Trigger The Coming of Redneck Hip
Rock and Country music met in Austin. That friendship may make the state.
Electric groups like the original Conqueroo playing at Vulcan Gas Co. in the late 60’s rankled the Austin establishment.
Photograph by Bob Brown
Austin’s number one, long-hair, honky-tonk, Armadillo World Headquarters, always draws a crowd Saturday night. The Armadillo, an abandoned armory adjacent to a skating rink, has already attracted its share of myth, mystique, and tall tales. Its concrete floors temper the urge to dance with the fear of shin splints, its walls bear some artwork of modest inspiration, and there is apparently no way to air-condition the damn thing. However, the Armadillo has a license to sell beer, some pretty fair food for sale, surprisingly good acoustics, and for the heat-exhausted, an outdoor beer garden. And most important to the faithful who part with their money one Saturday night after another, Armadillo offers some of the best live music in the country.
Getting things started the night of April 7 was Whistler, Austin’s first country-rock band, together again for the first time in nearly two years. They got a nostalgic reception. Then came Man Mountain and the Green Slime Boys, four converted San Antonio rock & rollers who offer original lyrics in the Nashville mode but can still bring the house down with a revival of the 1957 Cadillacs hit, “Speedo.” The crowd got off to Man Mountain, bringing them back for an encore, a tribute which left the boys a little abashed, considering who was waiting in the wings.
Even before country music became fashionable, it was possible to appreciate the music of Willie Nelson: His lyrics seemed to grasp the problems associated with coming of age in Texas, even as his voice rubbed them in.
Ten years ago Willie Nelson wore business suits for his national television appearances; for the Armadillo audience he was a little looser: boots, beard, cowboy hat, and gold earring. Nelson may look different, but except for the addition of some rock licks and lyrical references to Rita Coolidge’s cleavage, his music hasn’t changed all that much. His old songs—”Hello, Walls,” “The Party’s Over,” “Yesterday’s Wine”—still evoke memories of beery nights and jukeboxes, but they blend nicely with the newer, more upbeat numbers. Onstage, Nelson accepts praise with an irresistible smile, yet never lets audience enthusiasm interfere with his standard act, a non-stop, carefully-rehearsed medley of his own tunes.
As remarkable as Nelson’s act that night was his audience. While freaks in gingham gowns and cowboy boots sashayed like they invented country music, remnants of Willie’s old audiences had themselves a time too. A prim little grandmother from Taylor sat at a table beaming with excitement. “Oh lord, hon,” she said, “I got ever’ one of Willie’s records, but I never got to see him before.” A booted, western-dress beauty drove down from Waxahachie for the show, and she said, “I just love Willie Nelson and I’d drive anywhere to see him…but you know, he’s sure been doin’ some changin’ lately.” She looked around. “I have never seen so many hippies in all my life.”
The crowd kept pressing toward the stage, resulting in a bobbing, visually bizarre mix of beehive hairdos, naked midriffs, and bare hippie feet. An aging man in a sportcoat and turtleneck stubbed out his cigar and dragged his wife into the madness, where she received a jolt she probably did not deserve: a marijuana cigarette passed in front of her face. A young girl, noticing the woman’s discomfort, looked the woman in the eye, and took another hit.
But Nelson’s music relieved any cultural strain that developed beneath him. He played straight through for nearly two hours, singing all his recorded songs then starting over. They handed him beer, threw bluebonnets onstage, yelled, “We love you, Willie”—a sentiment he returned when he finally called it quits: “I love you all. Good night.” A night that for many had been a sort of hillbilly heaven, though Tex Ritter would have undoubtedly taken issue with the form.
The April 7 Willie Nelson concert was not all that unusual. Nelson is merely the most established of a gang of performers who have distilled a blend of music that reflects the background, outlook and needs of a unique Austin audience. The audience is largly comprised of middle class youths who hail from Texas’ cities yet are rarely more than two or three generations removed from more rural times; they came to Austin because the feel of those rural times still lingers there. In a way, they are anew breed of conservative who despair over big-city hype and 20th-century progress and romanticizes “getting back to the land.”
However, they are inescapably children of the mid-20th century: They grew up with their fingers on radio dials and stereo headsets clamped over their ears. Their need for music is insatiable. Living in Texas, they grew up with country & western, which in its whining way has stressed themes of bewildered displacement for years. The performers popular in Austin today also grew up with country music, and by sophisticating the lyrics and upbeating the tempo they have transformed country from a music of middle-class misery to one of down-home delight.
Austin musicians were not the first to borrow from country music; indeed, one of the Austin lyricists writes. “Them city-slicker pickers got a lot of slicker licks than you and me.” But Los Angeles country rock is slick rather than soulful: West Coast musicians are generally too citified to play country without a trace of put-down. In Austin the roots are real. The music rings true and that ring could establish Austin as America’s next cultural sub-capital.
Austin’s easy-going mix of musical styles did not originate with Armadillo World Headquarters it dates back to 1933, when Kenneth Threadgill purchased Travis County’s first beer license and turned a little filling station on North Lamar into a bar that reverberated one night a week with the liveliest music in Austin. The houseband was straight hillbilly. Threadgill himself highlighted the jam sessions with his Jimmie Rodgers yodeling, but he had an ear for almost any kind of music. The mike was open to anybody with the nerve to stand up and sing. Threadgill was also the first of Austin’s clubowners to realize there was gold in those university hills. Anybody interested in a good time was welcome in his place.
Musically, the most exciting days at Threadgill’s were the early sixties, when the little bar became a haven for folk purists who were reaching deep into America’s musical heritage of white country, black blues, and backwoods ballads. The most memorable of those performers was a young woman named Janis Joplin who wandered in one day carrying an autoharp. Janis of course went on to a meteoric career, but she never forgot the cherubic old man in the gas station music hall. Before she died she told a surfacing songwriter named Kris Kristofferson about her old patron. In 1972 zealous fire marshals forced Threadgill to close his bar, but the same year Kristofferson looked him up at a party in Austin, listened to his music, and in three weeks had Threadgill in Nashville recording his first album. Thus things have come full circle for Austin’s kindly 63-year-old patriarch.
At Threadgill’s one heard just about any kind of music that fingers could make, but the little bar couldn’t contain aIl the musical excitement that seized the country during the sixties: Rock ‘n RoIl. The bands that sprang up in Austin were hard up for somewhere to play until 1967 when a group of friends secured a location on south Congress and built themselves a rock & roll joint, incurring the universal wrath of the Austin establishment. The Vulcan Gas Company never had a beer license, which meant the only revenue came from the gate, but Lockett booked the best of Texas’ black blues singers, carefully spaced between Austin rock bands that kept the place jumping. Two of those house bands, Conqueroo and the Thirteenth Floor Elevator, attracted fanatical followings who came out with ritualized regularity to watch their electric leaders perform. The stoned crowds of teeny boppers, proto-hippies, and servicemen bore little resemblance to the beer-drinkers at Threadgill’s, but rock & roll had come to Austin.
Unfortunately, the Vulcan scene soured. The club’s cult rockers quickly found the music business wasn’t all incense and acid: The Elevator was the victim of an unfortunate recording contract, and the Conqueroo found that San Francisco’s rock gurus had no use for bands from Texas. And at home, psychedelics had turned into speed and Vietnam violence had spilled over into the Vulcan. Tired of the hassle, Lockett looked for someone to take over the Vulcan, but none of the new managers worked out, and the club died in 1970.
Eddie Wilson, whose Armadillo World Headquarters rose from the ashes of the extinct Vulcan, got into the music business in a roundabout manner. “A mediocre jock, hot-rodder, and general slob” at Austin’s McCallum High, Wilson wound up at North Texas State in 1963, where he joined the campus folk music club. Another member of that club, Spencer Perskin, went on the provide vocals, lead guitar, and electric fiddle for Shiva’s Headband, an Austin group that became the Vulcan’s last cult band after the dissolution of Conqueroo and the Elevator. Perskin looked up Wilson in 1969 and asked his old friend to manage the band, precisely because Wilson didn’t know anything about the music business. “The people on the street needed to feel that their fellow street hippies who were making music were into it in a pure sort of way,” Wilson explains.
Shiva’s eventually died the commercial death it apparently wanted, but the man who became the prime commercial mover of Austin music had entered the business. After the Vulcan closed Wilson started looking for a suitable site for a new club, found the abandoned armory in south Austin, and with his friends (particularly Jim Franklin, a graphic artist and veteran of the Vulcan scene who was fast creating a visual cult of the nine-banded armadillo) he turned inte building into “the archetype of the ugly, cold, uncomfortable rock and roll emporium.”
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