Crowd watching Freddie King perform onstage at AWHQ, 1970. The photograph shows the original stage as pictured from the upstairs rooms. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
A KING, A DOMINO, A CAPTAIN, AND A LEO
Following in the staggering footsteps of the Ragin’ Cajun, Freddie King kicked off 1971 at the Armadillo. The towering blues guitarist, a.k.a. the “Texas Cannonball,” had been popular since the early 1960s, when records like “Hide Away” packed the floor at sock hops and even made it onto the Top 40 charts. In his first weekend at the Armadillo, back in October, Freddie had done very, very well, and his fee was only $300.
On this night, however, the temperature was below freezing outside, and it was almost as cold inside the hall. Aside from body heat, three small space heaters were the only sources of warmth. The dampness in the concrete floor seeped up through my cowboy boots. So we were a little nervous, especially since, as showtime drew near, Freddie was nowhere to be seen.
Storm had the opening slot and were also contracted to be Freddie’s backup band. As their last song came to an end, I saw Bobby Hedderman frantically waving at me from the backstage door. When I stepped outside, Freddie King, wearing a floor-length fur coat, was standing next to a shiny black Cadillac, his enormous outline making the lead sled look small. The trunk was open, a guitar case inside. Freddie had a huge smile on his face as he draped a big, muscular arm around Bobby.
Crowd watching Freddie King perform onstage at AWHQ, 1970. The photograph shows the original stage as pictured from the upstairs rooms. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
“What you worried about?” Freddie said. “I don’t go on for five minutes.”
Freddie grabbed his guitar and amp and nodded at Bobby to walk him onstage. He took off his coat, laid it across a chair, nodded hello at the band, plugged in his guitar, turned to the microphone, and got down to business.
His first number was “Hide Away,” and suddenly, the chill started leaving my bones. Nobody could get down to business with a thunder and fire like Freddie King.
It’s hard to imagine anyone playing that ugly frozen room without complaint, but Freddie gave us the full treatment. He was the gold standard for Texas roadhouse blues. Over the next few years, he developed a huge following at the Armadillo, and he saw every improvement we made—in part because the business he brought to us made them feasible. Freddie liked to call the Armadillo the “House That Freddie Built.”
At the end of January 1970, six months into the Armadillo’s existence, I was still staring at a succession of dark, empty nights when a smooth talker named C. C. Courtney breezed into my office, offering to help us break new cultural ground. In an earlier life, Courtney had been a Top 40 disc jockey in New Orleans, where he was known as the “Duke of the Dial in Dixie.” Now he was trying to interest me in a quirky country-western musical about the village idiot of Ruston, Louisiana, titled Earl of Ruston. Perhaps he had heard that I had the same title in Austin.
The musical had been written by C. C. Courtney, his cousin Ragan Courtney, and Peter Link. Link and C. C. Courtney had previously collaborated on Salvation, which had been a hit on Broadway.1 The band that would play in Earl of Ruston, Goat Leg, had some of the best female singers I’ve ever heard.
The show was a success. The acting and singing had our audiences laughing, clapping, stomping, and shouting. Critics liked it, too. The Daily Texan gave it a favorable review, although the Armadillo was described as “bleak.” A writer in the Texas Observer more charitably described the place as an “arts laboratory.” So what if we were unconventional? At least we had a stage and were willing to take chances. Whatever the Armadillo was, we launched Earl of Ruston, which eventually made it all the way to Broadway, but the sophisticated New York theater audiences failed to get it. It opened on May 5, 1971, at the Billy Rose Theatre and closed on May 8.
Jim Franklin showing his genius on behalf of the Earl and his Louisiana Tribe. Earl of Ruston handbill. Artwork by Jim Franklin.
Although we were beginning to deliver on our promise of offering artistic productions that went above and beyond expectations, the Rag continued to warn readers that we were about to go under. We couldn’t issue any denials, because we were always about to go under.
Captain Beefheart was the kind of artist that inspired intense passion from a small cult following. The small crowd that showed up to see him at the Dillo couldn’t have been more excited. Being in awe of the Captain’s immense, rare, mysterious talents, I was as excited as anyone there, but if the record company hadn’t been underwriting the tour, it’s hard to imagine how we could’ve booked the show. Fortunately, they were. The show was a double bill with the Captain’s sometime guitarist, the brilliant Ry Cooder.
The Captain’s given name was Don Van Vliet. The opportunity to meet him and spend time with him was a rare privilege. He was far out, in the best sense, wearing a wackadoodle expression, artistically sculpted facial hair, and a top hat. A lot of his music was rooted in Delta and Chicago blues, filtered through jerky beats, dissonance, and overall weirdness. His voice was a Howlin’ Wolf howl, rasping but authentic. To some people, it was off-putting, noisy, or weird for weird’s sake, but his fans got it. It seemed as though the Captain was speaking directly to them, whatever it was he was singing about.
Seeing Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder on the same stage made for a truly eclectic and satisfying evening. Cooder’s playing channeled everyone from Johnny Cash and Blind Alfred Reed to Hawaiian slack-key guitarists. It was hard, maybe impossible, to imagine such a night happening anywhere else in Texas, maybe even in the whole world.
The Captain was also a painter, and to no one’s surprise, he found a kindred spirit and admirer in Jim Franklin. On the night of the show, Franklin did a drawing of the Captain while the Captain simultaneously did one of Franklin.
“He was a great intellectual,” Franklin said years later. “The day before the Beefheart show, I went by the hotel to meet Captain Beefheart. Accompanying me was Mincemeat Mercer, who played with Ramon, Ramon and the Four Daddyos. The three of us ended up going to the gift shop, where we bought toy fishing poles with plastic hooks. Beefheart was an animal lover and didn’t want to hurt any fish. From there we strolled down to Town Lake and went fake fishing with our fake hooks. We didn’t even catch a cold.”2
Poster for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and Ry Cooder show at AWHQ, February 20 and 21, 1972. Jim Franklin’s illustration is the visualization of an epigram by Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart) that was included in a promotional piece from his record company: “A whirling dervish, honey of two white pigs bore snoots ’n touched tusks on either husk of the sun ’n moon / an apple dropped thru membrane arches broke embryonic picked out seed cores.”
Many great performers graced the Armadillo’s stage, but during those early days, no one quite compared with Mr. Antoine “Fats” Domino Jr. One of the most singular pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, Fats Domino, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, had achieved fame with such hits as “Blueberry Hill,” “Walking to New Orleans,” and “My Girl Josephine.”
The privilege of seeing Fats Domino play was thrill enough, but there was more. The grand piano the great man played was the same Mason & Hamlin my mother, Beulah, had bought for me when I was twelve, the same instrument Granny Risher had tortured daily with selections from The Broadman Hymnal. Beulah, who still called me Edwin, was as proper as a church supper and had preferred not to think about what her adolescent boy was up to while the piano gathered dust at her nursery school. Never did she dream that the piano would end up in a joint like the Armadillo.
The crowd was small that night, but despite the fact that it was forty-two degrees outside and we had no heaters in the hall, they worked up quite a fever. They were going nuts from Fats’s first chords until his last chorus. Fats said thanks by belly-bumping Beulah’s baby grand all the way across our great wide stage. I never told Beulah or Granny Risher, but I think it was love.
Fats brought his own security team: two large, well-dressed black men who stationed themselves next to the backstage door to guard Fats and his abundant jewelry. Undoubtedly, they had been through this drill in a thousand different joints. Armadillo regulars, pickers without portfolios, and kids were all turned away with a raised eyebrow. The security team’s scowls alone had the power to transform men into mice. Certain men in business suits, acknowledged with no outward sign, came and went. Females were carefully scrutinized and some were allowed entry.
We all stood back and observed as one of the behemoth bodyguards stepped into the dressing room to help Fats change into his stage clothes. With his short, round frame, Fats stuck his arms straight out and his man went to work, slipping the famed ivory pounder out of his black velvet jacket and into fresh trousers, gleaming patent leather pumps, and a black Mexican wedding shirt. Reminding me of a diva backstage at the opera, Fats nodded at his assistants, signaling that the star was ready to meet his public.
A busty woman in a tight sweater stepped forward. “My name’s Choo-Choo,” she said. “Would you please give me your autograph?”
Choo-Choo tugged on the neck of her sweater on the left side, exposing one of her gigantic breasts.
“Why, of course, my dear,” said Fats.
Choo-Choo’s girlfriend offered a ballpoint pen. As he cupped the mammary Choo-Choo offered, its heft overflowing his grasp, he shook his head. “I need the felt-tip pen.”
A felt-tip pen instantly appeared. Putting tip to teat, the rock ’n’ roll star carefully inscribed it with “F-A-T-S” in big block letters. After he was done, he released his grip on the breast, but the pen remained poised to write. At first surprised, then pleased, Choo-Choo yanked down her sweater further to expose the other breast, where Fats proceeded to print “D-O-M-I-N-O.” As he finished the last O, she started to step back and let others take their turn with the star, but Fats stopped her with a look.
“We’ve got to use good grammar, now,” he said. With one last, deft motion, he added a comma.
Her breasts now said: “Domino, Fats.”
Beulah could never have imagined it, Granny Risher would never have approved of it, and I’ll never forget it.
Leo Kottke was the first act I picked up at the airport. I had no idea what to expect. Some people said he had extra fingers, and after listening closely to the amazing polyphonic fingerpicking on his records, it didn’t seem like such an outrageous idea. There were rumors that the guy was ancient. There wasn’t a photo of him on his first album, 12-String Blues, or on the second one, 6- and 12-String Guitar. Even if he called out to say hello to me as he got off the plane, how would I know it was him? The new LP had no vocals on it. In the liner notes he explained that it was because his singing voice sounded “like geese farts in the wind on a muggy day.”
The second album had also blown our minds because the cover featured a pretty fair drawing of a full-grown armadillo. When it came to armadillo drawings, we were pretty hard to please, but in this case, it looked as if illustrator Annie C. Elliott had channeled Jim Franklin. Even to this day, people call it The Armadillo Album. Kottke didn’t know it, but he was already one of us.
The fact that he walked off the plane carrying two guitar cases gave him away. Tall and clean-cut in a button-down Oxford shirt, Leo Kottke looked more like an Ivy League rowing team captain than a rock ’n’ roller. But before we could shake hands, he whispered hoarsely, “I don’t think I can play tonight.”
What a stunning talent was Leo Kottke and what good, easy manners he had. Jim Franklin’s accessorized toilets didn’t faze him, and he told the same knock-knock joke three or four years in a row, August 4, 1971. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
Poster for Leo Kottke and Greezy Wheels show at AWHQ. July 23 and 24, 1971. Artwork by Jim Franklin.
He was clearly in pain. “I cut my finger,” he said. “Maybe to the bone.”
The cut could not be seen because he was carrying the two guitars, so I took his word for it until we got in the car. He explained that he had restrung his twelve-string on the plane and after returning it to the case, he noticed the end of a small E string sticking out. Instead of opening the case and pushing the string out of the way, he had taken hold of it with his left hand, resulting in a deep cut on the little finger at the first bend.
Once we were in motion, he took out his twelve-string guitar and ripped off a few runs at incredible speed. When he needed to reach a note with the injured finger, he screamed but didn’t slow down. He kept playing. A minute later he screamed again. After the third scream, he stopped playing and said, “Well, I guess it’s nothing I can’t work around.”
Kottke seemed to fall instantly into the Armadillo groove. Not surprisingly, since they shared an off-center sensibility and view of the world, he bonded with Jim Franklin. Before the show, Franklin created an elaborate stage set with panels of painted bluebonnets, or “blue vomits,” as he liked to call the state flower of Texas, and used the panels to create an illusion-like entrance for Kottke. This was one of the occasions when Jim really put a lot of “ceremony” into his job as master of ceremonies. At the end of a particularly convoluted and dramatic introduction, delivered in Franklin’s inimitable Vincent Price–on-LSD voice, one of the panels moved aside to reveal Kottke sitting there, guitar in hand, ready to play.
“Just call me Tammy Wynette,” the musician retorted. And on the second night, that’s exactly what Franklin called him.
Kottke began his set by telling a knock-knock joke. He loved the joke so much, he continued using it every time he played the Armadillo for several years running. Decades later it would become the title of an Academy Award–winning film.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Argo.
Argo who?
Argo fuck yourself.
