Poster for Little Feat show at AWHQ, February 8–9, 1974. Artwork by Micael Priest.
Booking Van Morrison helped bring the Armadillo into the mainstream of concert promotion. The boost in our profile coincided with a general growth spurt in the live music and nightclub scene. The state ban on liquor by the drink had been lifted by an amendment to the Texas Constitution in 1970, followed by Travis County approving an option to serve liquor by the drink in local bars. The legal drinking age had been lowered to eighteen, which also had a major effect on the number of people going out at night to see music and do all the other things people like to do in association with booze.
A bumper crop of new live music venues opened, and some of them tried to position themselves as alternatives to the Armadillo. In a capitalist society, competition is supposed to help bring about higher-quality products at lower prices. In some cases, it also brings out the ugly side of some service providers and their former colleagues.
Waylon Jennings pulled off a rowdy two-night stand at the Armadillo at the end of January 1974, with Billy Joe Shaver, who had written the songs for Waylon’s breakthrough album, Honky Tonk Heroes, opening both nights. Six months later, Waylon canceled a return date in order to play the Texas Opry House, our new competition on the block. He went for a higher guarantee.
Meanwhile, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen had grown into AWHQ’s biggest road act. They came back for two nights in February 1974 to promote the release of the live album they’d recorded at the Armadillo the previous November. John Morthland and Ed Ward, two of the writers flown in by Cody’s record label for the show, were duly impressed by the scene and said so frequently in the stories they filed in the music press. (Later, Morthland and Ward gave up writing about Austin long-distance and moved here. Ward took over the rock critic slot at the Statesman and Morthland continued as a freelancer.)
Both nights were sold out, which should have been a source of joy, but at the time, I had my hands full trying to build up buzz for Little Feat, who were booked for four nights the following week. Linda Ronstadt was traveling with Lowell George, guitarist and bandleader of Little Feat. It occurred to me that, if we could advertise Linda doing a special guest appearance, it would create a lot of buzz. But I wanted to get their blessing first.
If ever there was a goddess of a musical age, Linda Ronstadt was it for me. So pretty she was hard to look at, so lovely to listen to she could make a he-man cry, she reminded me of a tiny, delicate bird. She was in a class of her own.
Little Feat was playing Liberty Hall in Houston before Austin, so I drove down there and caught the show. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get an audience with the moonstruck couple. On the drive home I decided to proceed with my plan anyway. Giving added encouragement, Commander Cody agreed to stay in Austin an extra two days and open for Little Feat’s first show, without contract or guarantee. We charged three dollars for a triple bill of Cody, Little Feat, and Linda Ronstadt.
Wednesday night, everyone was cool and relaxed before the show except Linda and Lowell, who were holed up backstage, not seeing anyone. Linda was widely known to be shy and delicate to the point of instant hysteria. I just couldn’t get an audience with her. She considered me a scummy promoter. I was starting to believe it.
Making matters even more awkward, she had recently shared the stage with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in Los Angeles for a television show, yet she didn’t recognize a one of them. It was just tunnel vision. She couldn’t help it.
Bill Kirchen and Andy Stein of the Lost Planet Airmen came back to the dressing room with their guitars and pretended they were all sitting around a campfire or something. They introduced themselves and ended up trading songs, picking, and singing on some old country classics. When it was time for Cody to take the stage, Linda had loosened up some, and it looked like about a 50/50 chance that she might get up and sing.
Linda Ronstadt was an unwilling goddess. Backstage at AWHQ, February 6, 1974. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
The opening set by Commander Cody was high energy, though looser and more casual than normal; the boys left their sequins in their suitcases and let their shirttails hang out. After a sizzling set, they came backstage and more or less swarmed Linda and Lowell. The crowd was still applauding and screaming for more, and Bill Kirchen, who is such a likeable guy, just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Linda took herself up the stage stairs, with Lowell holding her hand. Bill Kirchen led the band, which was about half Lost Planet Airmen, half Little Feat. Cody sat it out. I came out and introduced Linda with no fanfare. “Please welcome . . .” The place went nuts.
Bill Kirchen and the guys all knew her music. They made her comfortable and Lowell stayed close, and she mellowed out. Linda’s courage grew and they coaxed her into an eleven-song set. It’s hard to describe the impact of this improvised set, but there was a feeling of intimacy and hugeness at the same time. It was definitely one of the highlights of the whole Armadillo experience, maybe the biggest one I can recall. And the night was only half over. Little Feat followed with its powerful blend of Southern blues and rock filtered through the Laurel Canyon vibe, and by the end of the evening, the band had secured its place as an Armadillo A-list draw and an Austin favorite. One of Cody’s roadies said that night was his biggest payday ever—Linda had insisted that the door be split evenly among everyone, including the crew.
The next night, Linda came to my house with Lowell and chewed me out for what I’d done. She thought it was a terrible breach of ethics. I blamed the media.
Two weeks after Little Feat, Roy Buchanan played. On a stage where guitar heroes were a dime a dozen, Buchanan was a house favorite. In addition to his amazing talent and discipline, he happened to be the only guy to turn down offers to play with Lennon and McCartney, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Armadillo audiences appreciated an iconoclast like that.
Touring acts brought in the crowds, but we were continually trying to build audiences for worthy hometown bands. For a one-dollar admission on weeknights, you could see great acts like western swing fiddler Alvin Crow and his Neon Angels, or our favorite “blue yodeler,” Kenneth Threadgill. Alvin had tons more talent than bands like New Riders of the Purple Sage, but he could never build a following in our place. Once he moved over to the Broken Spoke, an authentic honky-tonk that was longhair-tolerant, Alvin started to develop the following he deserved.
We had some great double bills for only a dollar. We would pair the Conqueroo, one of Austin’s original hippie bands, with Leanne and the Bizarros, featuring Sterling Morrison, the former guitarist from the Velvet Underground who had moved to Austin and was teaching at UT. A double bill like that sometimes even earned enough to pay the AWHQ light bill, but not much more than that. We were too big to be a club and too small to compete for the bigger touring acts.
The scene in Austin was growing up and changing fast. There was an influx of talented and pretty people in town, the kind you’d see out and about after dark but not in morning traffic on their way to a nine-to-five job. A good many were thirty-somethings drawn to Austin by its reputation as a place where the living was easy, with perpetual sunshine, a low cost of living, the cheapest pot, and the cheapest beer. They weren’t hippies and they weren’t straights, but somewhere in between.
An alternative biweekly paper called the Austin Sun was taking the underground paper concept of the defunct Rag into the semi-mainstream. The content of the paper showed that the Austin scene was becoming more self-aware, and the creators of that content included several fine writers—including Bill Bentley, Michael Ventura, and James “Big Boy” Medlin, who later moved to Los Angeles and played a large part in the music scene, where they were among the founders of the LA Weekly.1
Clubs sprouted like magic mushrooms in a Bastrop cow pasture after a rain. In four years, the number of local clubs had grown from something like fourteen to fifty. KOKE-FM promoted concerts at the Country Dinner Playhouse, a theatrical venue north of the city, including one with Willie Nelson that Leon Russell tagged along to play, unadvertised. Chequered Flag, Rod Kennedy’s intimate listening room, booked a lot of singer-songwriter acts that I longed to get, most notably Bonnie Raitt.
The Bergstrom Air Force Base NCO club booked a Hee Haw show, and the Sheriff’s Posse Arena tried its hand with a Grand Ole Opry show. Alliance Wagon Yard, El Paso Cattle Company, Saddle Club, Feed Lot, Hansel and Gretel, Rusty Nail, Country Dinner Playhouse, Chapparal, Split Rail, Mother Earth, Black Queen, Oasis, Scorpio, Cricket Club, Skyline, Arkie’s Dessau Hall, Abel Moses, Saxon Pub, and many more joints were trying to fill their rooms and pay their bills in the same manner that we were.
One of the newcomers of 1974, the Texas Opry House, decided to go head-to-head with us. So I grabbed the bull by the horns, and in some ways, it was one of the best things that could’ve happened. For most of 1974, the mere words Texas Opry House would send a chill across the hairs on the back of my neck. The place was built in the midfifties as the convention center for the Terrace Motor Hotel, which had lodging units spread over the hillsides on either side of Academy Drive, just off South Congress. In the years since, the Opry House had aged about as well as a Ford Edsel.
The Opry House’s location put it less than a mile from our place. The room was completely devoid of charm and had no soul whatsoever, although it did have basic creature comforts the Armadillo lacked, and the management was willing to outspend us for road acts. The management also had no problem with Willie and his pals hanging out with their friends Smith and Wesson, probably because Willie had agreed to be a silent partner. It became Willie’s new Austin home stage.
Before the Texas Opry House opened for business, its people trolled the town for bartenders, waitresses, and bouncers. Wallace Selman, the guy fronting the business, told everyone who would listen, “We’re going to put the Armadillo out of business.”
The Terrace’s convention center had three rooms of different sizes, each with carpeting, wooden dance floors, air-conditioning, and tables. There was a hotel-sized kitchen to serve all three rooms. The parking lot was paved and well-lit, a welcome sight to anyone who’d scraped a muffler or dropped a transmission parking at the Dillo.
Fortunately, Selman’s noxious manners stirred public sympathy for our side and infused our staff with a hard-shell toughness that would have made our namesake proud. We burrowed down for the fight. In some ways, it was a relief to have a villain to blame for our troubles. We knew we needed to improve our place, despite the fact that we were on a month-to-month lease and could lose everything we had put into the place if we got the boot from the landlord.
During the same month in which the disgraced president Richard Nixon finally resigned and left the White House, we embarked on building a set of risers intended to improve sight lines in the hall. Dub Rose and his crew of hippie carpenters had their work cut out for them. Fortunately, on a visit to the Armadillo, the architect Cyrus Wagner—whose design work made the San Antonio River Walk what it is today—listened to our ideas and offered some help. He took a pen and some napkins and sketched out a rough blueprint of his idea for elevated seating on either side of the Cabaret. The Rolling Stones also did their bit. The stage for their Dallas show had been disassembled, and when it came up for sale I bought it, saving a lot of money on the lumber for the redesign.
“Hippie carpenters did all the work,” Dub Rose said. “A lot of hippies were carpenters at that time, and those were the kind of people we had on the volunteer staff at the Armadillo. Which worked out pretty well for me whenever I needed a work crew.”2
After the risers were installed, the ceiling of the old armory was sprayed with shredded-paper insulation, which improved the acoustics considerably.
The renovations did little to calm my nerves. I lost sleep. A few longtime employees deserted us for the competition. The Opry House drew crowds with acts who would’ve otherwise been playing the Armadillo. Waylon Jennings was one of them, Michael Murphey was another. Boz Scaggs went there for the bigger guarantee, and so did the Eagles, the SoCal band of slick country rockers who were about one year away from becoming major-league superstars with their album One of These Nights, which yielded three Top 10 singles, and three years away from releasing the song “Hotel California,” which many deejays and other canned-music providers simply left on replay for the rest of the decade.
In retrospect, we were doing a pretty good job at what we did best. Over six weeks in the spring of 1974, we had Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Austin Ballet Theatre, Freddie King, Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jewboys, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Leo Kottke, the J. Geils Band, and those reliable western swing/rockabilly madmen, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
Cody returned for two more nights, sharing the bill with another western swing band, Asleep at the Wheel. Two guys from Philadelphia, Ray Benson and Lucky Oceans, had formed Asleep at the Wheel in Paw Paw, West Virginia, in 1969. They played some shows opening for Alice Cooper and Hot Tuna in Washington, DC, and in 1970, they relocated to East Oakland, California.3 I’d met the guys when I was visiting in Berkeley, hyping up the Armadillo to Joe Kerr, who managed both Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody.
“Come to Austin,” I told Ray Benson, Asleep at the Wheel’s front man. “Y’all can be the house band at the Armadillo.” They took me up on the offer and played their first show at the joint in the spring of 1973. The house band promise didn’t work out, but we gave them plenty of work. Benson said, “We came to Austin because it’s where the music is.”
The Wheel was a big ensemble made up of players who lived and breathed western swing. They were brimming with talent, determination, and personality. By now Austin had more than its share of great new-style country bands—Freda and the Firedogs, Man Mountain, and Alvin Crow—along with the hardcore redneck combos, like Jess DeMaine, Johnny Lyon, Janet Lynn and the Country Nu-Notes, and whatever band was currently being led by Bert Rivera, Hank Thompson’s former pedal steel player.
When it came to carrying the Bob Wills baton, Asleep at the Wheel gave no quarter. Bandleader Ray Benson was a six-foot-seven-inch-tall, red-haired Jewish boy from Philadelphia. He looked like a baby giraffe with a cowboy hat. If the mellifluous drawl that rolled out of Ray’s mouth didn’t convince you that the ensemble deserved a place in the pantheon of authentic Texas music, then their hit “Miles and Miles of Texas” would surely do so.
The Wheel’s female vocalist, Chris O’Connell, sounded like she’d been raised by Tammy Wynette. Pianist Floyd Domino banged on the ivories, hands crisscrossing, rhythm and counter-rhythm exploding out of the box with the kind of fury that could turn a graveyard into a dancing ballroom. Tony Garnier thumped the upright bass like a beatnik cat. Holding down the pedal steel chair was a fellow who used the name Lucky Oceans but who was known in a previous life as Reuben Gosfield—just as Ray Seifert had become Ray Benson and Jim Haber was now known as Floyd Domino. Leroy Preston, a fresh-faced lad from Vermont with a penchant for writing twisted lyrics (e.g., “Hello, everybody, I’m a dead man”) was born with a stage name.
The guys in the Wheel and the Lost Planet Airmen often had their axes handy when they were hanging out, and they were prone to jam at the drop of a hat. The beer garden and the backstage area were never as much fun as when Cody and the Wheel shared the bill at the Dillo. They also kept the kitchen busy; each band might have set an all-time record for consuming Armadillo food. In a pound-per-band comparison between those two and the Charlie Daniels Band, you might assume that the latter had the edge, since it took a lot of feed to satisfy a guy like Charlie, who weighed over three hundred pounds. But the two hippie western swing bands were bigger ensembles.
From day one, Ray Benson and Floyd Domino knew they were moving to Austin. Backstage at AWHQ, September 7, 1973. Photograph by Burton Wilson.
Cody and Ray also burned more energy. They tended to act more like growing boys on vacation at Grandma’s house. Instead of napping after gorging, they’d play volleyball against the Dillo crew and then jam some more, teaching each other licks and lyrics they’d recently picked up, laughing like fools.
The Wheel acclimated quickly to Austin. In the beginning, Floyd Domino camped at Bobby Hedderman’s house and Ray Benson let his feet dangle off my guest bed until the band scouted more permanent digs. Before a year was up, most of the band members were well established in South Austin.
* * *
Every time economic pressures started blurring my vision, along came an event that blew away my worries, and such an event sometimes generated the kind of press that you couldn’t buy if you wanted to. We hadn’t heard all that much about the shy kid from New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen, but Columbia Records was underwriting a national tour and Wild West Productions from Houston had bought the Texas dates, giving us two nights in March at virtually no expense. The record company wanted to make a good impression on Bruce and on his edgy manager, Mike Appel.
We got into gear, working to capitalize on the buzz. Jim Franklin produced his finest, most detailed poster since Leo Kottke’s “Vaseline Machine Gun” poster and Frank Zappa’s “Do Not Adjust This Nut” poster. Columbia Records passionately believed in Springsteen and spent more money on his tour than we’d ever seen a label spend—so much that we were able to charge one dollar for admission to his first appearance, a Thursday night that was added at the last minute, with Friday and Saturday night dates already scheduled. Alvin Crow was already booked for Thursday, but Springsteen’s people were amenable to having Alvin’s Pleasant Valley Boys open the show.
Another one of Jim Franklin’s tribute-level posters. He recognized “the Boss” as soon as he heard him. Poster for Bruce Springsteen show at AWHQ, March 15 and 16, 1973.
Apparently, the record company’s generosity only went so far. On Thursday Leea Mechling drove down to the bus station to pick up Springsteen and the E Street Band. “They couldn’t afford a tour bus,” she said. “They were a bunch of gangly kids. I’m not even convinced they had hotel rooms.”4
The New Jersey musician who was destined to become one of America’s best-known faces was just another guy to Leea. He kept hanging around the bar in the Cabaret where she was busy setting up. She figured that he must be a roadie.
“He asked if we were staying for the show,” she said. “I told him, ‘Probably not, they’re just a bunch of Yankees who think they play rock ’n’ roll.’”
Alvin Crow and his Pleasant Valley Boys turned in a remarkable opening set, Alvin just blazing on his fiddle and the band swinging with a rock ’n’ roll intensity. The crowd was stirred up, and Springsteen apparently took notice. As Alvin worked the crowd into a lather, the New Jersey rocker anxiously paced back and forth. Kenneth Threadgill remarked that Springsteen seemed to be as jittery as a “cocker spaniel trying to pass a peach pit.” The New Jersey rockers might have had preshow nerves, but they were hardly intimidated. They delivered the goods in a two-and-a-half-hour marathon performance that came close to levitating the old armory.
Leea Mechling, who ended up staying and working that night, was blown away. When nacho time came around, Springsteen asked her opinion of “this bunch of Yankees.” She apologized and told him she thought they were great. Then as Leea and the cleanup crew pulled out their brooms and mops, Springsteen and the guys came out and serenaded them as they worked.
For the next two nights the place was filled to capacity, mostly on word of mouth from the previous night’s performance. Springsteen fell in love right back, leaving Austin with a burgeoning fan base.
Springsteen also found a brand-new girlfriend in Austin. Karen Darvin was a leggy, gorgeous redhead who wore the tightest cutoffs we had ever seen on the Drag. She was pictured with Springsteen in Time magazine on October 27, 1975, the same week the New Jersey rock ’n’ roller was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek for his new album, Born to Run.5 Karen later left the Boss for Todd Rundgren.
* * *
Our search for an air-conditioning solution led us to the Houston oil fields, where huge, diesel-powered AC rigs were hauled around on tractor-trailers and hooked up to manholes to provide cooling to miles of underground tunnels for firefighters. We tried the concept at the Armadillo and spread the word about our new system. But as the summer days grew hotter, we realized that while the Dillo may have been “underground” in a cultural sense, it was no tunnel, and the diesel behemoths were no match for a former National Guard armory.
The passing of summer into fall marked renewed efforts to figure out how to make the beer garden habitable in the winter. One of our consultants, Tony Bell, was privileged to be one of the rarest types of celebrities: he was the inspiration for Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog. Tony was also a genius at figuring out solutions to impossible construction problems. After studying the problem, he offered some ideas, but they were all out of our price range.
We worked on a geodesic-dome-type framework we called the Space Knuckle that could support a covering over the beer garden, but the design for a practical cover that could be removed in the summer eluded us. A three-season beer garden is what we ended up with. The giant pecan tree in the parking lot gave us coveted afternoon shade, which made the garden a close-to-ideal place to hang in spring, summer, and fall. Installing a covering on the beer garden would’ve necessitated cutting down the tree, and no one wanted to do that.
Time magazine capped the frenzy of Austin hype in September with a page featuring pictures of Jerry Jeff Walker and Doug Sahm flanking a wide shot of the interior of the AWHQ along with an article that was short but profuse with praise.6 “What the Fillmores East and West were to the rock era,” the article said, “the Armadillo World Headquarters is to Austin’s country-rock set.” Doug Sahm was identified as “a 32-year-old fugitive of San Francisco psychedelia,” and the joint was described as a “cavernous old armory decorated with surrealistic murals of the burrowing, bony-plated mammal that now ranks second only to the longhorn in Texas esteem.”
According to Time, the Armadillo crowd was “a curious amalgam of teen-agers, aging hippie women in gingham, braless coeds, and booted goat ropers.” What were they all doing at the Dillo? They were “swigging Pearl beer and swinging Stetsons in time to the music.”
As an advertisement for the Austin music scene, it was pretty good, including the quote from Doug Sahm about how “leaving Austin now is like climbing off a spaceship from a magic place.” Townsend Miller was quoted saying, “Austin music is country picking and basic bluegrass, leavened with rock and lightly glazed with acid.”7
The brass at Lone Star Beer weren’t too happy about the Pearl Beer reference, but that was something we weren’t able to control.
* * *
In November, before we put 1974 to bed, Bruce Springsteen made a triumphant one-night return, but it was just another night in a month that had already seen an abundance of great music. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, with Hoyt Axton opening, was one of our favorites. Cody and the band arrived in style, escorted from the airport in a fleet of ’59 Cadillacs. Rounding out the month were Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, Austin Ballet Theatre, British jazz-rock bandleader Brian Auger with his Oblivion Express, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Pointer Sisters, and bluegrass giant Bill Monroe, back for more love from his hippie fans.
We were still losing acts to the Texas Opry House, but we set about trying to “nice” the competition to death. Gracious overtures on our part became easier when word leaked out that they were in trouble. The landlord was suing them for $10,000 in back rent. The IRS was unhappy about their nonpayment of withholding taxes. Making for at least a triple whammy, the TABC pulled their liquor license.
We were only too familiar with the species of vultures that were circling over the Opry House. We had heard the stories of wretched excess, eye-popping scenes involving guns and large amounts of cash, and other sordid tales from friends and ex-employees. Most of us had seen far classier joints than the fifties cheapo modern complex on Academy Drive on similar downward slides. The Opry House’s decline was like a fat man tripping on a ski jump and rolling in the snow.
My sympathy glands were not immediately stimulated by the manner in which I heard the news. I learned that Michael Murphey was going to cancel his show at the Armadillo with less than a week’s notice to play at the Opry House. Murphey had called his manager Larry Watkins and told him he needed to help out the Opry House by playing a benefit there instead of keeping his date with us. He told Watkins to call us and inform us. Watkins told Murphey to call us himself.
Murphey might have done better to say that he didn’t have an album out and knew he wouldn’t sell out the Dillo, which would’ve been terribly embarrassing for him. Instead, he preferred to pretend to be Cosmic Cowboy No. 1, riding to the rescue of the Opry House.
Like a good manager, Larry Watkins called me anyway. He said, “I’ve got to call you because Michael doesn’t have the guts to tell you himself. He’s pulling out of the Dillo gig this weekend to play the benefit for the Opry House. He told me to call you, and I told him to call you himself, and by the way, I quit.”
During Murphey’s sound check at the Opry, I showed up to confront him, and Wallace Selman, too. I even brought my tape recorder to preserve my righteous tirade for posterity. My original plan had been to whip both of them, one at a time, but in the interest of social protocol, I settled for being loud, rude, and bellicose. I trashed everyone in sight, and also Jan Reid, who wasn’t there, but whose Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock had come out; almost everything about it, including the cover photo of Michael Murphey, had put me in a bad mood. Murphey had assured me that he was going to sue Jan and prevent the book from being published, which I had known was a fantasy.
On the plus side, the book brought a whole lot of attention to a whole lot of good music. But the “redneck rock” aspect of the thing just seemed to trivialize what we had going in Austin. The Armadillo seemed to have been marginalized in favor of focusing on a concept, giving the scene a cute name, and ignoring the bigger picture in favor of name checking every guitar player in town with long hair and a cowboy hat. On top of all that, it was a really fluid, quickly evolving scene, and the book had been rushed to print as a follow-up and expansion of Jan Reid’s “The Coming of Redneck Hip” feature in Texas Monthly from the fall of the previous year, talking up a scene that already had a good head of steam up by the end of 1972. I’m a big admirer of Jan Reid as a person and as a writer, but at the time, his take on the scene made me think of a loud party for Johnnies-come-lately at the day-old bread counter.
Anyway, I left the Opry House feeling energized and ready to spar with somebody, verbally or otherwise. I was still on the same cranky streak the next day, which was November 15, 1974, my thirty-first birthday and the seventh month since the grand opening of the Texas Opry House. In a spirit of friendship and neighborliness bordering on foster parenthood, the Armadillo hosted the benefit at the Opry House. The big headliner was, no surprise, Michael Murphey. The goal was to float some sort of fantasy that the place might not close after all. That night, as the foster parent emcee, I walked out on their stage and gave a tongue-in-cheek pep talk to the Opry House folks. My remarks were punctuated by flying joints, not periods. In all, I flipped thirty-one joints out to the crowd.
“This show is dedicated to all the bartenders and waitresses in Austin,” I said, sending the first reefer somersaulting into the crowd. “When you light up in licensed establishments, you jeopardize their jobs, and you ought not to do it,” I said, flipping another doobie, which landed gracefully in a pair of eager hands. “Unfortunately . . .” There went another one. “These fine people here lost their license earlier today . . .” Another launched into the darkness. “So you had to bring your own . . .” Now I was flippantly flipping a big missile with my left. “So nobody’s going to lose their job tonight . . .” Another one went sailing up and away. “Though we could get busted . . .” And another. “So be careful . . .”
Finally, with empty pockets and smile on my face, I departed the stage, my exit obscured by a roiling pall of marijuana smoke.
No sane business would have done what we did, lending a helping hand to a despised competitor. But to me, it was perfect PR in the shitkicker sense of the term, and about as satisfying a birthday as I could’ve wanted. I couldn’t help but get in the middle of it, in the interest of looking good while rubbing their noses in it. We’d lost the Eagles, Waylon Jennings, Boz Scaggs, and a bunch of solid acts to the Opry. Lending a helping hand was also the neighborly thing to do in their time of need.
In the weeks following our make-believe benefit for the Opry House, I started getting along better with Wallace Selman. When I got another request to help out the Opry House, I said yes, a decision I was to regret.
The Opry House had booked Ray Charles with opening act David Allen Coe and paid the fee, but the Opry House was closed, so we took the show. It was perhaps the oddest billing in AWHQ’s history: brother Ray sharing the bill with David Allen Coe, a singer-songwriter who desperately wanted to be recognized as a country music outlaw. In one of his more desperate moves, the latter parked his bus on South Congress and left it there for a month in the hopes that Willie would discover him. He fluffed up his bio to turn jail time for petty theft into a murder rap. He staged fights onstage.
David Allen Coe wanted to be a star so badly that he succeeded, although briefly, with his song “You Never Even Call Me by My Name,” which is pretty funny as a country music parody.
There was no getting around the fact that the Ray Charles/David Allen Coe double bill was a terrible idea. It made no sense. Ray Charles, who was the greatest in so many different categories, was the opening act for Coe, a minor-league country rocker. The show came to us with no financial risk, and yet the billing was a bitter pill to swallow.
On the night of the show, as Ray Charles began his set, David Allen Coe’s liquored-up and downered-out loyalists did their damnedest to shout him down. Coe didn’t even have that many fans, but the few who were there acted like a mob, infecting the room like a nasty virus, booing relentlessly. Ray Charles heard them, and probably smelled them, too. I should’ve tried to quiet them down, but I was so mad I just wanted to go out and slap them all with a shovel. And so the great R&B singer cut his set short and said good night. The assholes booed him for that, too.
* * *
Soap Creek Saloon, located on the western edge of town down a quarter mile of narrow, teeth-jarring washboard road, was only a third as big as the Armadillo, but it attracted the same core audience. Soap Creek was owned by George Majewski and his wife, Carlyne Majer. Sunday afternoon jam sessions, led by Doug Sahm, filled the place on what was the slowest night of the week for most clubs. George and Carlyne never turned away anyone who had the price of admission. When the space got too tight and people were still coming in the front door, they squeezed folks out of the back door. On a busy night, it was like being inside a sausage grinder. Soap Creek was snagging hip regional acts such as Professor Longhair, Delbert McClinton, and Clifton Chenier. All three would have been solid draws at the Armadillo.
What hurt even more was the fact that many of my favorite people preferred Soap Creek to the Dillo. Hell, they had a point. For one thing, the road to Soap Creek Saloon was so rough, the cops didn’t like going out there.
While the Opry House made me fighting mad, Soap Creek made me admire George Majewski, who seemed to be liked by everybody. We almost always ended shows at the Armadillo before legal closing time because of noise complaints. The only residence within shouting distance of Soap Creek was the mansion that Doug Sahm rented, and Doug never called the cops. He played Soap Creek like he owned it.
Soap Creek went under when their landlord sold the property. George and his wife set up shop on the far north end of town, taking over the location that had formerly been the honkiest honky-tonk in Austin history, the Skyline Club. Hank Williams and Johnny Horton had both played their last gigs there. By the end of the seventies, George and Carlyne moved again, taking over the old Terrace Motor Hotel lobby on South Congress.
The old Ritz movie theater on East Sixth had a stage and seating, but it wasn’t a place we considered competition. Later on, sometime in 1975, Jim Franklin went over there to manage the place and turn it into another showcase of music and art. In his mind, he didn’t see it as a permanent move. “I didn’t move all my stuff,” he said. “I just started staying over at the Ritz.”
Jim was more than ready to leave the problems of the Armadillo to me, and I couldn’t blame him, since the change gave him a chance to run a place the way he wanted instead of being one of many voices at the Armadillo. His partner was Bill Livingood, owner of Slow Printing, the company that printed Jim’s T-shirt designs.
The Ritz was successful enough that it siphoned off some shows that would have been moneymakers for us. J. J. Cale played there. The British band the Pretty Things played there, too.
We still had an abundance of talent with the Armadillo Art Squad, but we really missed Jim’s microphone magic. There was never an artist quite like Jim Franklin, and there was never another master of ceremonies like him. We were fortunate that we had Micael Priest, who not only continued to blossom as a visual artist but stepped into the role of emcee and made it his own. Micael had a really great rapport with musicians, too. He seemed to be friends with musicians from every genre and every corner of the Austin music scene. When he introduced a band, his enthusiasm was infectious and genuine, and it made him a great emcee as well as an ambassador to the community. Things like that contributed to the loud, rowdy, passionate audience response for which the Armadillo was famous.
On mornings that I sat at home alone, feeling blue, chain-smoking, and pouring down coffee by the gallon, a deep, syrupy voice threatened my sanity more than anything any rival club owner had ever done before. The voice belonged to the morning jock on KRMH, Austin’s so-called underground rock station. One morning he gave a recap of his evening on the town the night before at Castle Creek, another club in Austin. He went on and on about the mixed drinks, the air-conditioning, and the nice digs. Concluding, he wondered why anyone would go to the Armadillo World Headquarters and sit on the concrete floor in a puddle of beer and sweat when such civilized amenities were offered at Castle Creek.
That did it. I charged down to the station, hoping to get my hands on the smooth-talking, blow-dried, polyester piece of shit. Luckily, the building was locked like a tomb. It was a holiday.
