A hippie history of the ’60s and ’70s in Austin and the emergence of an Austin Sound would have to center on the Armadillo World Headquarters. True, the Vulcan Gas Company, Soap Creek Saloon, One Knite, and others all played a part. But our first wave of honky-tonk heroes to storm the nation came via the funky old Dillo. The highest and mightiest took the Willie Way to Wall Street, and the cream of the New York social set promenaded in boots and cowboy hats. In fact, if you listen to some old longhairs, you’d think that Austin mellow played a role in nationwide reconciliation following a decade of total war between hippie and redneck, young and old.

The split was ugly, a fiercesome battle with hideous atrocities on both sides. Of course, to hear conservative revisionists tell it, the “Lost Generation” was the misbegotten spawn of hedonism, a godless bunch of Charles Manson druggies. Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh share an affinity for this approach.

But this is hippie revisionism, which yields to the obvious, minor point: A lot of people were into the ’60s just for the sex and drugs. There are obsessives for every vice—sex, booze, drugs, dogma. (It’s like the drunk who says, “I know my limit. I just keep passing out before I get to it.”) They’re the ones who get the press.

On the other hand, a ’60s argument could be made for escaping the reality of the times. The powers-that-be weren’t exactly covering themselves in glory then. Confidence in our leaders took a freefall after the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed and the country dug deeper into a bloody, protracted war in Vietnam. Madcaps Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew followed, then Watergate, Kent State, the My Lai massacre.

On through the ’70s, a surreal series of events defined the status quo: Tricia Nixon deciding on a rose-garden wedding with her Harvard beau; Alexander Haig saying the missing 18 minutes on the Nixon tape were due to a sinister force; 20 prisoners and 10 hostages dying in the Attica Prison riot, all from police fire; Martin Luther King’s mother shot to death while playing the organ in an Atlanta church; Nixon resigning, then Ford pardoning him a month later; Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee, caught cavorting in the Tidal Basin with stripper Fanny Fox; Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz saying that “blacks were interested only in good sex, loose shoes, and a warm place to defecate”; Three Mile Island nuclear plant melting down.