Self-portrait by Burton Wilson.
Not long after we opened the joint in 1970, a couple of playboy drug smugglers came up with a bright idea to build a concession area around an ice cream parlor. Sure, why not? Someone else asked if hippie bakers could bake bread. The concession area would be open at night, and the bakery would operate during the day. I kept nodding my head, sure, let’s go for it.
The playboys turned greedy. They wanted a cut off of all concessions, not just the ice cream. Not a chance, I told them. So they told me they didn’t like the bakery using their space. It seemed their ice cream kept disappearing, and unknown parties kept spilling honey and cooking oil on the concrete floor without cleaning it up.
Tensions rose after the drug dealer/ice cream investors saw their ice cream business was running a distant second to the bakery, which was run by women who flaunted unrestrained breasts and left their underarm and leg hair to grow unmolested by razors. With their bare-bones, back-to-nature style, the earth mothers had a way of seeming confrontational to such guys, even when the women were just minding their own business.
Every morning, wealthy West Austin socialites cautiously navigated their Cadillacs and Mercedes into our dirt parking lot. They tiptoed inside the big, ugly building and looked around warily as their eyes and noses adjusted. Then they strode purposefully to the bakery and purchased warm loaves of fresh whole-wheat bread. In the backwater that was Austin in the early 1970s, no one else had anything like the Armadillo’s Daily Bread Bakery.
The bakery hosted free community dinners every Sunday. The serving line was an exercise in what I called “point and grunt, scoop and plop.” From old, dented pots, servers shoveled gobs of sticky, gray gruel onto plates. Rice, oats, molasses, and certain unknowns were combined to create some of the worst shit I have ever tried to eat.
These banquets entailed no real overhead, but we managed to lose money anyway. The donations can was almost always empty. Hippies kept coming, and a large proportion of them brought their dogs. One day, after picking up my plate of glop, I took my place on the floor at a splintery spool table with my friends and unwittingly sat on top of a fresh, wet pile of dog turds. That was it, I’d had more than enough. I put up a large sign on the doors that said “NO DOGS!”
And we called it civilization.
The playboy drug dealers were gone soon enough, but the earth mothers of the bakery became an Armadillo fixture. As with most communities, the people who really want to be there are the ones who hang on through thick and thin.
* * *
If you come across a classic photograph of a night at the Armadillo, there’s a good chance it’s the work of a man who was nearly fifty years old when I met him. That may not sound old to our generation now, but back then it was twice the age of most of the staff.
Burton had a very formal way of speaking. The first time we met, he made a proposal. “My name is Burton Wilson. I’m a freelance photographer,” he said. “I take a lot of photographs of musicians, and if you will be so kind as to allow me access to Armadillo World Headquarters, I will make available to you copies of any pictures I shoot to use as you please.”
What a fine deal it turned out to be. Burton had already documented many of the acts that played the Vulcan; now he wanted to document the Armadillo’s acts. Besides being incredibly talented and skilled in the photographic arts, Burton was always cool, calm, and collected.
“Burton, you’ve got a great name,” I said. “Just tell anybody who asks that you own the place. You’ll never need a backstage pass.”
* * *
As chaotic as the Armadillo was, my home life was maybe more so. The house was on a double lot across from a small city park in Tarrytown, then Austin’s snootiest neighborhood, except for maybe Pemberton Heights. Genie and I kept the lawn green and trimmed. We tended our garden. We probably had the nicest-looking hippie crash pad for miles around.
Bobby Hedderman and his girlfriend had moved in soon after he came to look at the Armadillo with Jim Franklin. Mike Tolleson moved into the guest room soon after. Shiva’s Headband practiced in a converted shop in the backyard. Spencer Perskin and his brood stayed on the back porch, but not permanently. Later, Spencer’s brother Pete and his wife moved in. When Pete started taking banjo lessons, it was a bad time for everyone. It was lucky we didn’t kill each other, and it was really, really lucky for Pete.
* * *
If not for the Armadillo’s volunteer staff, we wouldn’t have survived more than a few months. Volunteers were people who showed up and stuck around long enough to figure out where they fit in: kitchen, security, production, maintenance, or somewhere else. Some of them had been unable to make it in the outside world, but at the Armadillo, they helped breathe life into our strange enterprise.
Lloyd Goering was the perfect department head for maintenance, electronics, and sound. A master electrician and mechanic, radio expert, pilot, and outdoorsman, Lloyd was no hippie; in fact, he was antislacker and, like many people of genius I’ve known, kind of a grouch. But if someone made a good suggestion, he could admit it was good and analyze its cost-efficiency in a heartbeat. He was as valuable to the Armadillo as the ground it stood on.
A parade of talented gearheads worked alongside Lloyd Goering. Jerry Barnett, who at various times had played drums for Hub City Movers and Shiva’s Headband, conducted strange experiments in the pit that became the game room. Jerry later earned a degree in electronics engineering. Charlie Sauer, another alumnus of the Hub City Movers, used my old Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder to record Janis Joplin on her final pass through Austin. Charlie later became a star in the technology world, highly regarded as a systems architect specializing in networking, system modeling, multimedia, and Internet software development; before he had his own company, Technologists.com, he was vice president of software and technology at Dell.1 Another volunteer, Tim Elliott, took care of our mechanical and electrical problems and tried valiantly to keep the place patched together.
Probably our brightest volunteer was M. K. Hage III, our landlord’s eighteen-year-old son. His birth name was Mitry Kalil Hage III, but I called him “Three.” He was smart, articulate, and enthusiastic about what we were doing. The senior Hage had been concerned about Three’s apparent lack of focus and ambition, and to see his son excited about working with us, as unconventional as our enterprise may have seemed, gave the father hope.
We all had our problems, but not too many of us had to deal with being the son of a rich and influential man—one who had built a huge medical complex. While other teenagers scoured the streets for drugs, Three had ready access to the keys of the locked offices that held the pharmaceutical treasures of Austin’s midtown medical complex.
Yet I never saw Three loaded. Sometimes he would wait until everyone was gone to knock gently on my office door. He’d apologize for bothering me, but I was always tickled to see him. Most of the time, he just wanted to hang out or hear me talk. He shared the excitement of my expectations and my agony over things I couldn’t control. He knew he was too young to sway his family’s interest in the prime real estate we occupied, but he was acutely aware that his time was coming. His interest in our enterprise was my secret weapon. My wildest schemes and dreams were like bedtime stories to him. He hoped to wake up someday with an important role in making them all work out.
