Poster for the Violators and the Skunks show at Raul’s, 1978. Artwork by Jesse Sublett.
If the picture for the Armadillo was grim when I left, it got steadily worse in the last two months of 1976. Even when Hank Alrich and the skeleton crew that remained threw everything but the kitchen sink at the problem, a spate of pure bad luck would hit. No one was getting paid. About three weeks into December, KLBJ dropped an early Christmas present, filing a suit against Armadillo for their $4,300 debt. Other creditors were threatening to do the same.
Hank Alrich and Randy McCall took a meeting. The bass-playing CPA told Hank, “We had eight weeks here to try something, and we’re not going to make it. Bankruptcy is the only thing.”1
Hank and Randy went to see a bankruptcy attorney named David Cooperman. For several hours Cooperman grilled them, throwing out one tough question after another. Hank said they felt like criminal suspects getting the third degree. Finally, Cooperman lightened up a bit. “There’s a possibility you could save this business,” he said. “It’s called Chapter 11.”
“I didn’t know much about management, business, bankruptcy, any of that stuff,” said Hank. “Bankruptcy to me meant that you were out of business.” But, as Cooperman explained, Chapter 11 could possibly offer the Armadillo ark a lifeline, as opposed to scuttling it. Agreements would have to be reached with creditors approving a plan that would allow the Armadillo to pool all its debts, forming an escrow account. Legal action would be forestalled, giving the business a chance to recover and pay off the debt. This would necessitate obtaining additional financing for operating expenses through the next two quarters. Expenses that couldn’t be frozen in Chapter 11 included rent, taxes, insurance, and many other basics.
One major obstacle to making the plan work was the huge debt owed to Hank. The solution was brutal, but in Hank’s words, it sounded relatively simple and bloodless: “We would have to restructure the corporation to relieve it of my note, which was transferred [i.e., converted] to stock.”2
What Hank was saying was that he now owned 87 percent of Armadillo Productions Incorporated. To be more precise, that 87 percent was split between Hank and his brother William Alrich, who came to the rescue with another sizable loan. A cynical observer might say that, instead of the Armadillo’s assets being seized by one of its creditors, it had been taken over by Hank and his brother. For the most part, however, the change in ownership was viewed benignly. The other stockholders, who had previously owned 8 percent of Armadillo Productions, were left with 1 percent. The alternative to the restructuring was to let the Armadillo fail completely.
According to federal law, more than 50 percent of the creditors would have to agree to the Chapter 11 plan before it could be approved. When presented with the plan drawn up by Randy McCall, Hank Alrich, the attorneys, and US district court judge Bert W. Thompson, the Armadillo’s creditors were hit in the face by the same big fact that had haunted me for the past several years: most of the $150,000 owed by the corporation (adjusted for inflation, that would be $626,989 in 2015)3 was owed to Hank and William Alrich. And for such a large debt, the Armadillo itself had very few assets.
As Hank put it, “Part of the pitch of the bankruptcy pleading was this: look at this comparatively astronomical figure that is owed from an organization whose saleable assets are worth . . . a pittance. It was a few cents on the dollar. We just didn’t own much compared to what we owed.”
In other words, Armadillo World Headquarters, one of the most famous music halls in the world, wasn’t worth suing.
Agreements were secured with an impressive 80 percent of the creditors, and the Chapter 11 plan proceeded. Hank and Randy continued implementing cost-cutting, revenue-enhancing measures, including a forced march of thirteen weeks of no pay for the employees. There were also new renovations to the hall and the beer garden. Leea Mechling was promoted to the front office after she and Henry Gonzalez were given a short time to recover from the birth of their son, Ben. Sadly, one of her first duties on the job was to inform another fifty-five employees that they had gotten the axe.
Dave “Killer” Mabry was promoted from the cleanup crew to assume some of Bobby Hedderman’s responsibilities. Randy McCall, who had been on his way out the door to work at Manor Downs before I left, spun on his heels and stayed on. He and Fletcher Clark helped Hank run the joint.
Hank was a jazz fiend, and with his passion, credibility, and contacts, he and Killer Mabry pulled in a bevy of astounding jazz acts. Even during the austerity clampdown, Hank was determined to book shows for jazz fiends that blew their minds, even if they weren’t big box office draws. “Some of the serious music shows that drew the smallest audiences,” he said, “were actually shocking in the power of their musical, emotional delivery.”4 Jazz aficionados were treated to performances by Sam Rivers with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, Sonny Rollins, the Carla Bley Band, and Old and New Dreams, to name a few. Old and New Dreams was made up of saxophonists Don Cherry and Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell, all former sidemen and protégés of avant-jazz guru Ornette Coleman.
“Old and New Dreams hit as hard as a medium dose of a good psychedelic drug,” said Hank, “as if Mother Nature herself had instructed the trees to take gentle hold of your skull and open it to the Light.”5 With a review like that, I’m really sorry I missed the show, but Hank’s praise was enough to leave me with a contact high.
In the four years after I left the Armadillo, changes and growth in the Austin musical landscape continued at the hectic and half-crazy pace that we had experienced from 1970–1976. Hank and his happy henchmen were sometimes befuddled, sometimes bemused, but in general, the Armadillo embraced musical revolution like a hungry amoeba. But the stage that in 1970–1971 had nurtured East Texas blues songsters, psychedelic folk rock, Texas guitar boogie, and long-haired country music aficionados now also welcomed spiky-haired punk bands, experimental jazz, heavy metal, and other genres and subgenres.
Managing the Armadillo was, as Hank Alrich said, “something in excess of two full-time jobs,” which didn’t leave a lot of time to venture outside the joint’s mural-covered walls to check the pulse of the local music scene. Hank wasn’t the kind of guy you saw putting in an appearance at various places in the name of schmoozing and being cool. Hank relied on trusted sources, including “the community of radio folks, Inner Sanctum [record store] heads, musicians, and the Armadillo staff, who kept me pretty close to the musical heartbeat of the city.”6
With these resources, Hank said, he felt like he had “a giant musical stethoscope hooked up to [his] skull.” Input from the staff was essential. What bands did they like to see? Who was creating a buzz out there? Members of the kitchen staff and other employees were going down to Raul’s to see the Skunks, the first of Austin’s new punk-oriented rock bands. The scene had arisen overnight, starting with the debut of the Skunks and the Violators in January of 1978. The employees reported back that the Skunks, the Explosives, and a few others were their favorites. By that summer, the Skunks were recording with Joe Gracey in his basement studio at KOKE-FM. The trio of hard, fast rockers scored the opening slot for the New York proto-punk rockers the Dictators in August. The Skunks’ half dozen or so gigs at the Dillo in its late period included opening slots for the Clash and Joe Ely as well as the top of the bill for a special benefit show on Thanksgiving Day 1978 called the ThanksGracey Show. Organized with a lot of input from Micael Priest, it was a musical extravaganza and fundraiser for Joe Gracey, who was undergoing treatment for cancer of the throat. Nowhere else but in Austin would you find a top-shelf, extremely varied lineup like the one that played that night: Asleep at the Wheel, Alvin Crow, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and the Skunks.7
The Armadillo continued its policy of pairing road shows with local bands to help fill the room for the former and increase awareness of the latter. The Skunks and other promising bands from the Raul’s scene were tapped to open for the Ramones, the Talking Heads, John Cale, Devo, and others. As Jesse Sublett said, “Playing at the Armadillo was a big deal. It helped authenticate your band. People saw that you were professional, that you were for real.”8
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Hank and I had a lot more in common than most people realized, especially when it came to his passion for the artists who played the hall. It also took a lot of guts to ask the staff to sacrifice even more than they had previously, but he did it, and they had his back, a fact that was powerfully illustrated during that thirteen-week moratorium on payroll. Work went on as usual; employees kept showing up, food and beer were served, and the music hall kept rocking. The only difference was that no one got a paycheck. Not a single employee quit. Because of Hank’s inspired leadership and radical measures like those, which I could never bring myself to do, the Armadillo started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of debt.
To the astonishment of the law firm that handled the Chapter 11 deal, as well as the jaded critics who saw us as the old hippie crowd, AWHQ began digging its way out of debt. In the last two years of the Armadillo’s existence, red ink turned to black, and the South Austin music and culture emporium actually turned a profit.
One revenue-generating idea that proved successful was the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. When Bruce Willenzik had originally suggested the idea to use the hall as a staging place for a market where locally produced, handcrafted items would be sold during the Christmas shopping season, the proposal had been debated vigorously, and I had been the skeptic who repeatedly said no. The same month I opened the Raw Deal, Bruce organized the inaugural Christmas Bazaar in the hall. A skeleton crew worked the bar, the kitchen, and security. The crowd wasn’t huge, but everyone who worked got paid, and it brought in sufficient revenue to justify making it an annual event. As of this writing, the annual Armadillo Christmas Bazaar has outlasted AWHQ by well over three decades.
Bruce Willenzik moved up the ladder to become one of the major players at the Armadillo. Jan Beeman, who had brought Bruce into the kitchen operation, was confident that Bruce would work out. “I knew right away that he was mean enough to push the kitchen to start making money,” she said. “He had a great head for figures and profit and loss. . . . He made me write down all the recipes.” Later, she also brought Bruce’s brother Allen into the kitchen operation.9
Bruce bought the existing kitchen equipment from Hank and purchased additional equipment using his own money. Later, when it appeared that the Armadillo wasn’t going to remain open beyond 1980, he moved all the equipment over to the Rome Inn, where he also operated the kitchen. His intent was to have a single kitchen serving both establishments. Various complications ensued, the Rome Inn went out of business, and then Bruce brought the kitchen back to the Dillo.
The additional funding from Hank’s brother William Alrich helped finance various improvements in the music hall, including upgrades to the PA and Onion Audio. The financial situation began to improve in early 1978, and Armadillo Productions began turning the corner, emerging from Chapter 11 and showing a profit.
In 1980, which turned out to be the Dillo’s last year, Hank approved a proposal for building a new stage in the beer garden. Recently, Hank said he couldn’t remember who originally suggested it. Dub Rose thought it was Hank’s idea. In any event, an idea was all that Dub needed to hear. “You put Dub Rose in charge of something like that,” said Hank, “and you can quit worrying about it right there.”
With Dub and his hippie carpenters handling the renovation, the new stage scaled up the beer garden experience and allowed the charging of a cover on ordinary weeknights. “My friend on the custodial staff, Gordon Cole, did a lot of the work with me,” said Dub. “He was also in the band Cool Breeze, and as it turned out, they played the opening night for the new stage and it became a regular gig.” Randy McCall, the bass-playing CPA, handled the bottom line for the band.10
The Charlie Daniels Band, who had been lured away to the Austin Opry House and other venues, returned to the Dillo at the behest of Killer Mabry. On their first date back at the Dillo, the CDB crew arrived on time, as always. The load-in, setup, and sound check all proceeded smoothly. After sound check, Charlie went back to the office to speak with Hank. “This is about the slickest loading and sound check they’ve ever had here,” he said. “You’re running a really tight ship. You must have picked up a few more people.”
Hank thanked Charlie for the compliment and said he looked forward to a great night, as usual. In reality, the hall was getting by with a smaller staff those days, but Hank saw no reason to explain that to Charlie.
* * *
The site of Armadillo World Headquarters had been for sale pretty much ever since we moved in. Over the years, we had made renovations, improvements, and repairs and performed general maintenance. We had installed risers, new stages, insulation, heaters, the Cabaret bar, the beer garden, and countless other examples of money and labor invested in the physical property and its operations. It had all been done with no long-term lease from the owner.
Typically, a business such as ours would have secured a long-term lease at the beginning, affording the business operator certain advantages, not the least of which would be the ability to amortize depreciation costs and other tax advantages. In my defense, I could offer that our year-by-year verbal agreement kept our rent low. As a critic, you could say that all that money spent on improvements was poured down a bottomless hole.
In the spring of 1980, M. K. Hage had a series of fateful conferences with his close advisers, the most important of whom was his brother-in-law, Houston attorney Joe Jamail. The son of a prosperous Lebanese grocer from Houston, Joseph Dahr Jamail Jr. was renowned for winning billions in judgments for his clients in more than five hundred jury trials. His nickname, “the $13 Billion Man,” was the sum of the $10.53 billion he won for Pennzoil against Texaco in 1985 and the winnings from hundreds of other jury trials. He was Texas’s richest lawyer and a longtime friend of Willie Nelson.11
Joe Jamail had finally found a buyer for the 7.6 acres of land occupied by the Armadillo. Hage had repeatedly promised the Armadillo folks the right of first refusal, but he never picked up the phone and followed through. For a number of years, the whole 7.6 acres and all the buildings had been on the block for $1 million. We had repeatedly dreamed and schemed to put together deals for raising the money, but it never worked out. The final selling price was $1.4 million.
The fact that the place was finally running a profit when it was sold and slated for demolition was an ironic twist of the knife. With an annual gross income of $1.3 million, the Armadillo was generating a net profit of $80,000, and Hank Alrich was taking home $200 a week. Not a lot of money, but the Armadillo gang wasn’t about the money and never had been. The operation was working, the joint was rocking, and to be honest about it, they were performing a public service.
As he added up the figures, Hank saw an even deeper irony: the rental expenditure from the three tenants on the property—Armadillo World Headquarters, Doug Scales Body Shop, and Pounds Photo Lab—could have been used to purchase the corner on a standard thirty-year real estate note.
Once notified that Hage had found a buyer, Hank and the new regime scrambled to find another location. The alternative was to fold up the tents and call it a day. Several locations were scouted out. Negotiations were started with the city over the possibility of leasing the nearby City Coliseum, a modified, no-frills, World War II–era Quonset hut on Riverside Drive, barely two blocks west of the Armadillo. With a capacity of 3,500, the Coliseum was a multiuse facility with an impressive history all its own, having hosted everything from Elvis in 1956 to high school proms, Golden Gloves tournaments, livestock auctions, political conventions, and the Austin City-Wide Garage Sale. Music historians may find it either noteworthy or comical that the band Kiss made their Austin debut there in 1975. The city proved unwilling to relinquish a piece of the concessions, which was a sticking point in the negotiations for the Armadillo franchise.
Back in the summer of 1970, when I had “found” Hage’s building looming over my head as I pissed on the side of its wall, it had seemed like a small miracle that I’d discovered such a place waiting to become a music emporium, cultural center, and everything else the Armadillo eventually became. Ten years later, there were no such miracles left in Austin to be found. Indeed, there was no facility that even came close to meeting the Armadillo’s needs. The harder Hank and his crew searched, the more unique, weird, unlikely, and even magical the old armory proved to be.
“We couldn’t come up with a combination of facility, a reasonable amount of rent, and someplace you could walk to from UT if you missed the bus,” said Hank. “There was nowhere else in Austin on January 1, 1981, that you could do that.”
Or, as Hank saw it, “the Dallasification of Austin was already happening.” Austin had grown considerably in the past decade, from 251,808 in 1970 to 345,890 in 1980. It wasn’t exactly a population explosion, but it wasn’t hard to see the direction in which the city was headed. The high-tech boom was gaining strength, downtown property values were escalating, and people were cashing in on the boom.12 Hank had his finger on the pulse of the times.
When the end appeared inevitable, the next decision was a fairly easy one. As Hank put it, “We decided to go out with a bang and try to make as much money as possible.”
Booking acts for the big blowout was a job for a veteran booking agent, but Killer Mabry had left the Armadillo to devote more time to his family. He was burned out, weary of working nights, and anxious to spend quality time with a three-year-old daughter who had seen far too little of him.
Still, it only took a whisper of the impending closure to lure Killer back. He phoned Hank as soon as he heard the news. “I definitely wanted to be there,” Mabry said. “Hank welcomed me with open arms.” Killer’s “retirement” had lasted all of two weeks.
As the last months drew near, the people who had invested so much of their lives in the Armadillo were determined that the legacy of the place would be preserved and perpetuated. Jan Beeman and Allen Willenzik hatched an ambitious recording project: a multidisk compilation of tracks by artists who had played the Dillo over the years. Armadillo Productions agreed to split the recording costs.
More bad luck struck on November 15, 1980, six weeks before the Armadillo was scheduled to close. Hank’s brother Bill, his only surviving sibling, died under mysterious circumstances. Some years earlier, Hank’s other brother had died in a freak electrical accident. Hank wanted to go comfort his mother, but Armadillo business kept him in Austin.
Despite his grief, Hank pressed on. Efforts on the tribute record continued briefly, but a combination of factors led to the project’s demise. One of them was a phone call from Willie Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum called to tell Hank that he was sorry to hear that his brother had died and that Willie didn’t want to do a song for an Armadillo tribute album. “Willie says he can’t see any reason to do it,” said Rothbaum. “He can’t figure out anything in it for him.”
Randy McCall advised Hank to concentrate solely on working toward the Dillo’s last day, to drop the legacy thing and recording projects, and once all the bills were paid, pack all the corporation records away in boxes, put them in storage, and forget about the Armadillo World Headquarters.
“I didn’t take his advice,” Hank said.
Onion Audio had always been close to Hank’s heart. After all, he and Jerry Barnett had started the place with their own handmade mixing console. Armadillo Records had built up a roster of singles from the Austin rock band Too Smooth and a band called the Almost Brothers, in addition to albums by blues guitarist Bugs Henderson, the Cobras, and Balcones Fault. Too Smooth was a big draw at the hall and elsewhere in the state, and their mainstream, Doobie Brothers–style, commercial rock impressed the suits at major labels as well. The band inked one deal after another, and also ran into more roadblocks than a convoy of escapees from the striped-pajama house. Long story short: they gave up and became a Top 40 frat party band again.
If you have a hankering to get kicked when you’re down, you can always depend on record distributors, as Hank can verify from experience. “We pressed 1,000 copies of Bugs [Henderson],” he said. “In the first week, the copies were gone, but we had no money back.” Hank’s late brother had paid the $3,000 for the second pressing. “Six weeks later, those are gone and we have only a third of the money back. Eventually, we got 10,000 pressed, but the distributor went under, owing us for 2,200 copies.”
Armadillo Records eventually ran into more bad luck with the Cobras (singer Paul Ray and guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan had left the band by this time). Titled The Cobras, Live and Deadly, the album was recorded live at the Armadillo in November of 1979. Hank put up $10,000 for the project. The band had become a sort of revolving door for personnel, with the original singer, guitarist, and bassist all leaving. Then some of the replacements were replaced, but Hank persisted even during the last weeks before the Armadillo closed. A mere twelve months after the album was recorded, attorneys for the band notified Hank of their intention to file an injunction. The reason cited was damage to the band’s career by the label’s failure to release the record on a timely basis. Hank was so pissed off that he took the master tapes into the studio and erased them.
Armadillo Records released The Cobras, Live and Deadly in 2011, using a safety copy of the master tapes.
After the Armadillo received its eviction notice, Henry Gonzalez made some last-minute changes to a mural he had painted in collaboration with Sam Yeates, recreating Ken Featherston’s cowboy-in-the-clouds Searchin’ for a Rainbow piece. Previously, Henry had added Charlie Daniels to the mural, and now he added the face of Q. S. “Pee Wee” Franks, the wrecking crew chief who would be demolishing everything on the property. Franks was a veteran of Austin construction and destruction, having torn down numerous Austin landmarks in years past, including some on the corner of Barton Springs and Riverside. In fact, in one of several interviews with Statesman reporters, he remembered being at the same address in 1946, before the armory and skating rink were built.
“There was a furniture store where the Armadillo is,” he said. “It burned out and I tore down what was left. Then they built the armory.” Franks had even worked on the construction of the skating rink.13
In all his decades of experience in erection and destruction, however, this would be first time that Pee Wee Franks ever had to ram a wrecking ball into his own face.
An awful lot of people said they would miss the Armadillo and remarked on what a tragedy the whole situation was. But there was surprisingly little in the way of a great hue and cry. “We had the sympathy of the whole town,” said Henry Gonzalez, “but no follow-through.”14
As the last day approached, there were signs that the sleeping giant of Austin’s love affair with its musical community had finally awoken. A group of concerned citizens presented a petition to the Austin Planning Commission, requesting historic landmark status for AWHQ, but the petition fell on deaf ears. Like a well-fed giant, Austin rolled over and went back to sleep, despite all the racket and dust as jackhammers, bulldozers, and cement trucks resumed their inevitable work.
