From the first twinkle of a dream of the Armadillo World Headquarters, an in-house marketing agency had been an arrow we wanted in our quiver, just as surely as we wanted a nursery for the employees’ kids, an art gallery, and a jewelry store. And of all the things I tried to do to bring more revenue into the Dillo, our agency was the most successful. The advertising campaigns we did for Lone Star Beer made it possible for some of us to earn a living wage for the first time, and more important, it was creatively rewarding. What a great ride it was.
The new agency began with a simple idea. The Armadillo already had a grip on the young, beer-drinking, music-loving market. We sold more draft Lone Star Beer than any other place except for the Astrodome in Houston, which could accommodate fifty thousand more customers than the Dillo. Adding a sense of urgency was the fact that Coors, after a long delay, was finally coming to Texas. Coors had a sheen of hipness at the time, since it was unpasteurized and had been difficult to get. But we were confident that we could deliver our market to Lone Star.
Looking around at the staff I worked with, it wasn’t difficult to round up the team that would make our agency a hit. I’d already been a PR flack for the Brewers Association, and I’ve always been an idea generator. Mike Tolleson was one of the sharpest entertainment lawyers in Austin, and he always had his finger on the pulse of the moment. Woody Roberts, radio promotion genius, had saved Willie’s first picnic. Randy McCall, Tolleson’s pal from Southern Methodist University, was a CPA whose former clients included AT&T and the government of Panama, but he’d moved to Austin because he wanted to play bass more often.
The name of the agency was TYNA/TACI, provided gratis by my Five Dollar Name company. Pronounced “Teena Tacky,” the acronym stood for “Thought You’d Never Ask / The Austin Consultants Inc.” The short form was “Austin Consultants.”
It was the spring of 1974 when we drafted a set of proposals for marketing work we could do for Lone Star Beer. Barry Sullivan, the marketing director for Lone Star, set up a meeting and we drove to San Antonio feeling pretty excited about it. Besides being our first big campaign, this was going to be the spark that lit the fuse on a cultural moment. But what I didn’t know until very recently, when four of us got together at Threadgill’s to look at some pertinent files and video from that time, was that the meeting with Lone Star might have been staged much sooner, and with only one of the TYNA/TACI team present: Woody Roberts.1
Our writer/musician friend Jesse Sublett was with us at the table at Threadgill’s, asking questions about how the relationship with Lone Star began. Mike Tolleson and I were trying to narrow down the date that we started communicating with Barry Sullivan. Jesse grew impatient and said, “So, nobody remembers how the first meeting came about?”
Finally, Woody Roberts spoke up.
“Well, I do,” he said.
“Oh, you do?” Jesse said.
“Of course,” Woody said, speaking between bites of cucumber-and-tomato salad. “There are different sides to the story, the Armadillo side, and my side, and so on.”
What Woody meant was that he knew that Barry Sullivan was already acquainted with me as well as with Mike Tolleson, Bobby Hedderman, Jim Franklin, and others at the Dillo. We also knew Sullivan’s district sales manager, Jerry Retzloff. But I never knew until this lunch meeting years later that Barry Sullivan had tried to steal Woody out from under us. Woody told it like this:
Barry Sullivan and Jerry Retzloff had been coming up here from San Antonio because they wanted to find out why Armadillo was selling more Lone Star draft beer than any other place in Texas. One night—I think Commander Cody was playing—I was introduced to them by Eddie. And after we talked a while—maybe it was that night or the next time I saw him—Barry said, “I know what you did for Willie’s first picnic, and I want to hire you to be the advertising director for Lone Star Beer.” And I said to him, “I’ve got a commitment to Armadillo. We have a radio show, a TV show, and a record company through here, and that’s my direction. That’s what I’m doing.”
Barry said, “I’ll give you $60,000 a year.” I said, “Give the money to the Armadillo, let them pay me something.” Ever since the incredible success of Willie’s first picnic, Eddie had been asking me to come join the Armadillo staff. I knew they didn’t make much money, and I didn’t know what I could contribute to earn my keep up there. Armadillo was almost three years old at that point. But Barry said, “I don’t think we can do that.”2
Barry Sullivan’s hesitation was primarily due to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s “three-tier” law, which forbade beer companies from making cash contributions to retailers such as the Armadillo. Fortunately, being familiar with the ins and outs of the TABC, I knew there was a way around this problem: forming a marketing agency as an entity separate from the Armadillo. Armadillo World Headquarters was our client. We rented our own, separate office space in the building.
“I didn’t want to appear to be pushing,” said Woody, “because the Armadillo had a great thing going, and I thought this was my chance to be involved and pull my own weight. Eddie, being the spiritual leader and trail boss at the Dillo, came back with the idea of us being a corporation, and he named it Thought You’d Never Ask / The Austin Consultants Inc., which was a great name. Was it legal? I don’t know, but nobody ever asked.”3
Barry Sullivan got a kick out of it. With a wink and a handshake, he agreed that Lone Star was free to do business with the Austin Consultants. Just as important, Mike Tolleson and I were thrilled to work with Woody Roberts, a person we both recognized as a true genius, and I don’t mind admitting that Woody’s appraisal of our abilities and achievements gave our own confidence a boost. Woody remembered us as the “two main brains” at the Dillo:
Anything they wanted to do at the Armadillo would be accepted there. By the time I got to the Armadillo, I’d quit my vice president/general manager job at KTSA-FM in San Antonio, but I’d been working with talent since I was eighteen. Sometimes it was a great talent, sometimes they were temperamental and stuff, but I recognized in a second that Eddie was a star. So when we started the agency, we ended up with Eddie—he’s got brilliant ideas, he’s a genius, and he’s obviously a great person to talk to people and bring them in. Then there was Mike, the lawyer, and Randy [McCall], the CPA, which was a good idea, and me as the media guy. It was an ideal mix.4
For our first big sales meeting, Mike, Randy, Woody, and I piled into a VW Bug and drove to San Antonio to meet with Barry Sullivan. Sullivan’s own track record was pretty impressive. While he was still a big-league hockey player in Canada, Sullivan had started working at Falstaff Brewing Corporation during the off-season. At Falstaff in the 1950s, he worked with Hank Thompson, one of the first country singers to have a corporate sponsorship. Hank Thompson was one hell of a cool guitar player and honky-tonk singer. During his long-term relationship with Falstaff, Thompson recorded jingles for the brand, sang the beer’s praises on television, toured with his own sound and light system, and flew his own airplane on tour. Thompson’s song “A Six Pack to Go,” recorded in 1960, had sold more than a million copies.5
Barry Sullivan had also helped resurrect Narragansett, a faltering label owned by Falstaff that was brewed in Rhode Island. In 1970, one year after Woodstock, Sullivan came up with a savvy PR campaign featuring a series of mini–Woodstock festivals in every corner of the Narragansett market. Associating the brand with performers like Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and Santana helped turn Narragansett’s fortunes around.
Sullivan, who still had the look of a former hockey player or pro fullback, gave us a warm welcome at Lone Star headquarters. He escorted us straight to the brewery’s hospitality room, where we began discussing possibilities over pitchers of cold draft beer. At this point in time, Lone Star was a sagging regional brand that was losing sales to the big national labels. They needed us.
We were treated like visiting royalty as Barry Sullivan escorted us around the brewery, introducing us to everyone, including Harry Jersig, president of the company. Jersig was the youngest old man I’d ever met, full of piss and vinegar, defying the aging process by spending as much time as possible fishing, hunting, and drinking.
To our surprise, Jersig wanted us to work on marketing the longneck, the recyclable bottle that had once been the industry standard but had lost favor after the advent of nonreturnable cans and bottles. In the early 1970s, America was still under the spell of the “throwaway” craze: disposable bottles, cans, boxes, and all manner of containers for consumer products were promoted as a modern convenience, as if it were our patriotic duty to waste resources.
Beer in longnecks certainly tasted better than beer in cans. I remembered from my Texas beer history that, in terms of flavor, the next best thing to drinking your beer out of a clean glass the same temperature as the beer is drinking it from a longneck bottle, where the air in the neck of the bottle creates more head. As a beer joint proprietor, however, I hated stocking longneck bottles. Beer in plastic cups was easy to manage. Glass bottles conjured visions of shattered slivers on the floor and weapons that could draw blood when used to conk a bad actor in the head. Even though we got the contract to promote Lone Star Beer in longneck bottles, the Armadillo continued to serve it in pitchers and plastic cups only.
The deal we got was similar to the one that Woody Roberts had already discussed with Sullivan, except that, instead of hiring one advertising chief, Sullivan got a whole agency. We were paid $60,000 a year, or $5,000 a month, plus an override of 17.65 percent on production costs such as renting studio time, hiring musicians and writers, printing marketing materials, and so forth, which allowed us some leeway on costs that earned us some extra money.
We started the campaign by printing up five thousand black T-shirts with a Jim Franklin design of a map of Texas dotted with thousands of tiny armadillos, each bearing a Lone Star Beer logo. We mailed the shirts to hundreds of rock bands. It wasn’t our favorite T-shirt design, but it got the word out to the kind of people we wanted to reach, not just in this country but around the world.
The part of the campaign that probably had the biggest reach and longest life, however, was the slogan “Long Live Longnecks,” which was coined by Jim Franklin. Under our contract with Lone Star, we hired artists to produce a series of posters for the longneck campaign. Without a doubt, the posters that Franklin produced under this arrangement represent some of the best beer-and-music marketing artwork ever produced.
My favorite Jim Franklin Lone Star poster is probably the one with the Lone Star “prairie schooner.” The picture shows a scrubby southwestern landscape with a covered wagon inside a Lone Star longneck bottle, with an armadillo in the lower right corner rearing on its hind legs. Several puns are at work all at once: the schooner was an ocean-going sailing ship used to carry people and cargo across the Atlantic from the 1600s through the 1800s; it was also the nickname of the Conestoga wagons used by millions of Americans in their westward migration in the 1800s; and it was the name of a beer-drinking vessel. The poster depicted a “prairie schooner” in a bottle, as opposed to the usual ship in a bottle. But you didn’t even have to realize all those things to dig the poster. It was just visually compelling, funny, and fun to look at.
“The posters were fabulous,” said Woody Roberts, “and they’re the only thing that remains. But the fact is, those posters only went into certain kinds of nightclubs. They didn’t go into kicker bars. But everywhere you went you saw the ‘Long Live Longnecks’ stickers. They were on pickup trucks, in parking lots, in redneck joints in West Texas, in sophisticated neighborhoods, everywhere.”
We had wanted to do bumper stickers, but it was a challenge because we weren’t allowed to put the word “beer” on them. I said, “Why don’t we do a bumper sticker shaped like a longneck?” Woody wasn’t convinced.
Then Jim Franklin brought some of his work over to my house. We were looking at it, and Woody saw Jim’s slogan “Long Live Longnecks” under one of his posters and said, “That’s it!”
“I went to this guy at a printshop in San Antonio,” Woody said, “and told him to make it look like the ‘America: Love It or Leave It’ bumper sticker, which was real prevalent in Texas at the time.”
The Lone Star logo was so small it was hard to see. Sullivan didn’t get it at first, but success made a believer out of him.
For the radio commercials, we ventured into new, barely charted terrain, much like those pioneers, but with Woody Roberts as our trailblazing leader. For the first step in our market research, Woody compiled a list of about two hundred potential words and phrases that would elicit positive reactions in radio listeners. The list was delivered to Dr. Tom Turicchi at his psychographic research lab in Richardson, Texas. A market research group was selected using criteria developed by prior research at Lone Star. The typical Lone Star drinker, Barry Sullivan told us, was a thirty-seven-year-old blue-collar male with some high school education. Your basic redneck, in other words. Our goal was to insinuate the Armadillo consumer into that profile.
Dr. Turicchi sent a street team out to Dallas-area malls to recruit twenty-one-year-old college students who liked progressive country music. Each one who agreed to show up at Dr. Turicchi’s lab for the marketing test got five bucks. All they had to do to earn another five bucks was listen to some music and react to Woody’s list of words and phrases.
The lab was a small auditorium with rows of school desks wired to four-channel galvanometers, or lie detectors. Each subject was hooked up to a galvanometer via metal splints strapped to two fingers on the left hand with Velcro straps. On the desk were four buttons for the subject to push. They were asked to rank words, phrases, and music, registering a positive or negative response by pushing the appropriate button.
After Woody’s list of words and phrases was tested on the subjects, Dr. Turicchi analyzed the results on the galvanometer tapes. Some of the results were amusing. Of all the words and phrases, a single one had zero negative responses and a 100 percent favorable response rate: “high.”
To a gang of Dead Heads like us, this looked like the best omen since the days when you could buy legal peyote from Sledd’s Nursery on Enfield Road for a dime a bud. The kids liked several other words too, especially the sounds of “fine” and “Harry Jersig’s Lone Star beer.”
Woody trimmed the list to a dozen or so buzzwords, then called Bob Livingston and Gary P. Nunn of Jerry Jeff Walker’s Lost Gonzo Band. Woody asked the songwriters if they could write a song about Lone Star Beer that incorporated as many of the favorable phrases as possible. What we got was a song called “The Nights Never Get Lonely.” The lyrics made poetry of the test-market-approved words: “Dancing in the moonlight under Lone Star skies / In the Lone Star State with a Lone Star high / And the nights, they never get lonely.” And then a low baritone voice intoned, “Harry Jersig’s Lone Star Beer. It’s really fine.”
We booked the Gonzos at Pecan Street Studios and nailed a really good track. We sent the recording to Dr. Turicchi, who played it for a test group. The participants hated the steel guitar on the track, but everything else tested positive. We were up against a deadline with no time to rerecord, so Woody decided to overdub some intellectualization. Chet Flippo got a late-night phone call from us asking if he wanted to do some voice work in the studio.
Chet initially resisted our request. He had the flu, he said, and on top of that, he was worn out from a long trip he’d taken with his wife, Martha Hume. We got the impression that something else was bothering him. Eventually, he came out with it. His parents were Pentecostals, he said, and if he did a beer commercial, his father might disown him.
Assurances were quickly offered. We don’t want you to advertise beer, I told him, we want you to tell us about yourself. You’re a great music writer, I said. Tell people about the new music in Austin, the stuff some people call cross country, others call progressive country, but whatever you call it, it sounds like this . . .
Chet finally gave in, although it was hard to tell whether it was my gift for persuasion or the fact that he and Martha needed the money. They were about to move to New York, and with Harry Jersig’s Lone Star Beer covering the bills, TYNA/TACI paid good money.
Other versions of “The Nights Never Get Lonely” were recorded later, including Freddie King’s version, which could’ve been a big radio hit, but we also loved the versions by the Pointer Sisters and Sunny and the Sunliners. Our campaign was so successful that it’s been written about numerous times as an example of cultural branding, but the details often get scrambled in strange ways. An article in Texas Monthly in 1982 got a lot of the background right but called the song “Harina Tortilla.” Texas Monthly ran a story about it again in 2014, this time with a lot of emphasis on Jerry Retzloff and Jim Franklin. Writer John Spong rightfully gives a lot of credit to Retzloff for being a true believer in Lone Star whose eyes were opened by the progressive country music scene he found at Armadillo World Headquarters, and Jim Franklin gets kudos for coming up with “Long Live Longnecks” and making some damn fine art, but TYNA/TACI somehow disappears from the narrative. The effect of this kind of tunnel vision is a little like hiring a big name architect to design a swanky new house; the architect works with all the contractors for building it out, doing the finishing work, and dealing with utilities, furnishing, landscaping, et cetera, and when it’s all done, someone gives all the credit to the woman who hung the drapes, the guy who did the mosaic tile in the bathrooms, and the guy who designed the fireplaces.6
We also did a series of cowboy commercials that were really a lot of fun. Woody Roberts had done similar commercials before in San Antonio using his friend Gordy Ham as a voice actor. Gordy came up with a character named Ramblin’ Rose, and with writer Carolyn Allen they came up with additional characters and storylines that were entertaining, comical, and often laced with drug jokes that usually, but not always, went straight over the heads of the client.
For example, in a commercial during the Christmas season, Santa Claus talked about “snow” giving him a “froze nose.” We did get busted on the one that mentioned Alice B. Toklas and magic brownies.
The funny thing is, when we first pitched our services to Lone Star, we didn’t know what we were going into. Woody wanted to market something called the “handy keg,” a bullet-shaped container in which cold-filtered beer was sold. It turned out to be Harry Jersig’s favorite beer. But then Barry Sullivan told us that they wanted us to take on the returnable bottle.
That’s what he called it, the “returnable bottle.” Not “longneck.” Back then you had throwaways and returnables. Nobody wanted returnables. They took up space in the brewery. Rewashing and relabeling them was a process that the industry wanted to abandon. During our discussion with Sullivan, we talked about how returnable bottles were environmentally responsible, but the truth is, the excitement didn’t hit us until he mentioned an old brewery term for returnables: “longnecks.”
Woody and I looked at each other at the same time, and we knew just what the other was thinking—that we knew where that phallic term came from and that we would have a real good time marketing it.
And we sure did.
Barry Sullivan might not have been the hippest guy around, but he was a genius at marketing. He believed, and rightly so, that the way to sell the cans was through the bottles. That is, if you sold people on the bottles, sales would go up on the cans. He was right. Our “Long Live Longnecks” campaign reversed Lone Star’s historic decline in longneck sales to the tune of twenty thousand cases a month over a five-year stretch, and an increase of 1.4 million cases in fourteen months.
The campaign also paid for some of Jim Franklin’s best commercial work and, as stated earlier, gave some of us a weekly living wage for a short time. But it also created some bad vibes among some of the staff members who felt that making money off of the Armadillo’s hippie vibe was uncool. More about that unpleasantness later.