In the beginning, there was music. And damn, it was yummy. Trouble was, no one seemed to know who was playing where, when. Was Janis at the Soap Creek Saloon, or the Armadillo? Cornell Hurd at the Hole in the Wall? Nah, that can't be right. Where the hell was Eddie Wilson's pager when you really needed it? Nowhere to be found -- at least not back in the mid-to-late Seventies when the Austin music scene, fueled by the Cosmic Cowboy movement and a seemingly unlimited supply of talented musicians and good reefer, broke through and rivalled the burgeoning San Francisco/Haight Ashbury/Fillmore psychotrip.

Pagers, radio spots, even semi-inspired print ads for shows were few and far between back then, and the resultant information vacuum created by too many popular venues booking amazing bills with zilch advertising almost single-handedly spawned what people today think of as Poster Art. That $50 Frank Kozik print you've been ogling at Sound Exchange has its roots not only deep in the heart o' Texas, but also in the music explosion that rocked the Capitol City in the Seventies and made sideline superstars out of a struggling band of artists and cartoonists (frequently one and the same) that included such now-legendary names as Gilbert Shelton, Jim Franklin, Ken Featherston, Guy Juke, Danny Garrett, Sam Yeates, Micael Priest, Kerry Awn, Gary McIlhenny, Henry Gonzales, Jack Jaxon, and a few others. Twenty years later, not all of these guys are as famous as they ought to be. Twenty years later, not all of these guys are as alive as they ought to be, either.

While Shelton moved to San Francisco and let the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers run amok, others hung onto Austin's nascent poster art business as long as possible, eventually forming a locally owned and operated poster art ad biz, Directions Company -- by the hippies, for the hippies. Like all good things, that fell through before too long, and the "Armadillo Art Squad" (as most of the local artists who designed posters and handbills for Eddie Wilson's Armadillo World Headquarters were known) fell by the wayside, with the artists receiving less and less money for less and less work. The bottom, apparently, had fallen out.

Cut to the tail end of the Seventies: Punk Rawk explodes, flier art makes a resounding comeback, and Tim Stegall gets his spikey-haired clock cleaned almost daily down south in Alice, Texas. Randy "Biscuit" Turner, head Big Boy and all-around art-upstart proclaims, "Go start your own band! (And while you're at it, why not do your own fliers, too?)" By the early Eighties, Paul "Martian" Sessums, Jr. and Richard "Dicko" Mathers prick up their ears and pull out their Rapid-O-Graphs and do just that. Meanwhile, Flipshades motormouth Frank Kozik skulks around Atomic City and impresses The Artist Formerly Known as Jim Hughes with his startling ability to mimic classic EC Comics art (most notably Wally Wood). For a while, that section of Guadalupe affectionately referred to as "The Drag" is a mind-bending cornucopia of slapdash flier and poster art; Xeroxed handbills and four-color offset poster art vie for attention on every available telephone pole and lightbox. The ground itself is literally covered with flour/sugar/water-pasted exhortations to Go! See! Do!, shrieking at passersby in a delirious riot of gaudy shades.

Then, suddenly, punk dies, Kozik heads out to the City by the Bay (see accompanying story), and everyone chills out while waiting for the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Around this same time, the Austin City Council decides it might be a good idea to deprive a few more people of their artistic livelihood and passes an ordinance making it illegal to place posters of any kind on public property. The old work, inches thick by now, is cautiously peeled from the poles along the drag and nonchalantly tossed in the nearest dustbin. The poster art scene is again in hibernation. Beginning to sense a trend here?

These days, it's tough going for the current crop of Austin poster artists. Lyman Hardy, late of Ed Hall, has resorted to calling poster art "a fine art thing these days," and Jason Austin is desperately craving a move to the more artistically relaxed atmosphere of east of the Atlantic. Longtime scene stalwart Lindsey Kuhn has moved to more profitable shores in the Big D, and former Blondie's scion and heir apparent Craig Oelrich is pulling day shifts at Mama Mia's.

While the San Francisco poster scene has blossomed in the past few years, generating generous payoffs for Kozik, Coop, and others, our sister scene has apparently withered and died on the vine for the third time in as many decades. Remnants of the old days remain: The interior of Danny Young's Texicalli Grill is a virtual time machine, the walls plastered with sun-faded Jukes, Franklins, and Garretts, and the Green Mesquite Barbecue is similarly themed, but all in all, you're far more likely to come across the real deal behind a record-store counter or rounding out the ambience quotient at your local brew pub.

Which asks the question, "What Happened?"