The Armadillo World Headquarters' founders had reason to believe that an audience existed for such a musical experiment in Austin. Countercultural performance venues had briefly flourished in the last half of the 1960s, but they had met with daunting community opposition. The Vulcan Gas Company- founded by Don Hyde, Houston White, Gary Scanlon, and Sandy Lockett-was the most well-known of these places, and its location downtown on Congress Avenue stood in defiance of the conservative propriety guarded over by the capitol building at the end of the street. The Chequered Flag, the Eleventh Door, the IL Club, the Jade Room, the New Orleans Club, and others provided similar spaces for folk, blues, and occasional psychedelic rock performances. However, all of these operations were small, most were failing, and none possessed the sheer ambition of the mammoth venue about to rise south of the river.

The "hippie" side of the Armadillo's musical equation, then, had substantive local provenance, but the rampant talk of a "hippie-redneck" convergence in the early 1970s would have been inconceivable to many of the recent denizens of the Vulcan Gas Company or the psychedelic rock pioneers who had decamped from Austin to San Francisco during the mid-to-late 1960s. When asked about how hippies and rednecks interacted in the Austin of this era, Powell St. John, former band mate of Janis Joplin when she first moved from Port Arthur to Austin in 1962, replied curtly, "[T]hey didn't." Reflecting for a minute, he then recounted several instances of harassment and violence that constituted hippie-redneck relations in his memory of 1960s Austin.

However, by the early 1970s, a number of those who had left Texas for San Francisco during the 1960s began to stream back to Austin, and the Armadillo World Headquarters provided this native counterculture a welcoming home. In time, the Armadillo became perhaps the most recognizable representation of the 1970s Austin scene. Other live music venues arose over the decade with their own sub-cultural allegiances-blues and R&B at Antone's, a more locally-oriented progressive country scene at the Soap Creek Saloon, punk at Raul's-but the Armadillo put Austin on the musical map and went far to create the network of performers, audiences, and media that continue to nurture Austin's current musical community.

This sensation was not yet in full effect, however, in August 1970, when Eddie Wilson and others opened the Armadillo. In addition to Wilson, pivotal figures in the early days included Vulcan Gas Company veterans Jim Franklin and Bobby Hedderman, Shiva's Headband frontman Spencer Perskin, and lawyer Mike Tolleson. Franklin became the club's artistic guru and emcee, living in an apartment he had built just offstage at the venue. Mike Tolleson joined Franklin and Wilson and championed the idea of making the Armadillo not just a concert venue, but a community arts incubator of sorts. Recently returned from London, Tolleson hoped to model the Armadillo after John Lennon's Arts Laboratory, which endeavored to combine film, dance, theater, and music under one roof.

These were the ideas that defined the Armadillo World Headquarters in the beginning and set the stage for Austin's much-heralded hippie-redneck confluence during the height of the progressive country scene. However, it is important to consider just how these ideals manifested in the club's everyday practices, as well as the recurring tensions between these ideals and the realities of a working music venue. What was the music scene truly like at the Armadillo, and what impact did the club have on the long-term musical history of the city and the state? The first step in answering these questions is to determine which artists played the venue, and to what extent their music drew on both countercultural ("hippie") and traditional ("redneck") sources.