That Old Feeling

By Thomas Fawcett

Veterans of the 1970s music scene will tell you that Austin will never be as good as it was in those days. They tell tales of stoned and beer-soaked nights and paying pocket change to see iconic musicians perform the most intimate of shows. Bruce Springsteen for a dollar. Frank Zappa for three. Like all good stories, the often told tale about 1970s Austin is a scoop of reality topped with sprinkles of hyperbole.

"Austin back in the 70s -- holy smokes what a wonderful place!" said musician and historian Craig Hillis. "What a cultural Mecca, what a climate of creativity, what a vibrant place."

Hillis credits Austin's popularity to the holy trinity of "cold beer, good dope, and cheap rent." The town quickly transformed into a rocking and hedonistic buckle smack in the middle of the Texas Bible belt.

Scott Newton is the long time photographer for Austin City Limits. He moved to Austin in 1970, the same day the Armadillo World Headquarters music hall opened its iconic doors.

"There was a huge clash of cultures here in Austin," Newton said. "Austin was the state capital and it was conservative in a lot of places."

While parts of the Austin establishment were conservative, the young people flocking to the city were anything but. Home to about 250,000 in 1970, Austin became a destination for hippies, radicals, artists and free spirits. Their unofficial mascot was the armadillo and the famed Armadillo World Headquarters was their primary playground.

The best summation of how Austin's hippies felt about the old conservative guard can be found in one of the many armadillo-centric paintings of artist Jim Franklin. It depicts a giant armadillo, ahem, having its way with the dome of the Texas State Capitol building.

"Everyone that was a little different came to Austin," Newton said. "The intellectuals, the free-thinkers, the musicians – that's what made Austin what it was."

Among the musicians flocking to Austin in the early 1970s was Willie Nelson. Nelson moved to Austin from Nashville, where he had grown increasingly frustrated with the commercialism and creative restrictions of the country music industry. Back in Texas, Nelson found that Austin was the grit to Nashville's glitz. He quickly became one of city's most notorious 'outlaw' musicians mixing country with rock, psychedelia, blues, and even Latin influences. The musical melding of Nelson, Michael Murphey, and Jerry Jeff Walker, among others, would come to be known as outlaw or progressive country, a defining element of the 1970s music scene in Austin.

The genre – if you can call it that - even had its own radio station for a time. In the mid 1970s KOKE-FM played a blend of country and rock music, bucking commercial trends by giving considerable airtime to home grown Texas talent. Joe Gracey was a DJ at the station and played a pivotal role in shaping the new progressive country format. He was tapped as talent coordinator for the first season of Austin City Limits and was largely responsible for setting the artistic course for the show's early years. His connections from the radio station and as a rock critic for the Austin American-Statesman helped him land the top talent in progressive country and Texas roots music.

Austin had just the right ingredients for the unique musical gumbo that developed out of the scene.

"It had to happen in Texas because music in Texas is at the crossroads of America," said music writer Joe Nick Patoski, citing the unique cultural mix of the Lone Star State. "You have the tri-ethnic heritage of Anglo-American, African-American and, unlike most of the rest of the United States, Mexican-American."

Progressive country not only brought different kinds of music together, but different kinds of people as well. After all, longhairs and rednecks were equally fond of Willie Nelson.

"Everyone was just celebrating that they like country music and they all happened to like pot as much as they liked beer," Patoski said. "For a kid growing up in Texas like me, that had long hair, it was probably the only place in Texas where you wouldn't get your ass kicked."

Ground zero of Austin's musical universe during the 1970s was an ugly cavernous building near the corner of Barton Springs Road and South First Street - the Armadillo World Headquarters. The former National Guard armory opened its doors as a music hall on August 7, 1970.

It wasn't the only music club in town – Split Rail, Soap Creek Saloon and the Chequered Flag were just a few of the other important venues - but it certainly attracted the most diverse talent. The Armadillo filled a void left by the closing of several music venues in the late 1960s like the Vulcan Gas Company and Threadgill's, a former service station turned honky-tonk where Janis Joplin got her start.

Eddie Wilson, who now owns Threadgill's restaurant, was one of the founders of the Armadillo. The name of the venue was inspired in part by the artwork of Jim Franklin. It didn't hurt that the club's animal namesake and clientele shared similar tendencies.

"Hippies and armadillos are a lot of like," Wilson said. "They keep their noses in the grass, they're nocturnal, they're maligned and picked on, but they don't do any harm."

Eddie Wilson on the early Austin music scene

An eclectic roster of musical talents graced the Armadillo stage. There were innovative oddballs like Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Roky Erikson, and Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. The venue also drew blues and jazz legends like Freddie King, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Count Basie. The crowd could be treated to a show by rockers like Ted Nugent and Bruce Springsteen one day and the Austin Ballet Theatre the next. This eclectic lineup has a lot to do with the legendary status the Armadillo now holds in Austin musical lore. But Wilson offers up a different theory: his stepfather was a plumber.

In a former life, the building housed wrestling and boxing matches and was equipped with super-sized restrooms. Good plumbing turned out to be crucial since at the height of its popularity, legend has it, only the Astrodome in Houston served more Lone Star beer than the Armadillo. "We recycled a lot of beer in that place," Wilson said drolly.

The Armadillo also gave rise to several early attempts to capture the Austin music scene on video. The extent to which these attempts influenced Austin City Limits is up for debate, but short-lived efforts like the Armadillo Country Music Review and TaylorVision, a group of video producers formerly known as Space City Video, could certainly be seen as important precursors. According to Patoski, all of these "false starts" informed the creation of ACL.

"It was a good idea to put music on TV, that's the simple concept." he said. "In many ways it was a visual KOKE-FM."

Though the program would eventually broaden its scope beyond the borders of the Lone Star State, the early years of Austin City Limits captured the considerable creativity and unique vibe of the music scene that spawned the program.

"By 1975 the rest of the nation was caught up in disco fever and the Bee Gees," Patoski said. "In Austin it was like no one cared because we had our own little thing going on, it was really cool."

And thanks to the success of ACL, Austin's "little thing" has been broadcast across the country for over 30 years.