Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . .

—Hunter S. Thompson

The Armadillo World Headquarters opened in 1970 and struggled through its first year with a smattering of shows—largely from Texas bands the club could afford to book. Our first regular forays into its halls came that spring of 1971 on Saturdays, when Sattva, a local nonprofit with Middle Eastern overtones that had set up in the Methodist Student Center, offered low-cost vegetarian meals at the Dillo. Basically, for whatever you could afford (which often meant coughing up a dollar or so), you filled up on a meal of rice and vegetables.

The size of the hall would eventually allow for good-sized crowds as the quality of acts increased, though that alone created logistical problems. Basically a giant quonset hut with tall cinder-block walls, a concrete-slab floor, and steel beams supporting a corrugated-tin roof, the building proved too big to cool in brutal summers and heat during cold winter months. The parking lot, with its man-eating chuckholes, looked like the Normandy beaches on D-Day plus one. Efforts through the years to provide some sort of HVAC relief ran to the ridiculous: One winter, kerosene heaters were rented and placed strategically at side exits, but the heaters roared like jet engines and fouled the hall with an agonizing odor. During the summer, giant fans strewn about the floor to cool customers provided little relief, so the Dillo tried renting various sizes of air-­conditioning systems. The last, a forty-million-ton unit, broke down more than it ran. Even at peak pumping power, it failed to deliver a trickle of relief to what would eventually be a dripping, packed house.

Yet the club provided a sense of community for both local freaks and those of us who had escaped the city—from both the east and west coasts—with an eye to getting “back to the country,” doing our own thing, creating our own alternate reality. We were done with the reality of Dick Nixon and company. In later parlance, we were off the grid.

When Greezy Wheels opened up a show that June for the Flying Burrito Brothers, we could see the Dillo’s promise, plunked as we were on carpet remnants strewn around the floor. It wasn’t the Fillmore by any means, but it was ours—a hangout for a community drawn together amid the hostility of redneck Texas. With its size and setting in an Austin already known as something of an oasis in the state (on the strength of the University of Texas and its youthful students’ disproportionate influence on the local population) providing refuge for the hip, we could see it augured well for the scene.

Greezy Wheels had established a sort of residency at the Hungry Horse, a funky bar just south of campus, where they hosted a regular gathering—spurred on by a nightly chug-a-lug contest that gained the winner a free pitcher of beer. This led to raucous shows climaxing in a frenzied version of Sweet Mary’s “Orange Blossom Special” on the fiddle. A good time was had by all. But the Dillo promised an even bigger venue for a larger audience—and the place for freaks to congregate in numbers. So when Sis brought word that the club looked to hire somebody to get serious about checking IDs, I jumped on it.

“You’re perfect,” she said. Well, I had been a security honcho of sorts at the Fillmore, I was a good-sized dude, and I had a good feel for the hippie ethos of the time and place.

And I extolled these virtues sitting on the concrete floor upstairs at the Dillo with “officer” Bobby Hedderman, who had also worked at the Vulcan Gas Company. (Though I may have been a bit distracted, mooning as I was over a nearby female member of Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Lickette Maryann Price, as they clowned around following a show.) I did mention to Bobby that I had been a wrestler and could handle myself in a pinch, but said I excelled at settling problems nonviolently. I didn’t believe in throwing punches, but if all else failed I could tie a miscreant in knots until help arrived.

That fit the vibe of the time, short-lived though it turned out to be at the Dillo. For the nonce, we were all in this together. Austin, a small city of around 250,000 people, remained a laid-back place, accepting (within the confines of the university’s sphere of influence, anyway) the freaks seeking shelter from the storm. We huddled together for pro­tection—and friendship—in an otherwise hostile Texas environment.

A few smaller clubs in the surrounding area offered similar sanctuary to the nascent scene—bars such as the Hungry Horse, One Knite, New Orleans Social Club, Chequered Flag, Rolling Hills, and the I.L. Club. But in these simple, friendlier times, the Dillo served as the hub around which freaks could gather en masse, giving strength to a sense of belonging. A harnessed hippie energy transformed the club that year by moving the stage to the other end of the hall and building a raised “cabaret” area that could be curtained off and heated—more or less—for shows during the winter when it was too cold in the hall. The “grand reopening” in September 1971 featured Freddie King, Leon Russell, and local blues band Storm, all for the grand sum of three dollars.

Still and all, in the first couple years the Dillo lurched forward in fits and starts. A show with John Sebastian in October ’71, formerly of the Lovin’ Spoonful, bombed horribly—a major financial setback, given the $5,000 pricetag (and a disappointment for me, as well, as taken as I had been with a number of the band’s big hits in the Sixties). The club was forced to retrench for a time, surviving on more economical shows to keep the doors open.

That winter of ’71–72, I worked the entrance of the cabaret area for weekend shows that generally cost fifty cents to get in and often featured Greezy Wheels, a local favorite now, allowing the Dillo to scrape by. The Wheels had practiced and gigged hard, motivated by Bro’s looming date with the Texas prison system, building up a local following and branching out to other Texas cities in time. They became the de facto house band at the Dillo, ultimately selling out shows as the capacity of the club grew to 1,500. (In comparison, the Fillmore’s theater seating housed in excess of 2,500 in a much more contained venue: Pot-smokers could easily be spotted and curtailed.)

But even when the weather moderated in the early years, good bands to play the Dillo were hard to find. The hall was just another shaky hippie venture in the eyes of the national booking agencies handling the big names. Unless they knew a club owner well, they’d often demand most all the cash up front, a difficult proposition considering the costs of top talent even back then.

The Dillo survived by showcasing a wide variety of local acts from Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, as well as from Austin. For any construable reason, the club booked in benefit concerts, spotlighting ten or twelve local bands supporting the Deaf School, the People’s Clinic, the Greenbriar school—and one to help defray Bro’s mounting legal costs. Our little group signed on for any and all we could.

In my first year with the Dillo, major shows employing my services as security proved few and far between, meaning I had to find work elsewhere during periods of dormancy in the extremes of winter and summer. For one stretch I worked a stint flipping burgers at a Jack in the Box near the house to pay bills, where a supervisor in need of employees gave me a shot—with the proviso that I shave my beard and wear a hair net. Working the grill, I wouldn’t appear out in front where cus­tomers might be offended, and I showed up re­liably, unlike some other young temporary hires. After several months, shows picked up at the Dillo again and I turned in my spatula and resumed the bouncer’s life.

When shows required my services, the job only paid ten dollars a night, but again, Austin at the time didn’t require much. A kitchen in the club opened serving simple healthy fare, and employees received a break on the cost—enough so that I could get a chef salad and three nachos (a corn tortilla slathered with beans, cheese, and jalapeños then baked) for a dollar. Slowly but surely the staff hired people to fill new roles, particularly when, in May 1972, a beer garden opened up at the back end of the Dillo and waitresses and bartenders hired on to staff it.

It seems that a hippie musician working there doing odd jobs, one Hank Alrich, had overheard discussions about what could be done to help make the club more of a year-round moneymaker. Unbeknownst to others, Hank had a bit of an inheritance stashed away, and volunteered to underwrite the construction of a beer garden, which could serve to keep the club open during the brutal Texas summer. Its construction using that harnessed hippie energy even managed to earn a grudging nod of acceptance from the neighboring body shop, whose workers pitched in some to help with their heavy equipment.

The communal spirit, the sense of family among the employees, drove the development of the Dillo in those first lean years. Over time, the joint developed as something of a cross between a family business (you couldn’t get a job there with a résumé; you had to come recommended) and the prototype Japanese model (which meant working long, hard hours of real labor, at low wages, for the principle of the thing)—a grand experiment in the hip culture.

The lack of a serious revenue stream early on demanded innovative solutions for logistical problems. One involved getting beer piped to the different bars set up throughout the structure. Artist Jim Franklin, who’d taken up residency in a studio upstairs and expanded upon his armadillo-themed creations, had modeled artistic installations using blown foam, which hardened into his creative shapes. That idea morphed into cold vaults (the foam blown in as insulation covering the walls), one a small area adjacent to the main ballroom sealed off and refrigerated to store kegs of beer. A second vault occupied much of a basement space, and miles of plastic tubing connected kegs to taps in the bar areas.

In those early years, the communal efforts building up the club—and the struggle for basic survival—produced a close-knit family of like-minded friends, more so than at any time at the Fillmore East. In New York, after a show, we all left for abodes scattered throughout the city, and little of the camaraderie existed that characterized those of us huddled together in the confines of an Austin that more closely resembled a small town. Freaks, of course, didn’t stand out as much in the big city, which already sported a long-established assortment of weirdos—any one of whom might go ballistic on you if you as much as looked disparagingly upon them.

At the Dillo, we hung out together on and off the clock, a social set that revolved around the Armadillo hires. Carlito and I, with friend Madman, had moved into a house next door to Bro and Nance on the corner of 45th and Barrow, a short dead-end street where most of the houses were owned by one Dr. Johnson. Each month I’d walk down to the end of the street to the Johnson house to pay rent, where like as not I’d hand the cash to the doctor’s son, Eric—destined to be a mega-star guitar player. Our house, a three-bedroom affair, turned into what we jokingly referred to as the Barrow Street Men’s Club, and after Carlito moved on to his first attempt at marital bliss, Madman and I cycled through a number of room­mates but always hosted sundry social events.

For the holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’d stage an “orphan dinner”—whereby any unattached singles in the extended family could join us with whatever contribution they could bring to the meal, generally resulting in massive amounts of food for all to carry home as leftovers. On Mondays, when the Dillo always closed, we hosted poker games, which grew to include as many as two tables’ worth of Dillo staff, a tradition passed down to succeeding crews working the club.

Early on, we scraped together a softball team—the Slugs—to play in Austin’s ultra-competitive city leagues, attired in a cool jersey designed by Henry Gonzalez, a Dillo artist who was also one of our better players. A combination of experienced baseball hands and sort-of-athletic hippies, we had a lot of fun and usually proved inevitably to be the best second-place team in our league. Undeterred by the lack of trophies, we forged on, also coaching and rooting for a women’s team as well. One winter, the only season in four that we didn’t compete in softball, we played in a men’s basketball league (again finishing a strong second).

The camaraderie and shared misery held us together through these first unsettled years. With limited resources in 1971 and beyond, the Armadillo ventured far and wide, managing to bring in acts like Ravi Shankar, the Velvet Underground, Taj Mahal, Fats Domino, Leo Kottke, Captain Beefheart, Leon Russell, and Earl Scruggs. Originally conceived as some­thing of an arts laboratory, the Dillo hosted the musical “Earl of Ruston,” comedians Cheech and Chong, the Austin Ballet Theatre, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, among other eclectic offerings.

Austin hipsters, hungry to build on what the cavernous Dillo promised, ate it all up. And the unbridled enthusiasm that crowds greeted touring acts with resonated with many of the bands that began to cycle through the club. Frank Zappa, who called the club “the last fun place to play,” would soon start his tours at the Dillo—and who, among Freddie King and others, recorded a live album in its funky confines. When Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen recorded there, they had to dial back the audience from the final mix—it was too raucous. (For Commander Cody, we’d set up a volleyball net in the middle of the hall during the day, as they were hard-core enthusiasts. And though we had a number of good athletes working the club, I don’t believe we ever beat them.)

For me, Commander Cody served as some sort of vindi­ca­tion. Ricky V. and I had come to Austin with visions of stardom in a rock’n’roll band. But in 1971, the locals’ version of “getting back to their roots” entailed recycling the old “cryin’ in your beer” country music of their forebears. An unmistakable cowboy tinge could be heard coming from the bulk of popular Austin acts playing the club, bands like Greezy Wheels, Shiva’s Headband, Freda & the Firedogs, Balcones Fault, Tiger Balm, and Snaker & the Shakers. Maybe more swing, more kick, more pseudo-religioso jive, yet somehow country. And what Austin clubgoers listened to in 1971–72: a “progressive” country (not what someone in a rock’n’roll band wanted to hear).

This homegrown music also profited from the influences of seminal Austin and Texas musicians like Steve Fromholz, Rusty Wier, and Townes Van Zandt, and a steady influx of new names, which grew to include Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, B. W. Stevenson, Asleep at the Wheel, and, of course, Nashville expatriate Willie Nelson: the “Cosmic Cowboys” (as dubbed by Michael Murphy). The weight of all that talent ultimately—inexorably—would command attention nationwide.

Willie became the first Austin mega-star. And it was the Dillo’s Eddie Wilson and Mike Tolleson and others who sat cross-legged on the floor with Willie, smoking a joint, and talked him into appearing, convincing him that what he had was honest, and good, and that he would play well to the Armadillo audience. Which proved to be a gross understatement.

In a 1973 Texas Monthly piece called “The Coming of Redneck Hip,” Jan Reid wrote about a Willie Dillo show:

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.”

This became a familiar scene as Jerry Lee Lewis and Way­lon Jennings and more followed Willie into the Armadillo, drawing a complete mix of fans young and old. Music was the common ground, a “roots” sound Texas hippies and rednecks both could relate to. Chet Flippo quoted Waylon on the turn of events:

The long-haired kids—they like country music too. They just don’t feel welcome in some of these redneck joints. I did the same show in Kezar [in San Francisco] as I do in Gallup, New Mexico, or in El Paso, Texas, and it all works. Even though it’s three different things: In Kezar it was the rock crowd, the Dead following; in Gallup, it’s the Indians, and in El Paso it’s for some pretty wild old cowboys. One of them “let’s whup him” joints. You walk in there, like last night, and they say, “He’s a cowboy singer, let’s whup his ass.” That right there is why long-haired kids have never felt welcome in country music clubs. The only exception I know of is in Austin, but there’s not many places like that.

When Willie and the gang rode into town, they lent the club a certain cachet, and the next couple years proved to be for me the heyday of the Dillo—particularly when, in 1973, the drinking age was lowered to eighteen. The big touring acts no longer avoided coming to Austin, and weekend shows filled the club, with every conceivable type of music. You might hear Boz Scaggs, Freddie King, the J. Geils Band, or Bette Midler one week­end and Willie, Tom T. Hall, or Bill Monroe the next. Ray Campi, the “King of Rockabilly,” perhaps put it best: “Here they’ll accept anything that’s real and good. They don’t care what it is . . . There’s an open mind here, and that’s great.” And the bands played on.

Dearly departed artist and longtime Dillo emcee Micael Priest told a notable tale that encapsulates the feeling during this period. It was back before perestroika, when the Cold War still raged, and the head of the Soviet news agency and his staff came to Austin. After lunch with the Capitol press corps, they spent the afternoon at the progressive publication the Texas Observer with writer Kaye Northcott, who then asked if there was anything else they’d like to do. The Russians said, to the utter dismay of the State Department lady accompanying them, they’d like to check out this Armadillo place they’d heard about.

That night at the Dillo, the autumn equinox, Balcones Fault laid in a beat heavy on big-band swing—Fats Waller tunes and the like. Eight or fourteen pitchers of beer and numerous pocket flasks later, the Russians were jitterbugging with the hippies in front of the stage.

As Micael remembered it, “The one guy who could speak and read English pretty well was buzzing around the walls, filling up notebooks, copying people’s T-shirts, the signs on the wall and paintings, stuff like that.”

The Russians partied the night away, losing themselves in the good times. But before leaving, finally shepherded out long after the last dog dangled, one remarked, “This must be the freest place on earth.”

By 1974, Time magazine got hip to the scene and gushed:

Rock is no longer a dirty word in Austin. Indeed, by embracing rock’s big beat, Austin’s musicians have evolved a brand-new style of country rock, and have made the city the fastest-growing country-music center in the U.S. Nashville, still the capital of country, may provide more regular work. Bakersfield, Calif., may offer the inspirational presences of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. But from the point of view of new sounds, freedom and plain musical fun, Austin now definitely ranks as No. 1 . . . What the Fillmores East and West were to the rock era, the Armadillo World Headquarters is to Austin’s country-rock set.

It certainly seemed like that at the time. And nothing could stop us now from having our fun.