"The Vulcan Gas Company was really the first place in Texas of its kind," says Jim Franklin through a mouthful of Thai buffet. "It had light shows, music -- it was a psychedelic haven. We booked original music, no copy bands, which was the big thing at the time. The Vulcan was why I started doing poster art in the first place."

According to just about everyone involved, Franklin is the grandaddy of Austin's poster art scene. Back in the mid-Sixties, the twentysomething artist was ready to pull up stakes inGalveston and head east to New York. The Beats were strong then, hippies were just making their presence known, and Texas, Franklin thought, was a little too unappreciative of what he had in mind. Before the planned move, however, on a trip to the Gulf Coast, Franklin ran into a group of Austin artists and quickly revised his plans. Why travel all that way to the snowy climes of New York when Austin -- with a suddenly intriguing art scene of its own -- was so much closer to home?

Scrapping his original idea, Franklin came to Austin and before long found himself doing poster work for the nascent Vulcan Gas Company. "Gilbert Shelton did the original posters for the Vulcan," recalls Franklin, "but when he moved to San Francisco with the Freak Brothers, that kind of left me to fill the void. It was pretty much all left in my lap. I'd sit up all night, draw a poster, and take it to the printer. I never had to pacify anybody, and that was really one of the magical things about that time.

"[Doing music posters] was a way for me to overcome my loathing of advertising by turning the advertising around into a point of celebration rather than promotion. Celebrating the music with a piece of art." Payment was arranged by the Vulcan in the form of studio space for Franklin. "I was the artist in residence, literally, in the Vulcan building. The $10 a week they gave me was not good enough -- even in the Sixties -- to rent a space, so they just let me live and work out of the building. I was, oh, 24 at the time, and it was cool. No bosses, we were contradicting everything, and I was making art without having to attend the University of Texas. My art was all over town. In fact, someone who was teaching art at UT told me once that there was a discussion in the faculty lounge about whether or not I had attended UT, and somebody said, `Well, not only did he attend UT, he taught here, too.' Which of course wasn't true at all."

During his tenure at the Vulcan, Franklin hit upon an inspired idea that has followed him (and the Austin music scene itself) to this very day: the armadillo. "I had a little handbook of zoology of North America," recalls Franklin, "and it had a painted illustration of an armadillo in it. I was looking at that one day, and I thought the armadillo would be the perfect symbol for what I was doing. So, I drew one smoking a joint for a free concert in Woolrich Park. And that's what launched the whole deal. I started drawing them and it became kind of a theme. I got responses, everyone connected with it, you know. They got the connection between the hippie and the armadillo, so I started drawing them fairly frequently and it just continues from there."

Continues is one way to put it. Checking out the eaves outside Eddie Wilson's new Threadgill's location on Riverside Drive (conveniently located on the sight of the old Armadillo World Headquarters) makes it seem like more of a community obsession. Those little, plated weasels are all over this town, their corpses littering the highway outskirts. Franklin, I think, had no idea what he was starting.

Neither did Micael Priest, who entered the scene post-Vulcan, pre-Armadillo. Priest arrived in Austin for the same reason most young people do -- to attend UT. Here, he found The Rag, Austin's underground weekly newspaper, then being published out of the basement of an abandoned YMCA on the Drag. Franklin and Danny Garrett had already tried their hands doing covers and illustrations for the mag, so Priest figured he might as well give it a shot, too. "In 1969," he says, "we had the first explosion of pop festivals, where you could see all these acts on one bill for a $7 or $8 ticket. There was one of these festivals outside of Dallas, which I went to, and it was there I found an issue of The Rag with a Franklin cover; it was all pen and ink with billions of armadillos from the foreground all the way to the horizon. This was a lot like the kind of stuff I'd been doing, and I said, `Hey man, I can do that.'

"Jim Franklin was kind of the guy who showed us that you didn't have to play guitar to be a star. A lot of the early Armadillo posters that Jim Franklin did were just handbills, but there were a couple -- Janis Joplin in San Antonio and so on -- that were done with really psychedelic, mutually contrasting colors. But that was real expensive to do, and in those days they didn't do shows very often, so they could kind of afford to mount a pretty good promotion."

This being 1969, everyone's memories are a little, uh, foggy about exact dates, but at some point that year, Franklin, Priest, Garrett, Juke, Michael Osborne, and others combined their talents and formed what amounted to the first hippie advertising agency.

"We were the first alternative ad agency, and we were all just young guys," says Priest. "The oldest guy in the company was 24, the youngest 19. We handled alternative businesses -- Oat Willie's, the Armadillo, all the underground businesses. While we set out to be the first hippie ad agency, we in fact became the first hippie savings and loan, thanks to the fact that we had to extend 90 days credit to everyone. Everybody owed us money, and eventually we went out of business. The Directions Company broke up in 1974.

"The perception all around the country," Priest continues, "was that in Austin, the art was just as important as the music. When you put the two together, it really made big, serious juju magic. That was because the audience was introduced to the act before they ever got there. Our job was to take some of the experiences of the music into places where you couldn't hear it.

"You have to remember, at that time, most of those acts were not getting played on the radio at all. Maybe in the middle of the night, on KUT, and there would be brief stints where stations would try and do some progressive programming, but invariably they'd get slapped down by the numbers and the commercial aspect, right? "For most of its history, Austin has had incredible live music and no radio supporting it. Except for the hardasses at KUT, you know? They always managed to get some in there and boy, were they proud of it. And we owe 'em, because how else were you going to get to hear new music if it didn't get played on the radio? You couldn't go to the record store and even hope to play a sample of everything that came in. There was just too much, and even then you're the only one who gets to hear it. So the posters really made a difference, and as the media began to catch up, they weren't as necessary, but clubowners still thought they were a nice touch. And the bands enjoyed it a lot."

Art and commerce rarely mix -- this was as true then as it remains now. The money just wasn't coming in for the amount of work the artists were doing. Franklin: "At first [when I started], you're anticipating a future, you know? You get responses to the artwork, people love it, and you think that sooner or later the money's going to come your way. But then you just end up becoming aware that you're just another - and I hate to use the term -- nigger in the field."

Franklin still bridles at the less-than-thrilling monetary rewards. "After so many years of inspired creative activity, seeing no payoff from it, and finding that the few places that are willing to pay you today are only going to pay the same price that we should've gotten back in the Sixties, well, again, the artist is the nigger of the publishing business."

"As far as the advertising aspect of it," says Garrett, "it ceased to be an effective advertising medium before the show or for the venue in general a long time ago. When I started at the Armadillo years ago, there really was no way to promote a show; they didn't have much money, and there was no radio promotion. Posters were a good, cheap way to do it.

"It was something that people could relate to, because of that San Francisco connection. After the Armadillo got better off financially, the dynamic of the whole thing changed a lot - it became more cost-effective to put ads in the paper or even on the radio. But the days are long gone -- probably since, say, 1977 -- that posters were an effective form of advertising."

"Over time," recalls Priest, "it got littler and littler and skinnier and skinnier, and posters would only come out for the really big shows, and then on top of that you'd have hell just trying to collect all your money. We loved doing it and being a part of it, but after a while, it just became impossible to make a living at it."