As at any bar, club, honky-tonk, theater, or other venue where the music gets loud and the booze flows freely, especially in Texas, there were nights at the Armadillo when the natives got restless. When the good vibes turned gnarly, it was the bouncers who squared off against the sons of bitches who had eaten nails for breakfast.
My chief deputy, Dub Rose, rode herd on a posse of cowboys who had taken LSD before riding bulls and army veterans who had faced the Viet Cong in the jungles of Southeast Asia. These guys had faced phalanxes of nightstick-swinging riot police on campuses and city streets, and none of them were impressed with bullies who emerged from a drunken mob in a music hall, their bravery artificially enhanced by the combination of alcohol, other substances, and a depleted brain cell inventory.
Dub really cared about his job, however, and despite the formidable capabilities of his crew, he worried to the point of almost breaking out in hives at the approach of every big-league show. Before every show, he carefully followed an established routine: double-check each door to make sure the inside security crew is in place; go to the office, get the change drawer and the money bag, then escort our beautiful head ticket taker, Linda Wuenche, and her assistant to the box office; then, with the yammering crowd eager to get in, slip into the beer garden to check in with the outdoor crew; and, if the outdoor crew is ready, duck back inside and wait for the precise moment to open the doors.
Dub reminded me of a sharp private eye. If he saw someone for a split second, he could describe that person to a T. He could spot trouble before it happened.
Austin has a legacy of bare-knuckle badasses in its population. Call them the spiritual descendants of Big Gil Stromquist, a former boxer who ran a hardcore country honky-tonk out on South Congress. They included full-time hoodlums like Timmy Overton, tough guys who seemed to thrive on physical combat the way your average musician loves jamming. These characters were as native to the Austin area as live oaks, cedar fever, and armadillos. They were bent-nose, scarred-knuckle toughs who just loved to fight—not necessarily because they had something against the other guy, but because of a primal need to measure their own physical aggression against that of another combatant. The ancient impulse to pummel someone may sound like something out of the Stone Age, but in the 1970s, it was still pretty common in Austin, Texas. In places where strong beverages were sold, such confrontations were frequent and took little time to ignite.
One badass I had to deal with on a regular basis was Bill Campbell, a white blues guitarist from East Austin best described as large, scary, and usually drunk. Bill was a veteran guitarist in the 1960s East Austin blues scene going back to the days of Charlie’s Playhouse, Ernie’s Chicken Shack, Sam’s Showcase, and the IL Club. Just about every well-known blues guitarist who came out of Austin since then, from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson to Gary Clark Jr., followed in Bill Campbell’s footsteps in one way or the other. Too bad that music wasn’t Bill’s only influence or impact on the community.
Then there was Paco, a handsome troublemaker who sold Cuban sandwiches on the Drag. He thought he had first call on any available woman at the Armadillo, and he had promised to kick my ass. We’ll never know how that fight might’ve turned out, because before Paco could give me a chance to save my own hide, he got killed by someone else he’d pissed off.
Another big, handsome local tough—who will remain nameless—was one of those beer drinkers who could be quite charming when sober but, when drunk, turned obnoxious and threatening. I was pretty sure he could take me, and for two years I steered clear of him to avoid the knuckle fest that was sure to happen.
Finally, one night at closing time, he refused to leave. Drunk and swaying on his feet, he threw down the ancient gauntlet, saying, “Are you big enough to make me leave, you son of a bitch?”
Losing my cool, I pushed him lightly with my left, just touching his chest for the setup, but before I could throw a haymaker right that I hoped to God would take his head off, he fell to the ground, sobbing and howling. “Please don’t hit me,” he begged. “Please, please don’t . . .”
If only all of our beefs ended that way. My sermon to the bouncers was simple: hug, don’t hit, and holler really loud for backup. On most occasions, we could quickly outnumber the troublemakers, so I really stressed the need to hold on and wait before things got out of hand. I knew the incidents were going to increase as soon as we opened the Cabaret and started selling beer. We briefly floated the idea of restricting drinking to the Cabaret but concluded that it would be totally impractical. Therefore, we had beer everywhere, and everywhere beer goes, trouble often follows.
Hard drugs inevitably appeared on the scene, making the bouncers’ job even more difficult. Speed made troublemakers more difficult to reason with and harder to disable or hurt. The combination of alcohol and speed took the worst of both highs and quadrupled it. Downer freaks, on the other hand, were mostly obnoxious but harmless. No matter how badly they wanted to hit you, they mostly hurt themselves.
One night somebody kept fucking with Jose Cerna, our bouncer of bouncers. Jose chased the guy outside, where another asshole was waiting to stab Jose with a sharpened tire tool, which the asshole did and escaped. Jose was stitched up, and he recovered. On another night, we told a pack of Bandidos that wearing their colors in the club would cause trouble, so they retaliated by carving up a couple of our bouncers. Thank God for the ambulance and emergency room crew, or our guys would’ve bled to death. It must have taken a thousand stitches to put them back together. When the doctor doing the suturing on one of our boys thought he was almost done, he asked the patient to sit up, only to discover that the cuts went all the way around his body.
When Bill Brown, one of my brighter friends, told me he was leaving his job on the Texas Legislative Council, I talked him into coming to work for me as a bouncer. I asked him to give us some ideas on humane techniques for keeping the peace. His only suggestion was not letting the bouncers drink. I knew that wasn’t going to work. It’s hard to explain, but drinking within reason was too deeply ingrained in the culture. General attitudes about drinking were quite different back then as well. In Texas, it was still legal to drink and drive as long as you weren’t legally drunk. I was good at it, I believed, and I practiced a lot to stay in shape.
One night Bill Brown told a Himalayan-sized drunk that he was going to have to leave, which made the drunk want to whip Bill’s ass.
“OK,” Bill said, “let’s step outside and get it on.”
As the man-mountain stepped out the nearest exit, Bill pulled the door shut and bolted it, then ran to the main entrance, where he figured the guy would soon appear, boiling mad. Bill alerted Jose Cerna, who was already stationed there. Jose waited, and when the big angry dude came storming through, Jose dropped him like a bad habit.
Jose Cerna had been working for us only a short while when Bobby Hedderman saw him turn a burly, rowdy cowboy into a blubbering baby without doing much more than touching him. Jose was short and extremely stout—not the kind of build you’d associate with speed, but Jose was a sixth-degree black belt. He was modest to the point of being closemouthed about his skills in self-defense, but after seeing him in action, some of the other bouncers asked if he would teach them some tricks.
“There are no tricks,” he told them. It was a discipline, he explained, that required an attitude built around Zen philosophy and meditation.
One quiet afternoon, I was cleaning up in the kitchen when Jose wandered in and asked if he could help. I’d just finished filling the big sink with hot water. I reached in to retrieve a knife and yelled with pain after scalding my hand. Jose calmly reached into the water up to his elbow and pulled out the knife.
How the hell did he do that?
“Most pain is just in the mind,” he explained. “I’ve learned to shut it down for little things.”
I looked at my own arm, red and puffed up, the nerve endings still sending angry messages to my brain that were anything but Zen. Jose’s arm wasn’t even red.
The security guys eventually talked Jose into instructing them in karate and meditation. Despite being hippies at heart, they undertook the most rigorous regime of strength and endurance I’d seen since marine boot camp. They were good students. Although none of them seemed comfortable discussing it, Jose’s spiritual guidance and physical discipline actually seemed to influence their general demeanor. They gained a new level of confidence, especially when dealing with loudmouth drunks.
One day Bobby Hedderman was talking with Wichita, a tall West Texas cowboy with a black hat the size of an umbrella. Bobby appeared uncomfortable, while Wichita was energized and passionate.
Later, when Bobby was alone, I said, “What in hell were you and Wichita talking about?”
“Oh, he was just explaining to me how he was learning to acquire a transcendental state,” Bobby said.
Craig Hattersley was technically part of our security force, but he was another one who didn’t seem the type. Rail-thin, laid-back, and sunny, Craig kept an eye out for trouble in the parking lot while sitting cross-legged and barefoot in a chair, banjo on his knee. People tended to ignore him as they walked across the parking lot, but he played exceptionally well. On a night when Frank Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty were inside, playing “Orange Blossom Special” accompanied by Sweet Mary Egan, Craig matched their whipped-up frenzy note for note. At a salary of ten dollars a night, Craig was a bargain.
* * *
One night, I was drinking a beer in the beer garden with Robert Gower, our stage manager. We were sitting with a couple of the other guys at a table in front of the bar. The place was about a third full. The band was setting up onstage. A couple of girls had joined us. Someone on the staff introduced their parents, who were visiting from out of town. Meeting parents always made me self-conscious about the place; I didn’t want anyone’s mom and dad to think we were a bunch of dirty, immoral hippies. I remember feeling relieved that the joint looked pretty good that night and most of the waitresses were wearing shoes.
Gower, by the way, was a big guy who wore a gorilla suit better than anybody I ever saw. The costume really seemed to bring out his inner gorilla. Bobby Hedderman knows how it all began.
“Robert and I grew up together in Dallas,” said Bobby. “We used to watch the Ernie Kovacs show all the time, and one of our favorite skits was the Nairobi Trio, three guys in gorilla suits wearing top hats or bowlers—some kind of hat—doing these musical numbers. It was really funny. So that’s where it came from.”1
“I’d put on the suit for Halloween and hang out in the audience before the show,” said Robert. “I played a foam-rubber guitar onstage with Jo Jo Gunne, went to Dallas with Balcones Fault for a debutante-ball after-party, and did all kinds of special events.”2
On that peaceful day when Robert Gower and I were enjoying a couple of beers, a strange sight suddenly appeared just inside the entrance gate. Bearded and curly-haired, a man was standing there, slowly scanning the terrain of the beer garden. After a minute or so, he stretched his arms wide and, in a booming voice that reminded me of Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments, said, “I AM THAT I AM.”
Unlike Charlton Heston as Moses, however, this guy was completely naked. His hair was red and so was his beard and the hair on his chest and shoulders. In the late-evening light he seemed to be glowing orange.
Fortunately, the parents had already left.
“Shit, we gotta get this guy outta here,” I said to Gower.
He nodded reluctantly, and together we strode purposefully toward the entrance. As we got closer, we realized that the naked guy was tall enough to remind us of a giraffe, and almost as thick as Gower.
Just as the naked guy announced “I AM THAT I AM” once more with feeling, Gower grabbed one arm and I grabbed the other. We walked him out to the parking lot, and he offered little resistance other than repeating that he was who he was. We tried to get an actual name out of him, but before we got anywhere, some people showed up who claimed to be his friends and said they’d take care of him.
Gower and I went back to our beers, our existential identities intact. We were who we were.
The weird, the strange, and the deranged were as common to the Armadillo as our kitchen’s greasy nachos, but unlike our nachos, such people could potentially be dangerous. It was one of the things that kept life at the Armadillo interesting.