Around that time, Kenneth Threadgill, a fiftysomething country music lover and former bootlegger (and proud owner of the first post-Prohibition beer license issued in Travis County), started welcoming an autoharp-toting, ballad-belting Port Arthur wild child by the name of Janis Joplin and her UT student crowd of folk music-loving proto-hippies to Wednesday night jams at his redneck roadhouse on North Lamar. Wilson, also a Threadgill's regular at the time, maintains that Threadgill's ability to calmly host both rednecks and beatniks served as a template for his Armadillo World Headquarters.
Mescaline and LSD swept through Austin right about then, giving rise to the lysergic sonic tsunami that was the 13th Floor Elevators, the city's first nationally known rock band, and still Austin's most dangerous. By 1969, Wilson was managing Shiva's Headband, another psychedelic Austin band. Since Shiva's had trouble finding a place to play locally, Wilson had to open one himself. He bought a former National Guard Armory on Barton Springs Road and renamed it the Armadillo World Headquarters.
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk...
Photos by John Anderson
...and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the 'Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
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There followed a decade or so of Austin's glory years, where Willie's Django-infused gypsy country finally found its spiritual home and where Waylon's high-octane, cocaine-amped West Texas honky-tonk stomp coalesced, all in front of howling crowds of "headnecks in cowboy hats" and the scantily clad foxy hippie chicks.
Wilson wants it known that the Armadillo was not just a hippie club that became a cosmic honky-tonk. Blues guitar master Freddy King tore it down there on many a night, as did international stars such as Jimmy Cliff and Van Morrison. And it wasn't all shades of popular music. "No one ever gives us credit for all the bullshit we did. We had ballet once a month for ten years, musicals, folkloric groups from around the world," Wilson remembers.
In 1976, Wilson sold out to a friend, and the club marched on to the early days of Texas punk. Around that time, Patoski detected some ominous minor-key music amid the carefree parade. "I remember in the mid '70s seeing a banker snorting coke and going all on about Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. I knew it was over then," he says.
But it wasn't, quite. By about 1981, punk was on the march all over town, and Austin was hip for a whole new generation of disaffected kids from all over Texas, albeit these with Mohawks and Day-Glo hair and piercings. Dallas's Jeff Liles was chest-deep in the punk scene. "I lived there when Club Foot was happening, and Raul's was happening, and Club 29 and all those great venues. It could not be beat back then. Oh my God, Austin was the shit back then. That was before the whole concept of alternative music. Classic rock was on its way out, and punk, alternative and new wave were this brand-new thing, and Austin was a really cool, subversive place to live."
By the middle of the '80s, some of that punk scene would evolve into a new wave sound, something like a slightly twangier take on the Athens-jangle rock scene that gave the world REM. At the same time, Austin's bluesy retro-rock scene was going great guns under the auspices of iconic late club owner Clifford Antone. The major labels signed lots of Austin-based acts in the '80s from both the new wave and blues camps, with the latter winning out in sales in the form of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
In 1987, South By Southwest was launched. Its original goals were to fill up downtown bars while the UT kids were away on spring break and showcase local bands, and boy did it ever succeed, at least at the former.
Since its inception, SXSW's trend has been toward bigger, grander, louder and more. Today, there are three SXSW festivals — the original music confab and others for film and tech. The emphasis on regional and, to a lesser extent, unknown music is long gone, as some 2,000 bands from dozens and dozens of countries are spotlighted. Huge established acts now perform regularly, and it has sprouted a glitzy layer of B-list celeb scuzz on top; it is now the kind of event that is apparently proud to allow the likes of Perez Hilton to host day parties.
It has also become a Music Biz 2.0 event that is less about music than it is about corporate branding and data mining, according to Austin punk godfather Jesse Sublett. You don't think all those bands, those mounds of tacos and oceans of booze are really free at those day parties, do you? Sublett doesn't. He says when he saw the New York Dolls at a recent SXSW, he had to fill out an invitation that mined him for about 15 different items of information, and then, he says, he had to "watch Rachael Ray's fat ass bounce around to the Dolls. I mean, I'm glad she hosted the show, but come on."
Greg Ellis believes the 1990s were a horrible decade for Austin culture. MTV discovered SXSW, and suddenly the insider regional event became a destination for college kids who wanted to be like MTV's frothy host Tabitha Soren. And then Richard Linklater's Slacker came out. Ellis thinks it is an amazing film but that, like SXSW as presented by MTV, it made Austin seem cool for all the wrong reasons. "Slacker and SXSW established Austin as the place to be for the types of hipsters that you didn't want here," he says. "These were people who just wanted to he hipsters. That's not who you want."
