Hippie karma shown in beer pricing. After raising the prices across the board, we went back and lowered Shiner to 30 cents so it would be the cheapest. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
After we sweated through August, and usually September and part of October, a flood was just about the last thing we worried about at the Armadillo. But then came October 9, 1973. I woke up that morning to the sound of my bedroom door banging open. While reaching for my glasses, I blindly stepped out of bed and into ankle-deep water.
A guy who worked for the Grateful Dead’s record label was still asleep in the guest room. He was in town to promote the Dead’s new album, which in a bizarre coincidence was titled Wake of the Flood.
The bathroom window looked out on the backyard and carport area, where flood debris was stacked up against the gate. The water level was up to the windows of my Dodge Charger. I climbed out on the window ledge, inching along until I reached the gate. As soon as I released the latch, a log the size of a canoe rushed past. Opening the gate lowered the water level in the carport considerably, but on the front side of the house, the water was up to the windowsills and still rising.
Inside, the water was a couple of inches deep, but you could see around the front-door frame that the outside water was really desirous of coming inside. The stereo was high and dry, so I put the Dead’s new record on the turntable and cranked the volume, in the hopes it would send a gentle message to my guest as he awakened.
The phone rang. It was Galen Barber, the Armadillo’s sanitation engineer. “Boss,” he said, “you’ve got to see this to believe it.”
“Oh, I believe it, Galen,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”
The night before, Robert Gower and his brother-in-law had worked late putting the finishing touches on our new basement game room. It was a fully equipped arcade, with coin-operated pinball, shuffleboard, foosball, car-race games, and a new, state-of-the-art Pong machine.
During the night, one of the Colorado River’s South Austin tributaries, Bouldin Creek, had turned into a river feeding into Town Lake. When Robert Gower and Bobby Hedderman drove down South First the next morning, they encountered the overflow. They made it all the way to the last block before Barton Springs Road, where they had to pull the car over and wade the rest of the way. The water was waist-high and moving swiftly as they crossed the bridge. Bobby was so worried about the game room, he didn’t mention his fear that some of the things going bump against his body might be water moccasins, rats, or other nasty creatures.
They entered the building through the side garage door. There they saw Galen Barber, soaking wet, standing in six inches of water next to the stairwell. The roaring sound they heard was floodwater draining down the stairs, a cascade of doom.
“It’s been going like this for a while,” Galen said.
Robert desperately wanted to save whatever could be saved. He hesitated for a moment, then bravely climbed down. Down in the game room, the water came up to his knees. Each footstep stirred up about an inch and a half of silt on the floor.
By the time I got there, we were all starting to feel sorry for ourselves. Once a game room, now an underwater cave. I wanted to say something that sounded managerial, but nothing came to mind. Doug Sahm, who usually drew a good crowd, was scheduled to play that night, and we needed the money. Somebody had to call the radio stations to tell them the show was off.
“I think we’re fucked,” said Bobby Hedderman.
“You know what?” said Robert Gower. “I doubt that anything’s ruined.”
“Hold on,” I said. I took a deep breath to stall for time. “Let me think a minute.”
A volunteer appeared. Willis Alan Ramsey, a popular but absurdly low-key Austin singer-songwriter, held two tools, neither of them a guitar. “Where do we start?” he said, a shovel in one hand, a rake in the other. Other willing helpers soon followed.
“Eddie, do you think it’s possible to save this thing?” said Bobby.
“Hell yeah,” I said. “Let’s drag these carpets out of here.” More people showed up. Nobody liked what they saw, but they all pitched in.
That night, eight hundred people showed up for the show. Sir Doug Sahm, the most cosmic of the cosmic cowboys, his shoulder-length hair topped off with a cowboy hat and wearing blue jeans and pointy-toe boots, knew just what to sing for them. For starters, there was the 1965 hit by Sir Douglas Quintet, “The Rains Came.” Rain, rain, rain . . .
With Augie Meyers’s Vox Continental organ percolating skating-rink riffs, the crowd made their own kind of thunder, cheering so loudly they almost drowned out the vocals. But that was OK, because we knew the song so well.