Things fell quiet for several years. The Vulcan was long since a faded memory, the Armadillo was on its last legs, and the poster art scene seemed effectively dead. It took another musical revolution and a twisted new breed of artists to shake things up, which is exactly what happened. Punk rock invaded not just New York and Los Angeles, but also Austin, birthing Raul's on the Drag, and bands as diverse as the Next, the Skunks, and the Big Boys. As suddenly as they had vanished, the posters were backtaped, stapled, glued, and smashed onto every available (and unavailable) surface.

Things fell quiet for several years. The Vulcan was long since a faded memory, the Armadillo was on its last legs, and the poster art scene seemed effectively dead. It took another musical revolution and a twisted new breed of artists to shake things up, which is exactly what happened. Punk rock invaded not just New York and Los Angeles, but also Austin, birthing Raul's on the Drag, and bands as diverse as the Next, the Skunks, and the Big Boys. As suddenly as they had vanished, the posters were backtaped, stapled, glued, and smashed onto every available (and unavailable) surface.

Fritz Blau, who runs the Motorblade postering company, remembers, "Postering as a punk rocker for bands I was a fanatic about. Without them even knowing about it, I would go and create a poster for the Standing Waves or the Next or whoever, and just go out and put it up on my own like a lot of idiots did back then."

Priest remembers the sudden influx of new art vividly: "About the time we all thought [poster art] was going to die, here come the Xerox kids. This was around the late Seventies, the time of Raul's and the punk rock kids. They took it to an even more homegrown level than we had, because they would make 'em themselves without any fear of ever being paid for them. They'd make five or six or 10 or however many Xerox copies they could afford with what little money they had in their pockets, and go out and staple them up just to promote the shows. And I went yeah, because it finally got back to where it started from, you know? All we were ever trying to do was get across to people that rock & roll was supposed to be a participatory sport, a spectator sport. The more people there, the better."

For want of a better term, many people -- collectors, fans, etc. -- view this late Seventies/early Eighties tumult as the beginning of "The Kozik Years" (see accompanying story). There were plenty of others working at the time, notably Martian Sessums and Richard "Dicko" Mathers, both of whom played in the nascent Oi! band Criminal Crew and spent their days hanging out on the front stoop of Atomic City with Jim "Straight Edge" Copenhaver and Kozik.

Love him or hate him, though (or both, as most people do), Frank Kozik revolutionized postering in Austin and beyond, taking it off the street and holding his work and that of his contemporaries up for validation. There was a dawning realization that this poster art could trigger some serious cash flow. It had value, merit, and above all, financial worth. To this day many people in the art community resent the fact that Kozik apparently stumbled over this seemingly obvious truism and in the process became the most successful modern poster artist anyone had ever seen.

Priest: "Kozik did the poster that got banned by UT. It was Joseph and Mary barbecuing in their aprons with the baby Jesus on the grill, and it said, `Everyone serves the Lord in his own way.' So the University of Texas bans the poster, and they then ended up running it on the cover of the Daily Texan, distributing thousands of copies all over the world just to show everyone what they didn't want anyone to see! [laughing] That made us kind of proud of Frank.

"Through the Club Foot era, Frank and Andy Blackwood, Paul Sabal, and another fellow started the Art Maggots [a poster artist collective], and they were doing a similar thing to what we had done with the Armadillo a decade before. "To a great extent, their arrival meant that we didn't have to bust our asses and try and make a living doing this anymore because we had viable replacements now. For a long time, we probably did it because it still needed doing and there was no one else to do it. But with Martian, and Jason Austin, and those guys, when they came on the scene, it really made it fun and exciting again."

And then, towards the end of the decade, the process repeated itself, winding down under the weight of its own inertia as the Austin poster scene dried up once again -- right about the time Green Day started getting attention from people other than Lawrence Livermore (make your own judgment call on the implications...).