capitol-city.com-Armadillo World Headquarters

The Armadillo World Headquarters has been closed now longer than it had ever been open, yet it is still spoken of with reverence whenever the history of music in Austin, Texas is brought up. Many things made this cavernous, unglamorous, 1970s concert hall so special, not the least of which were the communal spirit that drove the place, the subcultural niche that it carved out for a growing breed of cowboy/hippies, and, of course, the incredible amount of tremendous music.

Thousands of artists played at the Armadillo between 1970 and 1980, many of whom built their careers by being heard there, others who could have filled up basketball arenas but instead chose the place that they knew would allow them intimacy with an attentive audience something that couldn?t always be achieved elsewhere.

Almost as soon as the joint opened, a new brand of country/rock music began to be associated with it and its bohemian city. Musicians began to converge on the city where they could get a fair listen: Jerry Jeff Walker, a New York veteran of the psychedelic band Circus Maximus; Doug Sahm, a native Texan who'd spent several years as a rock star in San Francisco fronting the Sir Douglas Quinte;, Michael Murphey, a rocker with country roots and a difficult to categorize sound, along with dozens of other musical misfits. And then Willie Nelson abandoned Nashville and returned to his Central Texas stomping grounds. Willie inadvertently found himself to be the leader of an outlaw musical movement that had nothing in common with what was going on in Nashville. It was later dubbed "redneck rock" or the "cosmic cowboy" sound, a new mix of traditional folk, tejano, blues, pop, psychedelia, you name it. Whatever it was, it wasn't quite country and it wasn't quite rock. Simultaneous with this new genre came new, creative practitioners of established sounds like the blues, with bands like The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Paul Ray And The Cobras setting up shop in town.

Any and all of these styles or sounds could be heard at the Armadillo, which wasn't a particularly attractive place inside or out, not that that really mattered, you couldn't even see it from the street. "Armadillo was an aberration that couldn't have happened anywhere else," remembers its original manager, Eddie Wilson. "A convergence of a whole bunch of people wanting to have a real unusual playhouse, based more on fantasy than any kind of business acumen. It was a free fall kiddyland of people that were high and very idealistic."

"Do the impossible, do it well, and have fun doing it," is how Bruce Willenzik, one-time kitchen manager at the establishment, encapsulates the whole Armadillo philosophy. Today, he runs the annual Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, an arts and crafts fair that started at the original Armadillo in 1976. He elaborates on that philosophy by bringing up the concept that he calls, "Us-and-them-ism. Us is us and everybody else is them, and them is bad and we're good. We replaced Us-and-them-ism with We-ism, because we can do anything we set our hearts to do, but Us-and-them can't do shit."

We-ism got started in 1969 when the great Austin concert hall, Vulcan Gas Co., closed its doors after three years of 13th Floor Elevators, The Conqueroo, and nationally known acts like Canned Heat and Johnny Winter, who recorded a live album there. Eddie Wilson wanted to keep the music coming by finding a new home for it. He had grown up in central Austin hanging out at Kenneth Threadgill's Service Station where the Wednesday night hootenannies had been all the rage. In fact, in the early '60s, Janis Joplin had spent some time hanging out there and singing with her friend Mr. Threadgill before moving on to bigger things.

Wilson wanted a new musical outlet for the city, but he didn't really choose the former National Guard armory in South Austin that was obscured by a skating rink. "It chose me while I was taking a leak," Wilson remembers. "I was behind George's Cactus Club, standing between John Reed and Jimmie Dale Gilmore [then a member of the Hub City Movers]. We were out back in a parking lot, and saw broken metal framed windows at least twenty feet off the ground. I thought, "My Lord, there's a giant building there." We were looking at the east side of the National Guard armory. I went around to the west side and discovered a garage door. I raised the garage door, drove my car in it, shut the doors behind me and turned on my lights. I had a real hallucinogenic moment there as I, first time, gazed on the inside of Armadillo World Headquarters. I knew immediately that I'd found the place."

The building already had quite a musical history. After being a National Guard armory, it had been The Sports Center, hosting wrestling and boxing matches, with occasional package tours coming through. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had played there, and one show in 1953 had included Faron Young, Johnny Horton, and a kid named Elvis Presley.

And it wasn't long before that lifestyle had a soundtrack to accompany it. Wilson had no way of envisioning the new sound that was to evolve under his own roof ("I didn't envision tomorrow's rent. I wasn't a visionary. I was an illusionary"), but it happened nonetheless. Willie Nelson had already hung around Nashville for a decade and had written some country classics before trekking down to Austin to see what it was all about. Before Willie's first Armadillo show, the Austin American-Statesman's Townsend Miller wrote in his country music column of the appearance of Nelson on a psychedelic poster and wondered about that night's inevitable collision of rednecks and long-hairs, the two warring camps that shared no common ground in any other place in the United States in the 1960s or '70s. Only in Austin could the music bring the two together.

Among the new Austin artists gaining recognition were singer/songwriters like B.W. Stevenson, Steven Fromholz, Kinky Friedman, and bands like Greezy Wheels, Asleep At The Wheel, and The Lost Gonzo Band. Gonzo songwriter Gary P. Nunn even wrote a song called "London Homesick Blues," which sang the praises of the place and pretty nicely got to the heart of the whole Armadillo experience: "I wanna go home with the Armadillo/Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene/The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen." The city even produced its own new sound on radio in KOKE-FM, calling the new format "progressive country."

The recognition outside of Austin began to come in, as articles about this happening little place in the heart of Texas started showing up in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, in which Eddie Wilson described what was so special about armadillos and hippies: "Armadillos and hippies are somewhat alike, because they're maligned and picked on. Armadillos like to sleep all day and roam at night. They share their homes with others. People think they're smelly and ugly and they keep their noses in the grass. They're paranoid. But they've got one characteristic nobody can knock. They survive."

By 1974, a new show for public TV had gone into production called "Austin City Limits." All of the artists that frequented the Armadillo were now being seen coast to coast, and were selling records accordingly. "Austin City Limits" still presents music to the world from Texas, with national country acts and Texas favorites. The series still uses Nunn's version of "London Homesick Blues" as its theme. In the late seventies, after the Cosmic Cowboy sound had died down, Armadillo continued to play host to an eclectic mix of Texas musicians, as other difficult to categorize players like Joe Ely, Uncle Walt's Band, and Too Smooth took the stage. National acts found their most significant followings to be in Austin, so quite a few made the Armadillo something of home base. Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, blues legend Freddie King, Shawn Phillips, The Charlie Daniels Band, Frank Zappa all played frequently at the 'Dillo. As the place became established, all of Austin's music scene began to explode, with numerous other live music clubs opening and succeeding, or as Wilson puts it, perhaps a bit more eloquently, "Austin went from zero places to hundreds of places. It went from less than a ooch to more than a gob in eighteen months from the time Armadillo started."

Austin music was doing well in the general sense, but the Armadillo rarely actually made any money. Concert tickets were always cheap, and, quite often, money had to be spent before it came in. For instance, John Sebastian once had a $5,000 guarantee from the Armadillo before his show there occurred, and then half a dozen people attended it. In 1976, Wilson moved on and his replacement, Hank Alrich, was forced to lay off most of the employees just to keep afloat. By 1977, the Armadillo filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Somehow, through it all, the determination to keep the music coming stayed alive in all who worked there. The Armadillo had that spirit of we-ism in its dedicated staff, who would sometimes go many weeks without paychecks, occasionally accepting food instead. The communal atmosphere was all a result of the collective belief that the cause of providing a really cool place to hang out was indeed a noble one. They even sold beer out of a vending machine, but in true hippie consciousness, stopped selling Lone Star Beer when the brewery was sponsoring armadillo races, which the Armadillo staff saw as cruel treatment to its animal counterpart. The 'Dillo took care of its own.

The lack of money drove them to make it an even cooler place by branching into food service. The restaurant helped pay the bills to keep the concert stage going through the lean years, which were all years.In fact,the distinctive hippie food stands out in the memories of many as much as the music does. Wilson says, "I run into people now who remember Armadillo not as a concert hall, but as an outdoor vegetarian restaurant. People that don't have a clue about what happened right inside those brick walls."

Of course, the number of great stories from behind those brick walls far exceeds the shows. Willenzik remembers the night that Frank Zappa got to town a few days before his gig and asked if he could work the cash register at the nacho counter during a Charlie Daniels show to see if anyone would recognize him. Willenzik asked him if anybody had figured him out, to which Zappa responded, "Nobody said they did, but I think I waited on Bob Dylan!" Another night, a very young Ted Nugent had allegedly relieved himself in the food in the kitchen. Nugent was ultimately regretful, even apologizing from the stage that night. Willenzik says, "His excuse was a pretty good excuse,"I'm crazy, I can prove it, I live in Detroit because I like it." After his show, the staff, who always fed the talent, had a special presentation set up for Nugent's dinner that night. "We took some dead toilets and made a chair out of them, we added a flush handle on the fork, he was served meatloaf and gravy in a bedpan, a urine beaker full of beer, yellow toilet paper for a napkin. He loved it!"

Bruce Springsteen played a total of five shows at the 'Dillo, all in 1974 when he already had a Columbia record deal but little name recognition beyond his native New Jersey. The shows in Austin, along with some in Houston and Dallas, helped establish his Southern following. Again, it was that Armadillo audience that was willing to try him out without having heard any of his music. The cover charge was a buck.

There was not always any rhyme or reason to the musical pairings at the Armadillo, but that was half the fun. Austin's western swingers, Alvin Crow And The Pleasant Valley Boys actually opened for one of the Springsteen shows. But such double bills made for just another night at the 'Dillo. Hippie rock band Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen once shared a bill with country's Waylon Jennings, and British punkers The Clash once shared the stage with Texan Joe Ely.

One Austin band that opened the shows of many national touring acts was Uncle Walt's Band, an acoustic swing/folk trio with beautiful three part harmonies. Its fiddle player, Champ Hood, today host of Austin's Wednesday night Threadgill's supper sessions, fondly remembers his days playing at the 'Dillo: "To me, it was like a big room with a small room feel. It did seem to have a certain intimacy about it. It wasn?t like going to a concert nowadays with assigned seating, it wasn't all that organized. It just seemed real loose, you could just kind of wander around. There were places to sit if you felt like sitting, there were places to stand, of course there were bars kinda all over the place. They just had a really loose, relaxed feeling to it. It was just a lot of fun."

One of Wilson's fondest show memories is a story of how a musical giant came to play at the place that had become so legendary. "Van Morrison, January '73 probably stands out in my mind. I never ever thought we'd get a shot at him and suddenly I had a goofy friend who was his manager, who just like overnight called me on the phone and said, "We're coming that way, we'd like to play Armadillo on a Friday and Saturday." Nobody ever called me and said they wanted to play Armadillo on a Friday and a Saturday for a split of the door. Anybody, much less Van Morrison. They got here, he stayed at my house and played Thursday, Friday, Saturday to sell out crowds, [then] I gave everybody several days off. [Van?s manager] called me Sunday night from the theater they were playing in Arlington, "Van says he wants to come back and play Monday night and stay at your house again." I didn't realize he was having that much fun! I think the tickets were 3 dollars, 3.50 at the door." In fact, the highest price ever charged for an Armadillo show happened to be for a later Van Morrison appearance, which got $8.50 a ticket.

The party came to an end after ten years when the perennially patient landlord had a much better offer for the property, and could no longer justify keeping the struggling business at the location; he'd been renting the place to them without a lease. The last night at the Armadillo was also the last night of 1980, with Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep At The Wheel, Maria Muldaur, Austin magcian Turk Pipkin, and the elderly Austin legend, Kenneth Threadgill bringing it all home. Wilson, in an amazing serendipitous coincidence, reopened Threadgill's old service station on the next day. The place had been shut down for years with the memorable graffiti on the side that said "Janis sang here." Wilson opened it now as a southern styled restaurant, once again getting those Wednesday night music sessions going, another way of keeping Austin music alive in the wake of the 'Dillo. Of course, by then and for all the years since the close of the Armadillo, Austin music has been doing just fine, with more big, medium, and small venues than just about any American city, and a steady stream of talent that's as diverse as the city itself. It didn't take long after the old National Guard armory was torn down for the heavy machinery to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, along with another tall bank building, nor did it take long for the new structure to fail itself: the new building spent most of the '80s vacant, indicative of the times. Now, it serves as an office building, again with one of those neat little twists. Among its residents is radio station KGSR, which frequently plays, supports, and participates in the music from this remarkable community, much as Armadillo had done from the same spot. When the building had been leveled in 1981, one Austin hippie flower salesman was pictured on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman sitting on the dirt playing guitar where the Armadillo had once stood. He'd always wanted to play there. That flower salesman, Max Nofziger, later spent some time on Austin's City Council.

What the Austin music scene has become since the demise of the Armadillo World Headquarters is wonderful and unique, but it's hard to imagine where it would be without the Armadillo in its past. Austinites still debate about whether what was happening in Austin music was better back then or is better today. Either way, one place keeps coming up in the discussion. As Willenzik points out, "Every time anybody refers to when Austin was good and when it wasn't any good anymore, guess what the benchmark is?"

								`Armadillo World Headquarters by Rush Evans` The Armadillo World Headquarters has been closed now longer than it had ever been open, yet it is still spoken of with reverence whenever the history of music in Austin, Texas is brought up. Many things made this cavernous, unglamorous, 1970s concert hall so special, not the least of which were the communal spirit that drove the place, the subcultural niche that it carved out for a growing breed of cowboy/hippies, and, of course, the incredible amount of tremendous music. Thousands of artists played at the Armadillo between 1970 and 1980, many of whom built their careers by being heard there, others who could have filled up basketball arenas but instead chose the place that they knew would allow them intimacy with an attentive audience something that couldn?t always be achieved elsewhere. Almost as soon as the joint opened, a new brand of country/rock music began to be associated with it and its bohemian city. Musicians began to converge on the city where they could get a fair listen: Jerry Jeff Walker, a New York veteran of the psychedelic band Circus Maximus; Doug Sahm, a native Texan who'd spent several years as a rock star in San Francisco fronting the Sir Douglas Quinte;, Michael Murphey, a rocker with country roots and a difficult to categorize sound, along with dozens of other musical misfits. And then Willie Nelson abandoned Nashville and returned to his Central Texas stomping grounds. Willie inadvertently found himself to be the leader of an outlaw musical movement that had nothing in common with what was going on in Nashville. It was later dubbed "redneck rock" or the "cosmic cowboy" sound, a new mix of traditional folk, tejano, blues, pop, psychedelia, you name it. Whatever it was, it wasn't quite country and it wasn't quite rock. Simultaneous with this new genre came new, creative practitioners of established sounds like the blues, with bands like The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Paul Ray And The Cobras setting up shop in town. Any and all of these styles or sounds could be heard at the Armadillo, which wasn't a particularly attractive place inside or out, not that that really mattered, you couldn't even see it from the street. "Armadillo was an aberration that couldn't have happened anywhere else," remembers its original manager, Eddie Wilson. "A convergence of a whole bunch of people wanting to have a real unusual playhouse, based more on fantasy than any kind of business acumen. It was a free fall kiddyland of people that were high and very idealistic." "Do the impossible, do it well, and have fun doing it," is how Bruce Willenzik, one-time kitchen manager at the establishment, encapsulates the whole Armadillo philosophy. Today, he runs the annual Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, an arts and crafts fair that started at the original Armadillo in 1976. He elaborates on that philosophy by bringing up the concept that he calls, "Us-and-them-ism. Us is us and everybody else is them, and them is bad and we're good. We replaced Us-and-them-ism with We-ism, because we can do anything we set our hearts to do, but Us-and-them can't do shit." We-ism got started in 1969 when the great Austin concert hall, Vulcan Gas Co., closed its doors after three years of 13th Floor Elevators, The Conqueroo, and nationally known acts like Canned Heat and Johnny Winter, who recorded a live album there. Eddie Wilson wanted to keep the music coming by finding a new home for it. He had grown up in central Austin hanging out at Kenneth Threadgill's Service Station where the Wednesday night hootenannies had been all the rage. In fact, in the early '60s, Janis Joplin had spent some time hanging out there and singing with her friend Mr. Threadgill before moving on to bigger things. Wilson wanted a new musical outlet for the city, but he didn't really choose the former National Guard armory in South Austin that was obscured by a skating rink. "It chose me while I was taking a leak," Wilson remembers. "I was behind George's Cactus Club, standing between John Reed and Jimmie Dale Gilmore [then a member of the Hub City Movers]. We were out back in a parking lot, and saw broken metal framed windows at least twenty feet off the ground. I thought, "My Lord, there's a giant building there." We were looking at the east side of the National Guard armory. I went around to the west side and discovered a garage door. I raised the garage door, drove my car in it, shut the doors behind me and turned on my lights. I had a real hallucinogenic moment there as I, first time, gazed on the inside of Armadillo World Headquarters. I knew immediately that I'd found the place." The building already had quite a musical history. After being a National Guard armory, it had been The Sports Center, hosting wrestling and boxing matches, with occasional package tours coming through. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had played there, and one show in 1953 had included Faron Young, Johnny Horton, and a kid named Elvis Presley. Shortly after Wilson's discovery, he and a few partners got the whole thing started. "Cheap rent made it possible," declares Wilson. With the help of that cheap rent and some recording contract bonus money that Shiva's Headband had just landed, Wilson and his merry band of hippies proceeded to open the place with an imaginative name that certainly didn't hurt in the recognition department. One of the other masterminds behind the project was Jim Franklin, the house artist. He quickly took the image of the Texas rodent in the name of the place and made it his own and made sure the people of Austin knew what it stood for, incorporating it into the show posters and wall designs that made the familiar little mammal synonymous with this new place to hear music. Paintings and murals soon were all over the big, otherwise non-descript room. Franklin painted a herd of armadillos on one wall, as well as Freddie King with an armadillo bursting through his chest. There was wall art everywhere, even in the restrooms. Headlining the first night at the Armadillo World Headquarters was Wilson's own Shiva's Headband on August 7, 1970. The room held about 1,500 people, most of whom would just sit on the big floor in front of the stage covered with sections of carpet pieced together. The place caught on fairly quickly as the little haven where the anti-establishment types could feel at home, and develop what was becoming their hedonistic music/ pot/beer-based lifestyle. "The lifestyle itself was an accepted art form in Austin and people set out to outdo everyone else with their own maximizing of daily pleasure," says Wilson. "Austin was widely known about in the very first year or two of Armadillo World Head-quarters because of stories about a lot of music, a lot of inexpensive living conditions, cheap pot and a permissive atmosphere. Everything to make the religious right cringe. We were tolerant of each other. And it wasn't long before that lifestyle had a soundtrack to accompany it. Wilson had no way of envisioning the new sound that was to evolve under his own roof ("I didn't envision tomorrow's rent. I wasn't a visionary. I was an illusionary"), but it happened nonetheless. Willie Nelson had already hung around Nashville for a decade and had written some country classics before trekking down to Austin to see what it was all about. Before Willie's first Armadillo show, the Austin American-Statesman's Townsend Miller wrote in his country music column of the appearance of Nelson on a psychedelic poster and wondered about that night's inevitable collision of rednecks and long-hairs, the two warring camps that shared no common ground in any other place in the United States in the 1960s or '70s. Only in Austin could the music bring the two together. Among the new Austin artists gaining recognition were singer/songwriters like B.W. Stevenson, Steven Fromholz, Kinky Friedman, and bands like Greezy Wheels, Asleep At The Wheel, and The Lost Gonzo Band. Gonzo songwriter Gary P. Nunn even wrote a song called "London Homesick Blues," which sang the praises of the place and pretty nicely got to the heart of the whole Armadillo experience: "I wanna go home with the Armadillo/Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene/The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen." The city even produced its own new sound on radio in KOKE-FM, calling the new format "progressive country." The recognition outside of Austin began to come in, as articles about this happening little place in the heart of Texas started showing up in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, in which Eddie Wilson described what was so special about armadillos and hippies: "Armadillos and hippies are somewhat alike, because they're maligned and picked on. Armadillos like to sleep all day and roam at night. They share their homes with others. People think they're smelly and ugly and they keep their noses in the grass. They're paranoid. But they've got one characteristic nobody can knock. They survive." By 1974, a new show for public TV had gone into production called "Austin City Limits." All of the artists that frequented the Armadillo were now being seen coast to coast, and were selling records accordingly. "Austin City Limits" still presents music to the world from Texas, with national country acts and Texas favorites. The series still uses Nunn's version of "London Homesick Blues" as its theme. In the late seventies, after the Cosmic Cowboy sound had died down, Armadillo continued to play host to an eclectic mix of Texas musicians, as other difficult to categorize players like Joe Ely, Uncle Walt's Band, and Too Smooth took the stage. National acts found their most significant followings to be in Austin, so quite a few made the Armadillo something of home base. Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, blues legend Freddie King, Shawn Phillips, The Charlie Daniels Band, Frank Zappa all played frequently at the 'Dillo. As the place became established, all of Austin's music scene began to explode, with numerous other live music clubs opening and succeeding, or as Wilson puts it, perhaps a bit more eloquently, "Austin went from zero places to hundreds of places. It went from less than a ooch to more than a gob in eighteen months from the time Armadillo started." Austin music was doing well in the general sense, but the Armadillo rarely actually made any money. Concert tickets were always cheap, and, quite often, money had to be spent before it came in. For instance, John Sebastian once had a $5,000 guarantee from the Armadillo before his show there occurred, and then half a dozen people attended it. In 1976, Wilson moved on and his replacement, Hank Alrich, was forced to lay off most of the employees just to keep afloat. By 1977, the Armadillo filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Somehow, through it all, the determination to keep the music coming stayed alive in all who worked there. The Armadillo had that spirit of we-ism in its dedicated staff, who would sometimes go many weeks without paychecks, occasionally accepting food instead. The communal atmosphere was all a result of the collective belief that the cause of providing a really cool place to hang out was indeed a noble one. They even sold beer out of a vending machine, but in true hippie consciousness, stopped selling Lone Star Beer when the brewery was sponsoring armadillo races, which the Armadillo staff saw as cruel treatment to its animal counterpart. The 'Dillo took care of its own. The lack of money drove them to make it an even cooler place by branching into food service. The restaurant helped pay the bills to keep the concert stage going through the lean years, which were all years.In fact,the distinctive hippie food stands out in the memories of many as much as the music does. Wilson says, "I run into people now who remember Armadillo not as a concert hall, but as an outdoor vegetarian restaurant. People that don't have a clue about what happened right inside those brick walls." Of course, the number of great stories from behind those brick walls far exceeds the shows. Willenzik remembers the night that Frank Zappa got to town a few days before his gig and asked if he could work the cash register at the nacho counter during a Charlie Daniels show to see if anyone would recognize him. Willenzik asked him if anybody had figured him out, to which Zappa responded, "Nobody said they did, but I think I waited on Bob Dylan!" Another night, a very young Ted Nugent had allegedly relieved himself in the food in the kitchen. Nugent was ultimately regretful, even apologizing from the stage that night. Willenzik says, "His excuse was a pretty good excuse,"I'm crazy, I can prove it, I live in Detroit because I like it." After his show, the staff, who always fed the talent, had a special presentation set up for Nugent's dinner that night. "We took some dead toilets and made a chair out of them, we added a flush handle on the fork, he was served meatloaf and gravy in a bedpan, a urine beaker full of beer, yellow toilet paper for a napkin. He loved it!" Bruce Springsteen played a total of five shows at the 'Dillo, all in 1974 when he already had a Columbia record deal but little name recognition beyond his native New Jersey. The shows in Austin, along with some in Houston and Dallas, helped establish his Southern following. Again, it was that Armadillo audience that was willing to try him out without having heard any of his music. The cover charge was a buck. There was not always any rhyme or reason to the musical pairings at the Armadillo, but that was half the fun. Austin's western swingers, Alvin Crow And The Pleasant Valley Boys actually opened for one of the Springsteen shows. But such double bills made for just another night at the 'Dillo. Hippie rock band Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen once shared a bill with country's Waylon Jennings, and British punkers The Clash once shared the stage with Texan Joe Ely. One Austin band that opened the shows of many national touring acts was Uncle Walt's Band, an acoustic swing/folk trio with beautiful three part harmonies. Its fiddle player, Champ Hood, today host of Austin's Wednesday night Threadgill's supper sessions, fondly remembers his days playing at the 'Dillo: "To me, it was like a big room with a small room feel. It did seem to have a certain intimacy about it. It wasn?t like going to a concert nowadays with assigned seating, it wasn't all that organized. It just seemed real loose, you could just kind of wander around. There were places to sit if you felt like sitting, there were places to stand, of course there were bars kinda all over the place. They just had a really loose, relaxed feeling to it. It was just a lot of fun." One of Wilson's fondest show memories is a story of how a musical giant came to play at the place that had become so legendary. "Van Morrison, January '73 probably stands out in my mind. I never ever thought we'd get a shot at him and suddenly I had a goofy friend who was his manager, who just like overnight called me on the phone and said, "We're coming that way, we'd like to play Armadillo on a Friday and Saturday." Nobody ever called me and said they wanted to play Armadillo on a Friday and a Saturday for a split of the door. Anybody, much less Van Morrison. They got here, he stayed at my house and played Thursday, Friday, Saturday to sell out crowds, [then] I gave everybody several days off. [Van?s manager] called me Sunday night from the theater they were playing in Arlington, "Van says he wants to come back and play Monday night and stay at your house again." I didn't realize he was having that much fun! I think the tickets were 3 dollars, 3.50 at the door." In fact, the highest price ever charged for an Armadillo show happened to be for a later Van Morrison appearance, which got $8.50 a ticket. The party came to an end after ten years when the perennially patient landlord had a much better offer for the property, and could no longer justify keeping the struggling business at the location; he'd been renting the place to them without a lease. The last night at the Armadillo was also the last night of 1980, with Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep At The Wheel, Maria Muldaur, Austin magcian Turk Pipkin, and the elderly Austin legend, Kenneth Threadgill bringing it all home. Wilson, in an amazing serendipitous coincidence, reopened Threadgill's old service station on the next day. The place had been shut down for years with the memorable graffiti on the side that said "Janis sang here." Wilson opened it now as a southern styled restaurant, once again getting those Wednesday night music sessions going, another way of keeping Austin music alive in the wake of the 'Dillo. Of course, by then and for all the years since the close of the Armadillo, Austin music has been doing just fine, with more big, medium, and small venues than just about any American city, and a steady stream of talent that's as diverse as the city itself. It didn't take long after the old National Guard armory was torn down for the heavy machinery to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, along with another tall bank building, nor did it take long for the new structure to fail itself: the new building spent most of the '80s vacant, indicative of the times. Now, it serves as an office building, again with one of those neat little twists. Among its residents is radio station KGSR, which frequently plays, supports, and participates in the music from this remarkable community, much as Armadillo had done from the same spot. When the building had been leveled in 1981, one Austin hippie flower salesman was pictured on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman sitting on the dirt playing guitar where the Armadillo had once stood. He'd always wanted to play there. That flower salesman, Max Nofziger, later spent some time on Austin's City Council. What the Austin music scene has become since the demise of the Armadillo World Headquarters is wonderful and unique, but it's hard to imagine where it would be without the Armadillo in its past. Austinites still debate about whether what was happening in Austin music was better back then or is better today. Either way, one place keeps coming up in the discussion. As Willenzik points out, "Every time anybody refers to when Austin was good and when it wasn't any good anymore, guess what the benchmark is?"