How Austin, Texas, Became the Live Music Capital of the World

Before Austin, Texas, was the "Live Music Capital of the World," a rollicking music hall run by a bunch of hippies threw open the doors for fans to enjoy a new blend of country music and rock. Over its ten-year lifespan, the Armadillo World Headquarters hosted thousands of high-profile musicians—Willie Nelson, Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, Taj Mahal, AC/DC, Charlie Daniels, the Ramones, Roy Buchanan, and Bette Midler, to name a random few. The Armadillo helped define the Austin lifestyle, culture, and identity, setting the stage for successors such as the SXSW music festival, PBS’s Austin City Limits, and the ACL festival, which have made Austin an international destination for music fans.

In the newest UT Press podcast, Armadillo co-founder Eddie Wilson shares stories from behind-the-scenes of the beloved temple of "Redneck Rock." Below we've transcribed some of the best bits from the interview, but be sure to tune in and turn on to the whole thang!




We ask Eddie Wilson how he discovered the building that eventually came to house the Armadillo World Headquarters:

UT Press: You did some urban parkour to find the building, right?

Eddie Wilson: Well, the bathroom was broken at the Cactus Club, and so there wasn't anything to do but go out back. And there was this giant wall looming up with broken windows way up top. It was 25 feet tall at least, and so, I knew that there had to be a giant room on the other side of a construction like that. I went around the building and managed to pick a flimsy lock--I watched James Garner a lot--but, uh, I was awestruck. I pulled my car in it, reached in and flipped on the lights, and almost had a heart attack. I think I turned them off as quick as I could. And it was just this huge room. And then we made it bigger by tearing out all of the rooms that were inside of that room.

UTP: And it had a stage?

EW: It had a concrete riser. If I had known at the time that Elvis had played on it, I probably would have kept it like it was. But he played there in '55.

Co-authors Eddie Wilson and Jessie Sublet discuss one of Frank Zappa's visits to the Armadillo World Headquarters and his introduction to local musician Blind George:

EW: Zappa was such a professional, he wanted a three-hour rehearsal--the contract read three-hour rehearsal, an hour off for supper, and then an hour for, uh...

Jessie Sublet: Sound check?

EW: Yeah, just the sound check, I guess it was. Anyway, his equipment got there about a half-hour before the show was supposed to start. We waited and waited and waited all day long. It was really nerve-wracking. And when it got there, he got to see the crew, who were at their very best; everybody just hustling and setting up, building that mountain of speakers that he was hauling and hauling. And, uh, he got a seventeen-minute sound check, and I figured he was going to keep on going until he was satisfied. Well, he got seventeen minutes and his road manager Marty Perellis ran his finger across his throat, and Zappa stopped immediately. And we opened the doors and they just came flooding in. Zappa, he uttered some excuse for a sound check, so I tried to disarm him a little bit with my Blind George story:

We had an entertainer in town named Blind George McClain, who was not just blind but close to deaf and crippled and twisted. He had a little board under his feet on the piano that he would stomp back and forth on for his rhythm. We had just found a videotape of him doing at least about 20 verses of "Tennessee Stud" at an outdoor benefit.

JS: Cool!

EW: Really good black and white [video]

JS: He had good hair though, didn't he?

EW: (Laughs.) Oh ho, yeah. Yeah, that was a great--I remember he did the nastiest version I've heard of "Cherry Pie."
. . .

So, Zappa was in a bad mood, it seemed to me, and I hadn't spoken to him yet. . . . "Let me try and disarm you," I thought. "Would you like to meet your opening act? He's deaf, dumb, and cripple." He said, "What does he do?" I said, "He plays the piano, stomps on a board, and sings Ray Charles and, uh, George Jones." And he said, "I want to meet him right now."

We went up the stairs and over to the office, and George was kind of crushed down in his terrible, cripple sort of way with black sockets, you know, just dark dark caverns where his eyes would have been. And I whispered to Zappa as we approached him. I said, "Remember he's kind of deaf." And [Zappa] was so stunned when he saw him that he just kind of mumbled. And George said, "Huh?" And he said (louder), "Did you hear our sound check?" George bellowed back, "Yeah, you were too damn loud!"

Jason Mellard, author of Progressive Country: How the 1970's Transformed the Texan in popular Culture (2013), talks to Eddie Wilson about the fateful Thanksgiving Day in 1972, when Jerry Garcia decided to invite Leon Russell to jam at the Armadillo World Headquarters:

EW: Jerry Garcia wanted to go on stage at the free jam that we had on Thanksgiving Day in 1972. . . The only reason that I was pushing was because we had no advertising; we had nothing to let anybody know that we were going to be open on Thanksgiving Day. And I did one of those--one call to the radio station --and I couldn't say who because I didn't know who was going to show. But as Garcia was leaving the auditorium, Palmer, the night before, after we fed him at the Armadillo, Jim Franklin and Leon Russell were coming in the back door, comin' down from Tulsa because Leon wanted to meet Willie Nelson.

And so Jerry Garcia looked up and saw Leon Russell and said, "Why don't you come over and jam tomorrow at the Armadillo?" He hadn't wanted to tell me what time because he had committed to doing it around the meal--that was going to be too much detail, and he was above detail. And when Leon [asked] what time, Garcia kind of looked at me and gritted his teeth, and I said, "How about 3 o'clock?" They agreed, 3 o'clock.

So, of course, at 3 o'clock the next day, I was just a nervous wreck. Who's going to really show? Garcia was there early and then Leon finally showed. So okay, guys, you know, let's do it. Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) was on bass and a lot of the best local pickers were all--

Jason Mellard: Yeah, I think, was it Furman, formally of the Elevators, was there?

EW: Benny Furman, he had a fiddle there; yes, he did.

JM: Sweet Mary Egan (Greezy Wheels)?

EW: Yeah, yeah. Hank Alrich (Tiger Balm).

JM: Jerry Barnett (Shiva's Headband), I think also?

EW: He did a lot of drumming. And, uh, Jim Finney also played some drums. But, Garcia said, "Let's just wait until Doug [Sahm] gets here, he needs to be the bandleader for this thing. He knows at least 1,000 songs." And Leon said, you know, not long before he died, he came through town and we had a good visit; and he actually said to the audience in our beer garden, he said, "I played Armadillo World Headquarters with the Grateful Dead, and it was the worst performance of my career.
(Laughter)

EW: He's not a jam guy! He's an arranger. And, you know, it just wasn't his particular bag. Oh, but you couldn't have wanted more.

Click here for more information on Armadillo World Headquarters: A Memoir.

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Remembering Miguel Ravago (1945–2017) of Fonda San Miguel

We were saddened to learn of the passing of Miguel Ravago this weekend—the visionary chef behind Austin’s Fonda San Miguel restaurant.

Miguel Ravago of Fonda San Miguel

            
Ravago earned rave reviews for his subtle and complex dishes that defined Fonda San Miguel’s menu and brought interior Mexican cuisine to central Texas. From Tostadas de Cochinita Pibil to start, to Carne Asada a la Tampiqueña, and Cajeta Crepes to finish, every meal at Fonda San Miguel was a reflection of Ravago’s passion and his childhood spent cooking at his grandmother’s side.

            
“I was also curious about cooking,” Ravago wrote for the restaurant’s official cookbook, Fonda San Miguel: Forty Years of Food andArt, “so my grandmother started showing me things like how to fill tamales. By the time I was six or seven, I was helping in the kitchen quite a bit. . . . So even when I was pretty young, I think I knew I wanted to be a chef.”

            
When Fonda San Miguel first opened in 1971, almost 50 years ago, a restaurant featuring authentic Mexican cuisine was a daring idea in a city where Tex-Mex food reigned supreme. Ravago and co-owner Tom Gilliland won over customers who expected a “No. 1 Enchilada Dinner” to build a loyal clientele of adventuresome eaters who came as much for the romantic hacienda-style décor as the food.

Ravago and co-owner Tom Gilliland

            
“After thirty years, cooking is still great fun for me,” wrote Ravago. “I especially enjoy the Hacienda Sunday Buffet, which always features four entrees from four different states in Mexico. This gives me a chance to help people learn about the food. If customers tell me they’re planning a trip to a certain region of Mexico, I show them what dishes to taste so they’ll know what kind of food to expect. Sometimes they come back and say the food wasn’t as good as Fonda San Miguel’s, and that’s always nice to hear. . . . I’ve always been curious about food, and I love to see people learn more about Mexican cuisine.”

            
In the spirit of Ravago’s desire to share Mexico’s diverse regional dishes, click through for a few recipes from Fonda San Miguel, including a tequila toast to a trailblazer for Mexican cuisine in America.

Q&A with Flatbed Press Co-Founders

Flatbed Press, a collaborative publishing workshop in Austin, Texas, has become one of the premier artists’ printshops in America and an epicenter for the art form. Founded in 1989 by Mark Lesly Smith and Katherine Brimberry, Flatbed provides studio spaces for visiting artists to work with the press’s master printers to create limited editions of original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and monotypes. Prints produced at Flatbed have been collected by major museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

We asked Katherine and Mark about how Flatbed Press developed its ethos, how it has survived over the years, and about that time James Surls got Olympic marksman David Bradshaw to fire nine bullets at his artwork.

Don't miss the final weekend of the East Austin Studio Tour, where you can visit Flatbed Press!

Flatbed Press has hosted an impressive array of artists with incredibly diverse backgrounds. We won’t ask you to choose favorites, but how do you think Flatbed has been shaped by the work of its artist collaborators over the years?

Jack Hanley, Plague Doctor (1990)
Soft-ground etching and aquatint

Katherine Brimberry: Each Flatbed artist has brought their own vision, concepts, working practices, and history. One of the pleasures has been to learn and grow through each artist. My job as Master Printer has been to try to think like the artist and find a way to transform their concepts and working practices into one or more printmaking techniques. With every successful collaboration, I have learned something, created a new way of working, found a way to put ideas into print media. I believe that over time, Flatbed’s “style” may seem more varied than many other presses because of our insistence that we meet the artist where they are conceptually instead of giving the artist a formulaic way of working.

Some important collaborations sealed this direction early in our history. Jack Hanley’s work pushed us to try experimental etching techniques. He wanted to be “out of control” with the color field of the etchings we planned. His key plates were extremely controlled soft ground drawings printed over the chaos of the background plates. His concept pushed us to find ways to remove the artist’s direct control of the marks and etch.

Other collaborations were with artists whose work was camped in the nuances of mark making, color, and control. Listening to these artists and striving to meet their standards gave us skill and precision that became the hallmark of our editioning. Working with Melissa Miller on “Anima,” I may have pulled as many as 40 color trial proofs to get to the final solution, leveraging her discipline as an artist to do whatever it took to get to a successful print.

Melissa Miller, Anima (1996)
Line etching and aquatint with chine collé

Mark Lesly Smith: Flatbed hasn't been just "shaped" by its artist collaborators over the years, it has been created by them! 

One of the things that has made Flatbed so successful has been the incredible variety of artists. Of course, we have always tried to work with artists of high artistic value, but the range of their work has been all over the map. It has made the work extremely enjoyable and interesting, and I think has established Flatbed as a very open shop that is diverse in every way, artistically and otherwise.

Flatbed feels more like a living, breathing organism than an institution. Over the course of its life, what periods of growth do you identify as the most transformative?

KB: We never set out to be an institution and I am happy that it doesn’t feel that way. Beginning as a “Mom and Pop” styled business with two people who shared a love a printmaking but divided the work load made us more like a family. When Jerry Manson became a business partner in late 1990, the printmaking family expanded. Printers and interns came to us to apprentice and learn. Even when they left, we considered them extended family. Business was done with a handshake and not detailed contracts.

Stories from the Hunter S. Thompson of Texas

The exploits and irreverence of Gary Cartwright's larger-than-life persona has led some to compare him to gonzo god Hunter S. Thompson. The comparison is apt, but Cartwright's fully-lived life seems less dogged by self-loathing. In his new memoir, The Best I Recall, the Texas journalist saunters through his wild years and arrives at a wisdom earned not just from befriending strippers, dope fiends, inmates, and politicians, but from harrowing heart surgery and losing his son, two wives, and a handful of friends to cancer.

There are laugh-out-loud moments, eloquent passages on

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friendship and grief, and the kind of you-can't-make-this-up stories your wild uncle might come up with if he had run-ins with the likes of Jack Ruby and Dennis Hopper. Here are a couple of the things you'll learn from reading The Best I Recall.

Come see Gary Cartwright himself this Saturday at Austin's historic Scholtz Garten on San Jacinto. Gary will be signing copies of his book from 3 to 5pm.

You Could Get Away With Some Stuff in 1970s Mexico

Some of Cartwright's exploits read like the plot of Argo but with much-mitigated consequences and more drug-fueled decision making. Cartwright and his "soul mate" writer Bud Shrake filmed a movie in Durango starring Dennis Hopper (Kid Blue, 1973). Before they got to the set, this happened:

We crossed into Mexico at Eagle Pass, where I convinced an overly diligent Mexican customs agent who was about to refuse Pete entrance because of his long hair that we were filming a movie about Jesus. Pete had been obliged to grow the facial hair, I explained to the confused customs agent, in order to convincingly portray the role of Our Savior.

On the same film shoot, the eccentric director made up his own rules for helming a feature film production. Cartwright recalls, "When his mostly British camera crew complained of fatigue and heat exhaustion, Marvin [Schwartz] laced their cocoa with amphetamines." Now that's problem-solving.

Spring 2015 Preview

This spring and summer, UT Press will publish significant works in photography, film and media studies, architecture, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Latina/o Studies, including a compelling chronicle of the dangers, fears, shared histories and aspirations that bind Mexicans and Americans despite the U.S./Mexico border walls.

  

Below is a preview of our spring books, with videos and interior images. Browse our full catalog here or below:

[ Nature and Environment ]

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Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change

By Seamus McGraw

"This title deserves a wide and varied readership; it has the power to change minds.”

—Booklist starred review

“Seamus McGraw takes on an immense and cacophonous subject—climate change—and does so in a way that avoids the usual polarities of denial versus panic. He does an excellent job of seeking out interested American parties who don’t typically have a voice in the debate and makes a case that leadership on the issue probably won’t come from the conventional class of ‘leaders’ (namely, Congress). . . . His pragmatism and his refusal to live in a world of ideals make this a worthy project. . . . It deserves an audience of good readers.”

—Tom Zoellner, author of Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World and The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire

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[ Music ]

John Prine: In Spite of Himself

By Eddie Huffman

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”
—Bob Dylan, Huffington Post

“The unlikely success of the reluctant performer makes for fascinating reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews

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