Bill Graham on AWHQ stage, February 5, 1972. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
Exactly why armadillos are taking hold as a youth symbol is a matter for speculation. Armadillos are paranoid little beasts who prefer to mind their own business. They love to sleep all day, then roam and eat all night. They are gentle, keep their noses in the grass, and share their homes with others. Perhaps most significant, they are weird-looking, unfairly maligned and often picked on, and have developed a hard shell and a distinctive aroma. They do far more good than harm.
BUD SHRAKE
That Bud Shrake would write about us was no surprise, but for it to appear in the pages of Sports Illustrated was a real kick.1 Armadillos had taken over precious magazine pages that were normally occupied by fire-breathing linebackers and bust-your-nose boxers. Such validation! What was next?
One night at the Armadillo, Shrake brought along two Dallas Cowboys stars: Don Meredith and Pete Gent. They were hardly the typical gridiron bubbas. Don had already been transformed from star quarterback to TV star on Monday Night Football. Pete would go on to write North Dallas Forty, which is as good a football novel as there’s ever been. Now they were sitting on my rump-sprung sofa in the office, drinking adult beverages from paper cups and laughing at all the right places as I told the story of the Armadillo’s origins.
Freddie King was rocking the joint. During a break, Bobby Hedderman walked into the office and whispered that ten men of a certain description were in the house; from their butch-waxed buzz cuts, Ban-Lon shirts, and bad sport coats, it was obvious they were agents of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Before Bobby could finish his sentence, two of the TABC agents waltzed through the door.
I tried to take charge, but the lead dog ignored me and went straight to Shrake, as if he was a chew toy. The agent sniffed at the cup the sportswriter was holding and scowled.
“This is alcohol,” he said.
Shrake gave him a so-what stare.
All I could think of was that the Armadillo was doomed. Booze on the premises was all the TABC needed to turn out the lights on this hippie menace.
Then Meredith rose from the couch and approached the agents. It was an amazing thing to behold, seeing these hard-asses transformed into fawning hero worshippers. Most any old Dallas Cowboy might have done the trick, but this was Don Meredith, Dandy Don, the Danderoo. He introduced himself, shook their hands, and generally made the tension evaporate.
Meredith signed autographs. Not for the agents, of course, but for their sons, daughters, and distant relatives. Whatever you say, fellas. He put his arm around one of the agents, as if he were a long-lost pal, and walked him out the door and into the parking lot. The other agents followed like puppies.
Bobby quickly ducked into Jim Franklin’s living quarters/studio, fetched a trophy, and brought it back. It was one of the gaudiest high school basketball trophies I’d ever seen, originally awarded to the Texas School for the Deaf and for some cosmic reason abandoned at the Armadillo and never thrown out, possibly because it appealed to our sense of the ridiculous.
After Freddie King finished another set, I walked onstage. Informing the audience that the Armadillo had a new hero, I summoned Don Meredith to join me.
Dandy Don walked out, and under lights so dim no one would have noticed if Howard Cosell had been at his side, he accepted the trophy with the deadpan aplomb that instantly made him the perpetual toast of the Dillo. “You may not know it,” he said, “but this is what I really always wanted.”
The crowd went wild. He was one of the most recognized faces in the nation, and he was hanging out in our joint. No one outside the backstage inner circle had a clue that he’d just stepped in to save our collective asses. One thing was certain, though: the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission had a new, if somewhat ambiguous, respect for the Armadillo hippies.
* * *
Through the auspices of the university’s Student Cultural Entertainment Committee, we booked the legendary San Francisco–based rock promoter Bill Graham for February 2, 1972. A refugee of the Holocaust raised by a foster family in New York City, Graham had moved to the Bay Area in the early sixties and entered the rock concert business after managing the San Francisco Mime Troupe with Chet Helms, founder of the Family Dog. The concerts that Graham and Helms staged at the Fillmore West and Winterland Arena launched the careers of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, and numerous other Bay Area bands. Helms and Graham shared credit for putting the San Francisco scene on the map, but Bill Graham was the name everyone remembered, whether the encounter was in the flesh or from watching behind-the-scenes concert footage. Graham was always the guy yelling, barking orders, and basically chewing the scenery.
By the time of the Graham date, we were all a bit nervous about meeting the man. We were anxious to see what we could learn from him, not only because of his experience in concert promotion, but because we were huge Dead Heads and fans of the other major San Francisco bands. Plus, with our mutual connections with people such as Janis and Chet, we almost felt as though we already knew the great man.
We were also wary because of his reputation for being confrontational. Gruff and aggressive by nature, Graham responded best when provoked. He thrived on conflict and crisis.
So Graham came to the Armadillo, shared his ego, told some stories with us, and stomped on a lot of toes. Sensing that Graham was a time bomb waiting to go off, a local theatrical character named Doug Dyer tried heckling him, but Graham quickly cut him to ribbons. It was over so quickly it was anticlimactic.
Not surprisingly, Graham and I didn’t hit it off. When the gig was over, I drove the great man to the airport in Genie’s Dodge Dart. The car had last been used for a vet appointment for our puppy, who was so upset about the trip that he pooped all over the backseat and floorboard. I’d been far too busy preparing for the gig to clean it up, and the famous concert promoter gagged and complained all the way to the airport.
By the time we got to the terminal, Graham was shouting at me that the Armadillo would never survive in the business world because we were a bunch of hippies. “Guess what, Bill,” I said. “I’m the hippie who talked the University of Texas into shelling out the $5,000 for you to fly down here so you could lecture me about my lack of capitalist ambition.” About that time, I noticed that John Henry Faulk, the native Austin writer, liberal commentator, and literary lion, was standing in line behind Graham.
Faulk gave me a wink and said, “You got him back pretty good, son.” Faulk had stood up to senator Joseph McCarthy during the wave of anti-commie hysteria in the 1950s. A compliment from him might not have been the equal of an endorsement from Warren Buffet or Ed Sullivan, but I sure was proud to get it.
A few feet closer to the terminal entrance, I encountered Bud Shrake and his friend, the actor Dennis Hopper. Hopper, who had achieved great status as a counterculture hero through the 1969 film Easy Rider, appeared to be using Bud for a crutch. He leaned against Shrake at such a sharp angle, I wondered if he was asleep. When Bud greeted me, Hopper brightened considerably and sort of straightened up. He beckoned me toward him with a tiny hand movement. As I came closer, the smell of ether almost choked me.
“You’re doing the work of the Lord,” Hopper mumbled. I’d heard that line before, from my friendly dealer friend, McDope, but it still sounded good.
A couple of years later I ran into Bill Graham again. This time, the scene was backstage at a theater on Broadway in New York, where the Tony Award–winning actress Elizabeth Ashley was starring as Maggie in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The vice president of Warner Bros. Records had introduced me to Elizabeth the previous day. I wasn’t intimately familiar with her track record as a star of film and Broadway, or the fact that she was born in Florida and raised in Baton Rouge, but her Southern roots were obviously genuine, not rehearsed, and I guess I felt I had at least as much business visiting Elizabeth’s dressing room as Bill Graham did. Maybe even more. As I glanced around, I happily noticed that she had plastered her dressing room wall, mirror, and door with the “Long Live Longnecks” stickers and posters I had given her.
When the king of rock promoters saw me, he seemed to shrink back against the wall, his eyeballs rolling upward, as if he might be having a stroke or something.
After I left, she and Graham talked about me a little. “Bill said you were really into hunting dogs,” she said later.
It was nice to know I had made an impression on him.
* * *
The Austin establishment was still having trouble accepting us. In March, the Austin American-Statesman editor Sam Wood bemoaned Austin’s emerging reputation around the United States as the “Hippie City.” Wood railed that hippies were streaming into town and that flower vendors on street corners were in fact “dope pushers, dope addicts, [and] petty criminals.” As for those Austinites who had previously complained about the newspaper’s scorn for “young people . . . engaged in free enterprise,” the editorialist had a stern retort: “Flower salesmen on busy street corners step out to pass a flower to a motorist while brakes screech, automobiles line up and traffic snarls. For anyone else in Austin this type of free enterprise would be a trip to the hoosegow.” Worse, it seemed, it was only March, and with Austin’s abundance of summer sunshine and warm weather, even greater numbers of the flower-pushing horde were expected to converge upon the capital city.2
No doubt the right-wingers in Austin were concerned that the Armadillo was a magnet for radicals. We prided ourselves on being the chamber of commerce for the counterculture. The Underground Press Syndicate came to Austin for its four-day conference in the spring of 1971. And where was the gathering of alternative newspapers from around the country supposed to meet, the Holiday Inn?
There was a lot of hostility out there, but the more our enemies tried to mobilize the public against us, the stronger we became. In addition to providing for the conferencing needs of the underground press, we welcomed groups from the straight world as well. We hosted ballet, the symphony, and the National Lawyers Guild, who held their four-day convention at the AWHQ in February 1973.
The Greenbriar School and the People’s Free Clinic were two places that were always in need, and it made no sense to let the Armadillo sit empty if we could help them out and make a few hundred people happy. Even though my association with Shiva’s Headband was starting to wind down, the band was always eager to play a fundraiser at the Dillo, and so was John Clay, one of Austin’s most popular folksingers.
During the first two years of the Armadillo’s existence, we hosted benefits for the Oleo Strut coffeehouse near Fort Hood, the Food Co-op, the striking UT shuttle bus drivers, and many others I’ve forgotten. Although we made no money from these benefits, we profited by integrating ourselves into the fabric of the community. We thrived on the hugs, handshakes, and good vibes sent our way.
We also worked hard to embrace the fine arts, presenting a wide variety of entertainment. In late 1972, the San Francisco Mime Troupe did a four-night stand at the Armadillo. The Abelard String Quartet had a no-cover, weekly residency gig in the beer garden. We staged a hot rod show, and, just to show the Austin Chamber of Commerce that we weren’t anti-capitalist, we founded the Austin Freak Merchants Guild.
We looked for every kind of entertainment that might put a few people in the big building. Stanley Hall, formerly with the Austin Civic Ballet, set up his own Austin Ballet Theatre at the Armadillo. Starting in the fall of 1972, Austin Ballet Theatre held a performance every second Sunday of the month. It was a win-win situation, as Sunday had always been a hard day to book, and Hall’s bunch not only paid for using the space, they spent money on food and drink. Their audience wasn’t messy, so the next day cleanup was minimal.
The ballet mothers and our kitchen staff didn’t always get along. One Sunday, a mischievous dishwasher donated a big bag of weed to the bakers for a batch of brownies. The moms grazed on the brownies during the rehearsal break. Several were heard to say, “These brownies are delicious!” Has a well-executed brisé or petite battement ever caused straight-laced west-side mothers to break out in such unseemly giggling and hooting? Not that I know of.
Later on, we hosted the Guatemalan Ballet, which was literally a blast. The Guatemalan dancers had a bigger fetish for fireworks than a drunk redneck at the lake on the Fourth of July.
Not all of our cultural experiments are remembered with fondness. The Armadillo World Series was a theatrical show directed by Doug Dyer, whose sensibilities and mine were like two cheese graters being rubbed together. In the late sixties, Doug had directed a production at UT called Now the Revolution that was busted for nudity. I had a feeling he was determined to bring the vice squad down on the Armadillo next. Bobby Hedderman and I kept thinking that any minute everybody onstage was going to end up naked, and we would end up being the guys they took off to jail. It brought out the redneck in us.
We never wanted to see Dyer or have anything to do with him ever again. Doug is gone now, but Esther’s Follies, the comedy club and satirical comedy show he founded with Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton on Sixth Street in 1977, is still going strong.
When we first opened the joint, we hoped that someday we’d be able to book the heroes of the day, like Timothy Leary. He finally made a trip to Austin to do a gig in 1979.
Yoga wasn’t nearly as mainstream in the 1970s as it became later, but we gave it our best shot. Our People’s Yoga program was probably doomed from the start by the fact that it was never quiet enough in our cavernous venue for people to reach the proper meditative state. Despite all the tofu and macrobiotic food our kitchen served to the masses, the Armadillo was better suited for skateboards, volleyball, and half-court basketball—activities that helped keep you warm in the winter and made you sweat enough to cool down in the summer.
Another entrepreneurial idea we came up with was a telephone message service for music listings. At the time, there wasn’t a reliable source to find out who was playing where on a given night other than radio and newspaper listings. Despite the cool poster and logo, designed by Micael Priest, the public never dialed in. Another pipe dream evaporated.
Another service we created was the Entertainers Information Guild, a nonprofit clearinghouse for musicians in the days before cell phones, faxes, and e-mail. Through this service, working musicians and their families could remain in contact with each other no matter where their gigs and private lives took them. The head of the guild was Prissy Mays, whose husband, Mike Mays, was the only banker in town who had the courage (and backing) to give us loans. It had seemed like a good idea, but the funding ran out and it went the way of so many other projects dreamed up in the Armadillo’s back room. As Captain Beefheart would have said, “They were gone like a turkey in a storm.”
