Program from Elvis Presley’s performance at the Sportcenter, August 25, 1955.
For hippies fed up with the straight world, Armadillo World Headquarters became a refuge, a kind of Noah’s ark for the hippie world. Its shape even resembled an upside-down ark. It was easy to see that there were cosmic reasons for it all.
It wasn’t always easy to interpret the workings of the cosmos in Texas, but the environment here at least made for a healthy respect for nature. You only had to live through a few cycles of drought and flood, or one average summer, to become educated. Along with the natural beauty of the hills and limestone outcroppings that underpin the Austin area, the Colorado River has always been one of Austin’s most valuable natural resources. Over the years, however, the river has seemed somewhat ambivalent about the relationship. Prior to the mid–twentieth century, extended seasons of drought periodically reduced the river’s flow to a trickle. Dry periods were followed by torrential rains and murderous floods that swept away homes, businesses, crops, livestock, and bridges. During Austin’s first century, the Congress Avenue Bridge was destroyed and rebuilt several times. Dams were erected with great hope and ceremony, only to be swatted away by the petulant river.
Efforts to harness and corral the Colorado River upstream from Austin finally progressed with assistance from FDR’s New Deal, leading to the creation of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) in 1935. By 1951, a series of dams for flood control and power generation had been completed, creating the present-day chain of Highland Lakes in the hills west of Austin. Then, in 1960, the city of Austin completed a dam at Longhorn Crossing in East Austin, which created what was originally given the not-so-creative name of Town Lake. The area around it was gradually enhanced with greenbelts and hike-and-bike trails, thanks in large part to the leadership of Lady Bird Johnson. After her death in 2007, Town Lake was renamed Lady Bird Lake, and it remains one of the proudest symbols of the Austin groove today.
But until the river was tamed by the LCRA, no development of consequence existed on the south bank of the Colorado. Even then, for several generations, South Austin remained more rural and funky. It was the capital’s ugly stepsibling, the place where Austin let its shirttails hang out. South of the river, Congress Avenue was lined with bars, feedstores, tourist courts, roadhouses, dance halls, used-car lots, wrecking yards, landfills, whorehouses, tent revivals, and carnivals. It was the domain of people who needed cheap rent and of enterprises that needed to be a respectable distance from courthouses, churches, and schools.
During the 1940s, the future site of the Armadillo fit this profile as well as any other block on the south shore. For years, the property at the corner of Barton Springs Road and Riverside Drive was mostly occupied by a small carnival that featured pony rides, a Ferris wheel, and a tiny wooden roller coaster.
In 1949, M. K. Hage, an enterprising Lebanese immigrant, bought the land and built the Skating Palace, with street-front offices and a warehouse following in the second phase of construction. Hage collaborated closely with the architects and even worked alongside the construction crews. The warehouse was a concrete-and-brick structure that was 150 feet long and 95 feet wide, topped by an arched, lamella-style roof.
“My father had been working as a stonemason since he was ten, carrying rock, trimming rock, helping in construction,” said M. K. Hage Jr. “He had very strong hands. He liked to build things. He loved the idea of having a big space without columns.”
Because structural steel was still scarce after World War II, wooden beams were used to support the sixty-foot-wide roof of the Skating Palace. According to Q. S. “Pee Wee” Franks, who worked on the project, it was the largest wooden-support roof in the state at the time.1 The warehouse was built with an outer shell of steel beams and reinforced concrete pillars. The absence of interior columns created a wide-open space inside the building as well. It’s as if Hage had a dream that envisioned some grand, unarticulated purpose for a future tenant.
During the Cold War era, the spaciousness of the warehouse also had practical implications. With its Quonset hut resemblance, the warehouse was suitable for use as an armory, complete with an underground firing range that would become our beer vault. And soon after completion, the federal government leased space in it for the National Guard. The Bureau of Internal Revenue also leased space.2
The building complex was never a big financial success, and in April 1953, disaster struck. Just as Hage was leaving on a European vacation, a fire broke out on the property. Everything was destroyed. Hage had no insurance coverage.
In a testament to first-generation immigrant determination, Hage decided to rebuild on the property and essentially had new versions of the original structures erected on the site, with a few improvements.
A local promoter named Owen Davis stepped forward, staging prizefights and wrestling matches in the warehouse under its new name, Sportcenter. Occasionally, the parade of twentieth-century gladiators was interrupted by a music show. Surely the most historic of these was the appearance of Horace Logan and his Louisiana Hayride in August 1955.
Louisiana Hayride was a traveling show broadcast every Saturday night on KWKH radio in Shreveport, Louisiana. Riding on fifty thousand watts of clear-channel power, the show could be heard throughout the South. The star of the 1955 season’s Hayride was a handsome, young truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, named Elvis Presley. Elvis had a few hits under his belt by this time, but in the entertainment hype of 1955, he was billed as the “Folk Music Fireball.”3
From the scant press I’ve seen about the show, the billing hardly mattered; Elvis could’ve been called Mr. X and he still would’ve set the room ablaze, with women old and young throwing their undies at him. A sellout crowd filled the Sportcenter at fifty cents a head, with an ad campaign promising “4 solid hours” of entertainment. Elvis was promoting his first hits for Sun Records, the pioneering Memphis label that introduced the world to Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Rufus Thomas, and Howlin’ Wolf. The show’s “Special Autograph Program,” which sold for fifteen cents at the show, noted that Elvis was breaking new ground with the singles “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “That’s All Right,” describing the former as an “unusual pairing of an R&B number with a Country standard.” Elvis was introduced to the public as a “big, blond guy who likes nothing better than to spend an afternoon practicing football with some of the youngsters in his neighborhood.”4
The idea of Elvis with blond hair still spins my hat around, even if that was his natural hair color. (Sammy Allred was there and asked the young rock ’n’ roller what the real color of his hair was. Elvis answered, “Purple.”) The big surprise for me was that Elvis played our building, fifteen years before we came along and renamed it Armadillo World Headquarters. Elvis played Austin several other times in the fifties before he joined the army in 1958 at the peak of his fame. I’d known that he played Dessau Hall and the Skyline Club in 1955 and the City Coliseum in 1956, but somehow the Sportcenter show had slipped through the cracks of the Elvis-in-Texas legend.
Looking back now, it makes perfect sense to me that Elvis rocked the house that M. K. Hage dreamed into existence—twice—before the Hippie World came along and made it our hippie boot camp, trade school, music hall, art pad, and home. It’s cosmic, man.
* * *
Fifteen years after Elvis and the Louisiana Hayride left town with the crowd howling for more, M. K. Hage Jr. still owned the building built by his father, who had died in 1966. Well-known in Austin, M. K. Hage Jr. had grown up swimming in Barton Springs and making deliveries for his father’s store. As a philanthropist, he devoted a lot of his time to public school education. He served twelve years on the Austin school board and helped establish Austin Community College, but he opposed desegregation and caused an angry outcry when he said the ACC board should be composed of “a black, a woman, a Mexican American, and someone who knows what he’s doing.” He bought a sizable tract of land midtown, between Thirty-Fourth and Thirty-Eighth Streets, as the first step in developing a new, state-of-the-art medical complex. After several of the primary facilities had been completed, Hage talked the people at Seton Hospital into moving there.5
Hage was an odd duck. At our first meeting, after a few minutes of small talk, he confided that he’d had a mistress for years. Although the thought hadn’t previously crossed my mind, I had the feeling he wanted to reassure me of his heterosexuality. (Or was I the one he was concerned about?) He also mentioned negative comments he’d seen in the Statesman regarding hippies and the Vulcan Gas Company. He was concerned that our place might attract the same bad vibes.
He was talking about comments by Wray Weddell, a dedicated hippie hater who wrote a city column on a typewriter that he apparently dipped in caustic acid every week. I told Hage that we were going to run a tight ship, that we wouldn’t sell beer, and that I’d had experience enforcing the peace in my time as a marine, boxer, football coach, and lobbyist for the Brewers Association.
And although I tried not to sound desperate, I let him know that I really needed and wanted a chance to rent the old, weird, ugly, vacant building. A few minutes later, I agreed to pay $500 a month for the privilege. Over the next ten years, there were incremental increases in rent as new spaces within the office building became available to us and we expanded our operation; but even when the monthly rate was triple the original amount, it was still a bargain, the main drawback being the short-term lease.
There was one stipulation added to the deal: Mr. Hage wanted his son, M. K. Hage III, to work with us. I told Mr. Hage that would be fine; we needed all the help we could get. Mr. Hage gave me the key and then, taking note of my physique, complimented my biceps.
Heading out the next morning, I decided my first stop would be the Cactus Club. I wanted George Davis to know that I would be a good neighbor, that I wasn’t going to sell beer. I also hoped to pick up some advice from him. But when I got there, there was nothing left but a pile of ashes. The Cactus had burned down the night before.
* * *
Jim Franklin said we should call the joint the Armadillo. Various riffs on that idea were tossed around until we came up with the grandiose name “Armadillo National Headquarters,” which made ironic reference to the building’s former incarnation as a National Guard armory. Bud Shrake chimed in with some good advice. The word “national” had negative connotations during that era of Vietnam, Nixon, and Kent State. Young men still faced being drafted into military service to fight in a stupid war in Southeast Asia. The draft lottery had just gone into effect. Every US male aged nineteen to twenty-five was assigned a number according to his birth date, and all 365 numbers were drawn randomly out of a shoe box to determine the order in which the men would be called up to serve in the military.6
Shrake said it would be better to call the place the Armadillo World Headquarters. It was a winning suggestion.
The armadillo was already the cultural icon of hippiedom, as well as a prominent symbol in underground art. The armadillo itself was a perfect metaphor for Texas hippies. Both were at-risk species in the Lone Star State in the sixties and seventies; both had endured ill treatment, disrespect, and violent harassment, and yet both had survived.
With their hard, bony shells, armadillos seemed to inspire grim visions among know-nothing squares and rednecks, despite the fact that the only thing the animals truly desired was to root around in the soil for their dinner, and to avoid being flattened by highballing semis and pickup trucks with a gun rack in the back window and a sticker on the back that said, “America: Love It or Leave It.”
Leading up to the opening of the Armadillo, people kept making comparisons to our forerunner, the Vulcan, as if the Armadillo was simply going to be a larger version of that place. But they were way off-base. From the very beginning, our goals were far grander than that.
We were determined that the Armadillo would be more than just a rock club or an auditorium for musical performances. In fact, I tried to discourage use of the words “club,” “nightclub,” and “auditorium.” I wanted to have all kinds of music, not just rock.
And that was just the preamble; we wanted Armadillo World Headquarters to be a community of the arts. All the additional space and extra rooms cried out to be used for art galleries, head shops, an art supply store, arts workshops, a nursery for the children of the staff, and many other possibilities, while the stage itself suggested the staging of plays and screening of underground films. Most of those ideas for using the building were realized before long.
Fortunately, a handful of local heroes were willing to provide the cash infusions we desperately needed. Spencer Perskin contributed $3,000 of his band’s $10,000 advance from Capitol Records. Bud Shrake pitched in $1,000.
The check from Bud Shrake was drawn on an account for Mad Dog Inc., a company that existed primarily in the minds of the Austin writers and free spirits who partied under that moniker, sometimes donning strange costumes, superhero capes, and other theatrical garb to enhance their swashbuckling adventures. Shrake, the head Mad Dog, was often accompanied by Gary Cartwright, also a journalist. Both later became well known as book writers. Other members of the Mad Dog crew were the writers Jan Reid and Blackie Sherrod, the Austin attorney David Richards, and David’s wife Ann Richards, the future governor of Texas. I had been a student at North Texas State University in Denton when I was introduced to Ann and David Richards by Stan Alexander, my English professor at the time. Alexander was a great country singer, mentor, and longtime devotee of Kenneth Threadgill’s Wednesday music nights.
Bud Shrake, who figures in many of my favorite Mad Dog memories, passed away in 2009. He always seemed to have a good time. As Cartwright put it, Bud was “a giant of a man with a poet’s soul and a lumberjack’s appetite.”7 In the years ahead, he would help us again and again, with wisdom and money, seeking nothing in return. His company was always an additional reward.
* * *
Jim Franklin was our de facto poster artist, master of ceremonies, underground figurehead, and, as one wise reporter put it, “resident genius.”8 And Jim brought us Bobby Hedderman. Lanky and stoic, Bobby grew up in Oak Cliff and for a while had wanted to become a famous rock ’n’ roll singer. After moving to Austin, he skirted fame as the booking agent at the Vulcan.
It was a boiling-hot August afternoon when Franklin was near the university in the “Frog,” his 1934 Ford, and spotted the tall, lanky longhair walking down the Drag. Partly out of compassion, partly out of good business sense, Franklin offered him a ride. Franklin told him that he ought to come meet Shiva’s new manager.
After Franklin described me as a “guy from the Brewers Association . . . razor haircut and sharkskin suit,” Bobby said he’d met me before, mentioning the day I had unexpectedly popped in to the Vulcan to warn them about an impending heat wave.
Yes, Bobby had assumed I was some kind of a cop that day. But later on, I had invited him and some of the other Vulcan paranoiacs over to my house for dinner with Genie and me.9
So Jim and Bobby pulled in at the Armadillo parking lot, a wasteland of rocks and giant potholes. Driving around back, they saw the magnificent oak tree, along with the open garage door on the enormous building, and heard the sounds of music and construction.
At first, Bobby wasn’t all that impressed. “I just stood there,” he said later, “wondering how I was going to get back across town.”10
First impressions of the interior took longer to sink in. “It looked like a real stage,” he said. “It was made of concrete, brick-faced, but a real stage.” He looked up at the high ceiling. He counted the doors around the interior and came up with fourteen. He tried to estimate how many people could fit inside. The official capacity of the original layout, according to the Austin Fire Department, was 750.
Bobby couldn’t help but wonder about the “older fellow in overalls and plumber’s cap, fiddling with something in his paw-like hands.” The older man glanced at Bobby “the way someone looks at a stray dog” and resumed his work. No mistaking that description for anyone besides Woody Wilson, my stepfather.
Bobby thought he recognized somebody near the stage, but the last time he’d seen the “big bear of a guy,” his wavy, black hair had been razor cut and he’d been in a suit. “Now his hair was just starting to get long, and instead of a suit, he was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a snap-button denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up high over his thick biceps.”11
That’s when I introduced myself again and mentioned that we needed a booking agent. Bobby seemed open to the idea, so I suggested we smoke a joint and talk about it.
“I remember a couple of weeks later we were all driving somewhere in Eddie’s Dodge Charger,” said Bobby, “and Eddie’s throwing out a new idea or scheme every thirty seconds, like usual, and he says, ‘You know, I think we’ve got a gold mine going here.’ And I remember thinking that was the first time I’d ever been associated with anything like that.”12
Around this same time, Mike Tolleson showed up. He was with a friend named David Davis, a UT student who was writing a story about the Armadillo for the Daily Texan. Mike was a young lawyer from Dallas who’d been involved in the music business for several years and was actively scouting locations in San Antonio and Austin to develop a music and arts venue for live performances, music and videotape production, and other cultural ventures. Under that calm exterior, he was ambitious, inspired, and excited.
Mike recently shared his own first impressions of the work in progress. As he recalls it, we were about a week away from opening. According to my recollections, by that time, we had pretty much exhausted the $4,000 of funding that had been pooled from various sources.
“There were guys running around the place, painting, building things, doing the murals, and all that stuff,” Mike said. “Eddie gave me a tour of the building, walked me around, and talked about what they were going to do. There was a lot of talk about Shiva’s record coming out, doing the publicity, going on tour, in addition to getting this place ready to open.”13
Mike was impressed. We were doing pretty much the same thing he’d been dreaming about. He was blown away. But he didn’t think we knew much at all about the music business. He said, “I’m available to get involved with you.”
I said, “Great, we need you, but I can’t pay you.” He was fine with that. All he wanted was a place to stay. I told him he could move into my house. Bobby and his girlfriend had just taken one bedroom, and Mike took the other.
He went back to Dallas, picked up his stuff, and moved in a couple of days later. From there, as he put it, “Eddie and I started doing Armadillo business twenty-four hours a day.”
* * *
While the Armadillo was being made semi-presentable, I had a chance to work with somebody who’d been a hero to me since I was an adolescent: Kenneth Threadgill, Austin’s grand old man of country music. Shiva’s Headband had been booked to headline a party honoring him, called the KT Jamboree. The event was to be at the Party Barn in Oak Hill, on the southwest outskirts of Austin.
My Thomas Jefferson, the first person to ask if he could join the effort: Mike Tolleson. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
In the fall of 1933, just before the Volstead Act was repealed and Prohibition officially ended, Kenneth Threadgill was a twenty-two-year-old country music lover, a bootlegger, and the operator of a Gulf filling station on North Lamar, then known as the Dallas Highway. Kenneth had been selling booze illegally out of the gas station for years, but immediately after Travis County voted to go “wet,” he stood in line all night long, waiting to obtain the first beer license in Austin. Travis County Beer License No. 01, dated December 7, 1933, was held by Kenneth Threadgill for the next forty years.
Every Wednesday night, Threadgill’s gas station was a hopping place, and not just for gas and beer sales. The place was renowned among musicians and night owls as an after-hours joint where working musicians hung out, jammed, and gambled. One of the performers at the late-night sessions was Kenneth himself, who idolized Jimmie Rodgers and tried gamely to yodel just like him. The fact is, Kenneth wasn’t a great singer or yodeler, but his love of the music was infectious, and over the years, his love and dedication to it planted some of the seeds for what would become the Austin music scene.
Being an adventurous adolescent, I would walk over to Threadgill’s from our house and talk to Kenneth. I liked the old man. When I was a sophomore at McCallum High, I went there a few times, trying to catch a date with Dotty, his daughter. Dotty was a senior and she already had a steady boyfriend, but I’ve always been persistent.
In the sixties, curfew laws and annexation put a damper on the vice action at Threadgill’s. A new crowd was going there, not for illegal hooch and gambling, but for something else that seemed rare and vintage. Kenneth Threadgill was singing his Jimmie Rodgers songs and presiding over weekly hootenannies. Friends, fans, and professionals passed the microphone around, sharing songs. The weekly gathering of folk and traditional music enthusiasts had originated on campus, where it also entailed bonding over progressive politics and pot.
When I was a freshman at UT in 1961, my English professor, Stan Alexander, invited me to come down to Threadgill’s on a Wednesday night to hear him and some friends of his sing country music. I started going there again to listen and soak up as much as I could. Kenneth sounded like a piece of history, his yodeling a bright novelty, a lightning-bolt link to the yodeling brakeman Jimmie Rodgers. But Stan Alexander turned out to be a fine country singer, the best of them all.
From 1933 through the sixties Threadgill’s had a very limited menu. A gallon of pickled eggs sits on top of a butcher case containing rat cheese, bologna, and wine. Photographer unknown.
Kenneth Threadgill and band onstage at Bevo’s Tap Room, April 27, 1972. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
One of the folkies who came to take a turn at the microphone was a homely, wild-haired UT co-ed named Janis Joplin. She came out of Port Arthur with charisma to match her big voice, and after she won the hearts of the Threadgill’s crowd, she hitchhiked from Austin to San Francisco in the trademark fashion of Texas hippies. Next thing any of us knew, she was the lead singer of one of the biggest psychedelic bands in the Bay Area, Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Now Janis was back in Austin, with the wreckage of Big Brother behind her and a grand plan to start a new band. As we were getting ready for the KT Jamboree, rumors circulated that Janis was going to make a special appearance. The general assumption was that she would sit in with Shiva’s Headband. We’d been expecting about three hundred people to show up, but the rumors threatened to blow that number up.
I still didn’t know whether to believe we’d get that kind of crowd, but then five thousand people showed up, looking for Janis.
We scrambled like hell to adjust to the new reality; obviously, we were now doing an outdoors show. We moved the PA and band equipment out of the Party Barn, hurriedly setting up a makeshift stage made of planks, plywood, and cinder blocks. The thing was about as sturdy as a wooden trampoline. Microphone stands and speakers swayed with every step. Stomp your foot while singing and the microphone would punch you in the mouth.
Thank God Janis appeared. She made a flamboyant, swaying entrance, and around her neck was a feather boa and leis fresh from Hawaii. Rude, arrogant, and loaded, she brushed off most everyone but her friends Julie Paul and Chuck Joyce, who played in the Velvet Cowpasture. After huddling with them a few minutes, she went onstage accompanied by Julie, Chuck, and Kenneth Threadgill. She tested her microphone, then took off one of her leis and, sweetly draping it around Kenneth’s neck, said to the crowd, “I always promised Kenneth a good lei.”
When the laughter stopped, Janis turned serious about the music she was going to perform, saying, “You keep an ear open for a guy named Kristofferson. He writes songs like this.” And then she proceeded to sing the Kris Kristofferson songs “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” She was knocking them out, breaking hearts with her soulful, blues-drenched voice, but the spell was broken, temporarily at least, when a girl in the back of the crowd was bitten by a rattlesnake and needed immediate medical attention. All in all, it was a night to remember. While it’s true that Janis was loaded and kind of obnoxious, it was pretty special that she had canceled a $15,000 gig to play for Kenneth’s birthday.14
Kenneth Threadgill and Janis Joplin at the Newport Folk Festival, July 1968. Photograph by David Gahr.
* * *
The last couple of days before the Dillo’s opening night, hammers were still pounding as Spencer Perskin and I huddled with attorney Dave Richards to formalize our business as Armadillo Productions Incorporated. Shiva’s Headband would headline the first show, naturally, and Hub City Movers would also be on the bill. A third opening act, Whistler, broke up at the last minute, so Jim Franklin threw together a reunion of his Vulcan-period band, Ramon, Ramon and the Four Daddyos. Unfortunately, the Daddyos were not on the poster, since Jim had already drawn it and had it printed.
A story in the Rag, the influential underground newspaper published in Austin, boosted our spirits. The reporter raved that our opening, just a week hence, would be “the most exciting development in Community Arts to happen in Texas.” After dropping in to visit the venue, the “Roving Rag Reporter” “rapped for a couple hours, and got nothing but good vibes the whole time, and came away infected with enthusiasm. . . . A community is All the People, and all the people can be beautiful if they have a chance to turn on.” 15
Even for 1970, the tie-dyed lingo was a little over the top, but all I could think was, Right on, brother! By showtime, I was pretty high on the place myself. Gazing around at the carpet sample squares that passed for seating and the telephone wire spools that passed for tables, I felt like a young commander on the eve of a great campaign.
The Armadillo World Headquarters officially opened its doors on the evening of August 7, 1970. It was hotter than nine kinds of hell, as any August night in Texas tends to be. Before the music began, I mounted the stage and took a good look around. There was much to be proud of, not least the fact that in Austin, there was a sizable enough community of hippies to merit a room this huge and a project this ambitious.
One of the great logos of any era. How many other creatures on the planet can say they haven’t evolved in the last 60 million years? Armadillo World Headquarters grand opening poster, August 7–8, 1970. Artwork by Jim Franklin.
No longer a lobbyist, and no longer jollying up legislators and spreading goodwill and cheer through beer, I was now an aspiring long-haired hippie in pursuit of a higher consciousness. Or something like that.
I wanted to make damned sure that no one confused the Armadillo with another music venue called the Chequered Flag. It was a little folkie joint on Lavaca Street, barely a block from the state capitol. The place had opened in 1967, around the same time as the Vulcan Gas Company. The guiding light at the Chequered Flag was Rod Kennedy, a square, uptight Republican back in the day when Republicans were the oddball minority in Texas. Kennedy had cornered the road show market in Austin, and his tastes in music favored the safe, white-bread, nonthreatening purveyors of the folk genre. The décor and logos of the place were meant to make customers think of folk music and car racing at the same time. Get it? I never did, either. Especially since Kennedy insisted that patrons remain silent during performances, paying worshipful attention, as if they were in church or at a funeral. It was time to do something completely different. The size of the Armadillo alone demanded it, but the negative example of the Chequered Flag did its part as well.
Kennedy’s status was in danger the moment I shed my fancy duds and started growing my hair out, and I wanted him to know it. The Armadillo was going to be a very different place. Silence wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Rowdiness would be our trademark.
On opening night I stepped up to the microphone and said, “My name is not Rod Kennedy, and this is not the Chequered Flag. Welcome to the Armadillo World Headquarters.”
The bill on our first night made a powerful statement, I thought, about what the Armadillo was all about, and by extension, the Austin music scene and hippie community at that time. There was nothing generic or stereotypical about it. I certainly wasn’t a stereotypical hippie. Neither were the musicians.
None of the bands really fit the psychedelic label. Loosely speaking, Ramon, Ramon and the Four Daddyos was an offbeat, artsy, fifties rock ’n’ roll band. Shiva’s Headband had their roots in folk and country music, refracted through a hallucinogenic lens and Spencer’s hyperactive electric fiddle. The Hub City Movers were into folk and jug band music, although at least one of their songs had originated during an acid trip. Artist Gilbert Shelton had written “When I Set My Chickens Free” after granting freedom to his chickens while under the influence of LSD.
When I think back on it, the musicians in the Hub City Movers all looked as if they had stepped out of one of Shelton’s underground comics. The two guys on guitar, who looked like demons from another dimension, were Ike Ritter, famously frazzled, and, his eccentric West Texas counterpart. Ed Vizard, on sax, looked like an elf who’d stepped out of a cow patty mushroom field. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the thin-as-a-whisper singer-songwriter from Lubbock, warbled High Plains melodies in a spacey, ghostlike voice that seemed to emanate from a scratchy old 78 rpm record.
The night was full of strange surprises. Many people who walked up to the ticket booth came to a dead stop after they learned the price of admission. “Three dollars?” they whined. “Music’s supposed to be free.”
An amazing number of them had stories about why they shouldn’t have to pay. Some had contributed volunteer labor, and that was one thing, but others claimed exception simply because they used to work at the Vulcan, or because they “just needed to come in for a minute to take a piss.” Then there would be some character who swore that he’d bought a ticket but lost it. Next up was the dude who just wanted to come in and look around for a minute or so. Would that be cool? No, man, it would not.
A pack of youngsters denied entrance loitered in the parking lot, drinking beer and smoking pot, laughing, grumbling. If you went out there, they would make a circle around you and chant about how music should be free. We were ripping them off, man.
Another bunch of them gathered behind the chain-link fence out back. At some point I heard them yelling and cheering. I looked up and saw a girl in the process of climbing the fence. I got there just as she made it over the top. I grabbed her ass with both hands, crouched, and pushed up as if throwing a medicine ball. She flew up and over the top of the fence like a badminton bird. Obviously, I’d lost my temper. Only as she went airborne did I think of the razor wire and the potential bloodshed that might occur and regretted the hell out of what I’d just done. Fortunately, she landed safely in the arms of her comrades. They booed and called me a pig.
There was some kind of trouble brewing everywhere. People were popping out of the overhead windows. The hot water heater died, meaning no hot water for the ice cream shop or the restrooms. Wet paint reached out hungrily for bare skin and clothing. The nursery overflowed with crying, unattended babies. Marijuana smoke billowed in all the wrong places. One guy became so unruly that it took several of us sitting on him to immobilize him. He still managed to poke my eye with a cigarette. He ended the night strapped to a table in the infirmary at UT.
Finally it was time for Jim Franklin, master of ceremonies, to introduce Shiva’s Headband. Jim worked himself into the kind of fevered, operatic pitch that only he could muster. The band followed this dramatic setup by taking a few minutes to tune their instruments and adjust their amplifiers. Spencer Perskin addressed the audience, saying, “I didn’t think anybody could find this place.”
Maybe it was the wrong thing to say, because the band never found their groove. I’d never seen them play so badly. Bobby Hedderman and others agreed. Early in the set, people started talking, then talking louder and completely ignoring the band. By the end of the show, half of the audience was gone.
When the music stopped and the lights came on, I got my first look at rock ’n’ roll afterbirth. Cigarette butts dotted the floor between the beer cans and bottles, visual evidence that both nearby convenience stores had sold out of beer. Leave it to hippies to stimulate the neighborhood economy. The shin-splintering telephone wire spools had been spun around the room. It reeked of good times and smelly people.
In contrast to all the goofballs outside who thought that music should be free, the three bands were all jammed into the office, clamoring for cash. “How many tickets did we sell?” demanded the nine-fingered bass player for Ramon, Ramon and the Four Daddyos. “How many were sold in advance? How many at the door? How many people does this place hold?”
I had no answers. My poor performance was noted by all. Not being trusted takes some getting used to.
When everyone was gone, I sat down on the stage, so exhausted that I dozed off for awhile, then awoke with a start. On my way home I spotted a young couple trying to hitchhike. Their car had broken down. Turned out they’d been at the Armadillo. When I asked what they thought of the place, the guy said, “Well, that woman with Shiva’s sure can’t sing.”
* * *
The next morning I met my first long-term volunteer. Waiting at the door was a skinny kid with long red hair who introduced himself as Mike Harr. He said he figured somebody would have to clean up. In return for his labor, he asked for living space in one of the small rooms at the back of the building. He said he’d been living with a bunch of fellow Cajuns in a crash pad on West Sixth and had had enough. Mike got the job: official sanitation engineer of the Armadillo World Headquarters, a.k.a. the Righteous Scrub Company. Every week for the first three years, I wrote a check to the Righteous Scrub Company, treating myself to the illusion that I was being conscientious about our business.
Mike began push-brooming the trash into piles while I retreated to the office. A few minutes later I heard a knock at the door. I recognized my visitor as a teaching assistant at UT, but didn’t let on, as if the old fedora pulled down over Dealer McDope’s eyes was an adequate disguise.
McDope held a large bundle wrapped in red wax paper. “You’re doing the work of the Lord,” he said. “Use this as you see fit.” He handed me the package, turned, and left.
Under the red paper was thin, white tissue paper with purple mimeographed text. Each line of text ended with a blank space filled in by pen. It said: “Location Guerrero; Altitude 229 kilometers; Cuantos 2.2 pounds/1 kilogram; !El Armadillo Vive!”
In the weeks that followed, I paid each member of the crew with two hits of Clearlight acid, a bag of pot, and thirty dollars. Mike Harr split his money with his buddy Tracy Frederick, who became his partner in the Righteous Scrub Company. Nobody worked harder than Righteous Scrub. The debris in the Dillo often threatened to overwhelm them, but Mike and Tracy patiently educated us in the use of trash containers. Attention to cleanliness, if practiced by up to 1,500 people, could make a difference in the workload of two skinny guys at the long end of a push broom after a long night of boogie.
The second night, a wide-eyed kid from the crew informed me that a gang of bikers outside wanted a word with the boss. The bikers were bunched around the entrance like a band of Comanche warriors, restless and spoiling for trouble. Their leader, a would-be diplomat with grease under his fingernails, volunteered that they would be only too happy to keep trouble from happening; free admission was all they asked in return.
Calling the cops, I realized, was not the thing to do. I got the leader to promise to hang on peacefully for a minute and said that I’d be right back with a special gift for him.
I returned with one dose of Clearlight acid. Because the hit itself was hard to see in even the best of light—it was transparent as well as thin and small, about an eighth of an inch square—I’d wrapped it in a sheet of notebook paper, folded repeatedly until it was a package about a quarter of an inch square.
The acid had been an Armadillo housewarming gift from Don Hyde of the Vulcan. The container was a small clear-plastic cube holding one hundred hits. Even with that amount, I had to hold the container up to a light in order to see them.
In hushed, reverent tones, I told the biker about the new acid I’d just imported from California. The others crowded around, straining to hear, grumbling in complaint. The leader shushed them. He feigned familiarity with the subject, though his expression called him a liar, an acid newbie.
He wanted it badly. I warned him that it was extremely powerful, that I only had four hits, and that there were no more to be had in Austin. I was giving him two hits, I told him, as I handed him the package containing one hit, and keeping the other two for myself and my old lady. Acknowledging my generosity with a nod, he accepted my gift and stuck it in his jacket.
“Be careful,” I said again. As he fastened his jacket, the girlfriend on the back of his bike cooed and reached for his pocket. He jabbed her with his elbow and growled, “I ain’t said you get one, bitch.”
He cranked his bike. The others grumbled, “What about us?” But he roared off and they followed, bouncing through the potholes of the parking lot. I was sweating and shaking, but by the time I got back inside, I felt good about everything. Entering my office, I found a gang of hippies milling around. I went off like a Roman candle. “Get your asses into the hall! This is a business office! The show’s out there, not in here!”
The last to leave was Gary Scanlon, another Vulcan expatriate. From his no-ass backside to his pencil-thin mustache, he had the wry, sinister demeanor of a sleazy dealer. On his way out, he sneered at me: “Nobody has ever made a business out of one of these places. Lots better men than you have tried.”
An empty AWHQ. Scarlet scraps of curtain transformed the warehouse lights. Photograph by Jim Richardson.
When he was gone I punched a hole in the door. The hole would be my daily reminder of the challenge I’d undertaken, but also a message to the staff that I had a temper.
Sunday, I came in early to think about things and get started on the week. I loved the place when it was empty. When the Rag ran a review of our opening, the critic praised the Armadillo’s “good vibes” and claimed he’d had “about the groovingest night I’ve spent since the Gas Company.”
