I first visited the Armadillo one afternoon in 1971. The cavernous building had been operating under the Armadillo aegis for a year, but it still had the look of a work in progress-as it has ever since. It initially opened as a larger version of the Vulcan Gas Company, Austin's Fillmore¬style bastion of psychedelia. But there was something different about the Armadillo. For one thing, the managers would not let the customers forget that even though they were raised on rock, their Texas roots were undeniably country and western. Bob Wills, George Jones, and Ernest Tubb were as important to the culture of the state's youth as were Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Bob Dylan.

This attitude was frequently voiced by the Armadillo's burly trail boss, Eddie Wilson, a former publicist for the U.S. Brewers Association who managed to generate plenty of newsprint on the place in its early years. Texas hippies, he said, enjoyed their rock 'n' roil and marijuana as much as their California counterparts did, but like their mamas and daddies they dug their beer and hillbilly music too. He proved his point by introducing Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Tom T. Hall, and a host of conventional country musicians to a new and surprisingly eager audience. By its third year, the Armadillo was the melting pot of country rock and the wellspring of redneck chic. Wilson hyped the Armadillo as the "world's largest honky-tonk," and there were nights he couldn't be disputed. When Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, a long-haired revivalist country band, recorded a live album there, the audience response was so raucous and constant that the applause track on the album had to he dubbed in at the studio. Similar enthusiastic responses prompted Frank Zappa, Freddy King, Doug Sahm, and Phil Woods, among others, to record live performances there as well.

Another catalyst was Jim Franklin, the balding, bearded artist who popularized the armadillo. His realistic paintings portrayed *dasypus novemeinents* engaged in such strange feats as flying over highways or bursting out of blues guitarist Freddy King's heart. The Michelangelo of armadillo recognized the considerable similarities between the animal and that late-sixties anomaly known as the Texas hippie, Both were misunderstood creatures that survived in a hostile environment. They had hard outer shells to fend off predators, Franklin noted, but they were essentially peaceful. They kept their noses in the grass, slept by day, roamed at night, and shared their homes with others. And both thrived in Texas.