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.
The South by Southwest music conference and festival (SXSW, as it is now known) kicks off this week here in Austin, TX. The reach of SXSW has gone global and quite a bit corporate, which means well-established music acts like the Avett Brothers, Weezer, and the Wu-Tang Clan can steal thunder from the hundreds of relative unknowns who travel from all over the world to Austin hoping for exposure and whatever one calls a "record deal" these days. It's these hardworking musicians and local artists who prop up the massive event SXSW has become. They slug it out to make a name for themselves, hauling their equipment all over town to get as much stage time as possible. That's the game.
From Willie Nelson to the bassist in a Sixth Street house band, most guitarists have strong feelings about their primary tool, and some are downright passionate about their axes. When photographer and writer Chuck Holley set out to document guitar players talking about their most prized instruments, he thought he was fairly well-versed in professional guitarists. The playlist he has put together for this blog is all about the lesser-known artists he discovered over the eight years he photographed guitarists with their favorite instruments and listened to their stories. A Perfectly Good Guitar is a beautifully illustrated book presenting these stories in revelatory photographs, featuring Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark, JD Souther, Jorma Kaukonen, Kelly Willis, and more. Enjoy the selection on Spotify here.
Discovering Good Music
By Chuck Holley
In the Fall of 2007 I began a project interviewing and photographing guitarists. I asked each professional to single out one guitar in their arsenal and explain why it was important to them. The result of that eight-year effort is the book, A Perfectly Good Guitar.
I’m an unabashed music fan and, when I began this project, I considered myself well-versed about music from different genres. I knew about the good stuff—or at least I thought I did.
It didn’t take long to realize how many great working musicians are out there I didn’t know about. Reality set in; it became painfully obvious how much I had to learn.
As the project picked up steam, artists who came to my attention fell into one of three categories: There were the seasoned professionals whose recordings I already owned. Players like Dave Alvin, Joanna Connor, Alejandro Escovedo and Bill Kirchen come to mind. Sure, I had a Blasters record with Alvin and his brother on it and I had one of his early solo albums. My collection of Joanna Connor music consisted of one early release on Blind Pig Records and I owned three or four Escovedo albums. In the case of Kirchen, I knew all about his days with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. As for his solo work, I didn’t have a clue. In the ensuing years, my interests turned to other artists.
Sonny Landreth
Then there were the artists with whom I was familiar; I’d heard of them, but didn’t own any of their recordings. I knew the music of Sisters Morales but I didn’t own any solo recordings by Lisa Morales. The same was true of Bill Frisell. From reading album credits I knew at one time Sonny Landreth played in John Hiatt’s band, The Goners, but even though I’d heard of Sonny, I didn’t own any of his music.
Finally, there were the artists who were new to me. They weren’t new to the scene, but I wasn’t familiar with their work. Toronzo Cannon, Johnny Nicholas and Jamie Lin Wilson are three such artists.
I enjoy turning my friends on to good music. I’ve told them about some of the terrific musicians and songwriters I’ve discovered. They listen politely until their eyes glaze over. My friends are creatures of habit, but aren’t we all?
I subscribe to the Duke Ellington school of thought: “There are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind.” If I like it, I’ll listen to music regardless of labels. At the same time, it’s difficult to write about this without resorting to categorization. The artists profiled in A Perfectly Good Guitar represent a variety of genres.
I’ve never understood the guy who claims to just like only country music or classical or jazz. In my opinion, that’s like saying you only like the color blue.
This blog features ten artists from A Perfectly Good Guitar. These ten artists represent personal discovery. Their genres don’t matter. They’re just labels, but do they mean anything?
“All By Myself” – Dave Alvin Dave Alvin spent his youth sneaking into blues bars with his older brother, Phil, to see and learn from masters like Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Lightning Hopkins. In 1979 he and Phil formed the seminal roots rock band, the Blasters. They released four influential albums before Dave left to join the band, X, and later embark on a solo career that produced several critically acclaimed albums, including the Grammy Award-winning Public Domain. He and Phil reunited in 2014 to record Common Ground, their tribute album to Big Bill Broonzy, and later a blues album, Lost Time.
Dave recalls how he purchased a 1934 National resonator guitar. He used that guitar on the Broonzy song “All By Myself,” the first track on Common Ground.
When I was asked to compile a list of Austin musical moments related to my new book Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, I decided to take a broad approach to the task. Thus, this list isn’t exhaustive or definitive; I’m not going for the ten absolute best or most significant moments in the life of Austin music in the 1970s. Rather, these are ten moments that I find particularly interesting, that complement the narrative of Progressive Country, or that otherwise capture something of the scene’s flavor. Lists like this are never finished works; they are invitations to a conversation. So, if we run into each other at a show someplace, feel free to bring up some other moments you might have chosen. —Jason Mellard
1
Janis Joplin’s last visit to Austin, July 1970
The connections between San Francisco in the ‘60s and Austin are dense. (The South Austin Popular Culture Center has even mounted an exhibit on the subject, on view through January 2014). Migrants from the Texas capital and elsewhere helped define the West Coast counterculture, and blues queen Janis Joplin may well be the poster child for these developments. Long before wowing the crowds at Monterey Pop, Joplin held court with Lanny Wiggins and Powell St. John in Kenneth Threadgill’s North Lamar bar. Her last visit to town honored Mr. Threadgill on the occasion of his birthday, at a concert in Oak Hill helmed by Shiva’s Headband. Her set was short and messy, but she also introduced Austin audiences to Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” The show also provided a taste of things to come, as Daily Texan journalist Roger Leinert wondered at the strange crowd of “longhairs and rednecks, hippies and businessmen.”
2
Dripping Springs Reunion, March 1972
By 1973, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics would ramp that hippie-redneck rhetoric to its fever pitch, but the first Central Texas “Country Woodstock” was the Dripping Springs Reunion of March 1972. The concert ably matched Nashville’s old guard with its new wave of singer-songwriters. Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, and Dottie West appeared alongside Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. Threadgill was there, too. Willie would play the Armadillo World Headquarters for the first time a few months later, sealing an alliance that would launch the first Willie Fourth of July picnic at the same Dripping Springs site in 1973.
3
Austin Music Has a Lot To Be Grateful For, Thanksgiving 1972
By November 1972, enough young artists in Austin had turned to country that this new, rootsy, rock-inflected “progressive country” sound could produce a little bit of magic on any given weekend. Thanksgiving that year was one such time. The Grateful Dead were in town to play a show at the Municipal Auditorium. Word got around, and Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jerry Garcia, and Phil Lesh, joined by members of the 13th Floor Elevators, Shiva’s Headband, and Greezy Wheels gathered for an impromptu jam session at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Sahm led the supergroup in rousing renditions of everything from Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” to Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and a little bit of everything in between. In the same weekend, the United Farm Workers held a benefit concert that brought Willie Nelson, Steve Fromholz, and Greezy Wheels together with Alfonso Ramos, Vida, and Teatro Chicano. These two events show that what was going on in Austin music was not divorced from the national music scene or from the decade’s tumultuous politics. The Dead and Russell thought highly enough of Sahm to follow his lead on a tour through musical Americana, while progressive country stalwarts Nelson and Fromholz lent their substantial talents to the Chicano Movement resonating in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio. Download the full Thanksgiving Jam on adioslounge.com >>
