $8 ticket. There was one of these festivals outside of Dallas, which I went to, and it was there I found an issue of The Rag with a Franklin cover; it was all pen and ink with billions of armadillos from the foreground all the way to the horizon. This was a lot like the kind of stuff I'd been doing, and I said, `Hey man, I can do that.'

cont

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The party came to an end after ten years when the perennially patient landlord had a much better offer for the property, and could no longer justify keeping the struggling business at the location; he'd been renting the place to them without a lease. The last night at the Armadillo was also the last night of 1980, with Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep At The Wheel, Maria Muldaur, Austin magcian Turk Pipkin, and the elderly Austin legend, Kenneth Threadgill bringing it all home. Wilson, in an amazing serendipitous coincidence, reopened Threadgill's old service station on the next day. The place had been shut down for years with the memorable graffiti on the side that said "Janis sang here." Wilson opened it now as a southern styled restaurant, once again getting those Wednesday night music sessions going, another way of keeping Austin music alive in the wake of the 'Dillo. Of course, by then and for all the years since the close of the Armadillo, Austin music has been doing just fine, with more big, medium, and small venues than just about any American city, and a steady stream of talent that's as diverse as the city itself. It didn't take long after the old National Guard armory was torn down for the heavy machinery to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, along with another tall bank building, nor did it take long for the new structure to fail itself: the new building spent most of the '80s vacant, indicative of the times. Now, it serves as an office building, again with one of those neat little twists. Among its residents is radio station KGSR, which frequently plays, supports, and participates in the music from this remarkable community, much as Armadillo had done from the same spot. When the building had been leveled in 1981, one Austin hippie flower salesman was pictured on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman sitting on the dirt playing guitar where the Armadillo had once stood. He'd always wanted to play there. That flower salesman, Max Nofziger, later spent some time on Austin's City Council.

What the Austin music scene has become since the demise of the Armadillo World Headquarters is wonderful and unique, but it's hard to imagine where it would be without the Armadillo in its past. Austinites still debate about whether what was happening in Austin music was better back then or is better today. Either way, one place keeps coming up in the discussion. As Willenzik points out, "Every time anybody refers to when Austin was good and when it wasn't any good anymore, guess what the benchmark is?"

copyright © 1996 Capitol City Publishing, L.L.C. (USA / EARTH) All Rights Reserved Capitol City A&E zine is a trademark of Capitol City Publishing, L.L.C. Other copyrights and registered trademarks in this document belong to specific companies and are used here with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

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The lack of money drove them to make it an even cooler place by branching into food service. The restaurant helped pay the bills to keep the concert stage going through the lean years, which were all years.In fact,the distinctive hippie food stands out in the memories of many as much as the music does. Wilson says, "I run into people now who remember Armadillo not as a concert hall, but as an outdoor vegetarian restaurant. People that don't have a clue about what happened right inside those brick walls."

Of course, the number of great stories from behind those brick walls far exceeds the shows. Willenzik remembers the night that Frank Zappa got to town a few days before his gig and asked if he could work the cash register at the nacho counter during a Charlie Daniels show to see if anyone would recognize him. Willenzik asked him if anybody had figured him out, to which Zappa responded, "Nobody said they did, but I think I waited on Bob Dylan!" Another night, a very young Ted Nugent had allegedly relieved himself in the food in the kitchen. Nugent was ultimately regretful, even apologizing from the stage that night. Willenzik says, "His excuse was a pretty good excuse,"I'm crazy, I can prove it, I live in Detroit because I like it." After his show, the staff, who always fed the talent, had a special presentation set up for Nugent's dinner that night. "We took some dead toilets and made a chair out of them, we added a flush handle on the fork, he was served meatloaf and gravy in a bedpan, a urine beaker full of beer, yellow toilet paper for a napkin. He loved it!"

Bruce Springsteen played a total of five shows at the 'Dillo, all in 1974 when he already had a Columbia record deal but little name recognition beyond his native New Jersey. The shows in Austin, along with some in Houston and Dallas, helped establish his Southern following. Again, it was that Armadillo audience that was willing to try him out without having heard any of his music. The cover charge was a buck.

There was not always any rhyme or reason to the musical pairings at the Armadillo, but that was half the fun. Austin's western swingers, Alvin Crow And The Pleasant Valley Boys actually opened for one of the Springsteen shows. But such double bills made for just another night at the 'Dillo. Hippie rock band Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen once shared a bill with country's Waylon Jennings, and British punkers The Clash once shared the stage with Texan Joe Ely.
One Austin band that opened the shows of many national touring acts was Uncle Walt's Band, an acoustic swing/folk trio with beautiful three part harmonies. Its fiddle player, Champ Hood, today host of Austin's Wednesday night Threadgill's supper sessions, fondly remembers his days playing at the 'Dillo: "To me, it was like a big room with a small room feel. It did seem to have a certain intimacy about it. It wasn?t like going to a concert nowadays with assigned seating, it wasn't all that organized. It just seemed real loose, you could just kind of wander around. There were places to sit if you felt like sitting, there were places to stand, of course there were bars kinda all over the place. They just had a really loose, relaxed feeling to it. It was just a lot of fun.

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And it wasn't long before that lifestyle had a soundtrack to accompany it. Wilson had no way of envisioning the new sound that was to evolve under his own roof ("I didn't envision tomorrow's rent. I wasn't a visionary. I was an illusionary"), but it happened nonetheless. Willie Nelson had already hung around Nashville for a decade and had written some country classics before trekking down to Austin to see what it was all about. Before Willie's first Armadillo show, the Austin American-Statesman's Townsend Miller wrote in his country music column of the appearance of Nelson on a psychedelic poster and wondered about that night's inevitable collision of rednecks and long-hairs, the two warring camps that shared no common ground in any other place in the United States in the 1960s or '70s. Only in Austin could the music bring the two together.

Among the new Austin artists gaining recognition were singer/songwriters like B.W. Stevenson, Steven Fromholz, Kinky Friedman, and bands like Greezy Wheels, Asleep At The Wheel, and The Lost Gonzo Band. Gonzo songwriter Gary P. Nunn even wrote a song called "London Homesick Blues," which sang the praises of the place and pretty nicely got to the heart of the whole Armadillo experience: "I wanna go home with the Armadillo/Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene/The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen." The city even produced its own new sound on radio in KOKE-FM, calling the new format "progressive country."

The recognition outside of Austin began to come in, as articles about this happening little place in the heart of Texas started showing up in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, in which Eddie Wilson described what was so special about armadillos and hippies: "Armadillos and hippies are somewhat alike, because they're maligned and picked on. Armadillos like to sleep all day and roam at night. They share their homes with others. People think they're smelly and ugly and they keep their noses in the grass. They're paranoid. But they've got one characteristic nobody can knock. They survive."
By 1974, a new show for public TV had gone into production called "Austin City Limits." All of the artists that frequented the Armadillo were now being seen coast to coast, and were selling records accordingly. "Austin City Limits" still presents music to the world from Texas, with national country acts and Texas favorites. The series still uses Nunn's version of "London Homesick Blues" as its theme. In the late seventies, after the Cosmic Cowboy sound had died down, Armadillo continued to play host to an eclectic mix of Texas musicians, as other difficult to categorize players like Joe Ely, Uncle Walt's Band, and Too Smooth took the stage. National acts found their most significant followings to be in Austin, so quite a few made the Armadillo something of home base. Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, blues legend Freddie King, Shawn Phillips, The Charlie Daniels Band, Frank Zappa all played frequently at the 'Dillo. As the place became established, all of Austin's music scene began to explode, with numerous other live music clubs opening and succeeding, or as Wilson puts it, perhaps a bit more eloquently, "Austin went from zero places to hundreds of places. It went from less than a ooch to more than a gob in eighteen months from the time Armadillo started."

Austin music was doing well in the general sense, but the Armadillo rarely actually made any money. Concert tickets were always cheap, and, quite often, money had to be spent before it came in. For instance, John Sebastian once had a $5,000 guarantee from the Armadillo before his show there occurred, and then half a dozen people attended it. In 1976, Wilson moved on and his replacement, Hank Alrich, was forced to lay off most of the employees just to keep afloat. By 1977, the Armadillo filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Somehow, through it all, the determination to keep the music coming stayed alive in all who worked there. The Armadillo had that spirit of we-ism in its dedicated staff, who would sometimes go many weeks without paychecks, occasionally accepting food instead. The communal atmosphere was all a result of the collective belief that the cause of providing a really cool place to hang out was indeed a noble one. They even sold beer out of a vending machine, but in true hippie consciousness, stopped selling Lone Star Beer when the brewery was sponsoring armadillo races, which the Armadillo staff saw as cruel treatment to its animal counterpart. The 'Dillo took care of its own.

cont

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We-ism got started in 1969 when the great Austin concert hall, Vulcan Gas Co., closed its doors after three years of 13th Floor Elevators, The Conqueroo, and nationally known acts like Canned Heat and Johnny Winter, who recorded a live album there. Eddie Wilson wanted to keep the music coming by finding a new home for it. He had grown up in central Austin hanging out at Kenneth Threadgill's Service Station where the Wednesday night hootenannies had been all the rage. In fact, in the early '60s, Janis Joplin had spent some time hanging out there and singing with her friend Mr. Threadgill before moving on to bigger things.

Wilson wanted a new musical outlet for the city, but he didn't really choose the former National Guard armory in South Austin that was obscured by a skating rink. "It chose me while I was taking a leak," Wilson remembers. "I was behind George's Cactus Club, standing between John Reed and Jimmie Dale Gilmore [then a member of the Hub City Movers]. We were out back in a parking lot, and saw broken metal framed windows at least twenty feet off the ground. I thought, "My Lord, there's a giant building there." We were looking at the east side of the National Guard armory. I went around to the west side and discovered a garage door. I raised the garage door, drove my car in it, shut the doors behind me and turned on my lights. I had a real hallucinogenic moment there as I, first time, gazed on the inside of Armadillo World Headquarters. I knew immediately that I'd found the place."

The building already had quite a musical history. After being a National Guard armory, it had been The Sports Center, hosting wrestling and boxing matches, with occasional package tours coming through. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had played there, and one show in 1953 had included Faron Young, Johnny Horton, and a kid named Elvis Presley.

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Armadillo World Headquarters

by Rush Evans

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http://www.austinlinks.com/Music/armheadq.html

Closed and gone forever. Jan 1, 1981

Many thanks to Nicki Turman for compiling this page and providing the photographs.
N.Turman@isode.com

Jim Franklin is the artist who painted many of the murals at the Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin's most famous music venue in the 1970s. He also created many of the posters advertising the shows playing at the Armadillo.

A Brief History

August 7, 1970, Eddie Wilson opened the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. On New Year's Eve, 1980, Kenneth Threadgill played the last concert. These pictures were taken the following day, January 1, 1981. During its ten year run, the Armadillo was the venue to play in Texas, hosting many local and national acts, including Taj Mahal, Leon Redbone, Asleep at the Wheel, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, Steve Fromholtz, BB King, Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Greezy Wheels, Edgar and Johnny Winters, the Pointer Sisters, Bonnie Raitt, Chuck Mangione, and many others. It was also the home of the Austin Ballet Theatre and the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. There was a beer garden outside, and inside it was a huge cavernous place, where you had to sit on the carpeted floor with the smell of beer and ashes from previous performances.

Pictures

OutsideEntranceBeer GardenMural in parking lot
(which was dotted with huge car-swallowing pot holes)Rikke, The Guacamole QueenWe're All EarsThe Ragin' Cajun
Doug KershawInterior, Stage

Closed and gone forever. Jan 1, 1981

Many thanks to Nicki Turman for compiling this page and providing the photographs.
N.Turman@isode.com

Dixie

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/pda/A3866015

Created: 28 Apr 2005
Among all the music venues - both past and present, that have graced the city of Austin , it's likely that none is more fondly remembered than the Armadillo World Headquarters. Named after the Nine Banded Armadillo ( Texas state mammal), it lasted for only ten years, but played host to an eclectic mix of some of the biggest names in music such as Count Basie, The Ramones , Kraftwerk , Robert Palmer, The Jam, Frank Zappa , Roxy Music, Roy Buchanan , Van Morrison, and Talking Heads. It was also host to the annual Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, and even has a resident ballet company - the Austin Ballet Theatre.

You guys... this place rocked, then mades us cry when they closed their doors... if there is an  "Austin Phantom" reading this:  "caw caw". Armadillo Worldheadquarters has better historians than me, I hope I can do some justice here!

I am

Dixie

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http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/AA/xda1.html

During the 1970s the Armadillo World Headquarters, a concert hall in Austin, became the focus of a musical renaissance that made the city a nationally recognized music capital. Launched in a converted national guard armory by a group of local music entrepreneurs, the "Armadillo" provided a large and increasingly sophisticated alternative venue to the municipal auditorium across the street. This venture, which capped several years of searching by young musicians and artists to find a place of their own, reflected the emergence nationwide of a counterculture of alternative forms of music, art, and modes of living. The name Armadillo World Headquarters evoked both a cosmic consciousness and the image of a peaceable native critter, the armadillo,^qv often seen on Texas highways as the victim of high-speed technology.

The Armadillo opened its doors in August 1970, and quickly became the focus for much of the city's musical life. With an eventual capacity of 1,500, the hall featured a varied fare of blues, rock, jazz, folk, and country music in an informal, open atmosphere. By being able to host such top touring acts as Frank Zappa, the Pointer Sisters, Bruce Springsteen, and the Grateful Dead, the Armadillo brought to Austin a variety of musical groups that smaller clubs or other local entities might never have booked. Since outstanding local or regional artists often opened these shows, the Armadillo also gave vital exposure to such future stars as Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.^qv The Armadillo's eclectic concert calendar brought together different, sometimes disparate, sectors of the community. The most dramatic fusion mixed traditional country-music culture with that of urban blues and rock to produce a Texas hybrid character known as the "cosmic cowboy" and a hybrid music called "progressive country" (sometimes referred to as "redneck rock"). The acknowledged godfather of this movement was singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, who made his Armadillo debut in 1972.

To promote its concerts, the Armadillo maintained a staff of poster and mural artists, including Jim Franklin, Micael Priest, Guy Juke, and Danny Garrett. Given free reign for their creative impulses, these and other artists explored many new images and techniques in poster making. The hundreds of Armadillo concert posters they made during the 1970s contributed to the flowering of poster art in Austin. The Armadillo operated on a shoestring budget and much volunteer labor, on a month-to-month basis in an atmosphere of perpetual financial crisis. By 1980 the demands of downtown real estate signalled the end of an era. As its lease expired, the Armadillo World Headquarters held one final New Year's Eve blowout (December 31, 1980), then closed its doors to await demolition. Though the building is gone, the Armadillo's legacy as a vital center of musical and artistic creativity lives on in Texas music history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armadillo World Headquarters Archives, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. David L. Menconi, Music, Media, and the Metropolis: The Case of Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1985). Jan Reid, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

John Wheat

Dixie

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