Still and all, Austin was better than most places. For one thing, it boasted a low threshold of survival. In 1969 and again five years later, a Department of Labor study declared Austin the cheapest city of its size in the nation. Back then, you could rent a small house for $50 a month and eat on a dollar a day. That made it easy to follow your muse—“do your own thing,” as it were—a boon to the starving artist. And word got around: From 1970 to 1973, Austin population growth of 4.5 percent a year was second in the nation.

The city’s youthful core provided a defensible perimeter, and Austin soon gained a rep as an oasis of tolerance in all of Texas (as long as you minded your p’s and q’s and didn’t go where you weren’t welcome). A hippie could even get a job working construction, something unheard-of in Texas at the time. And Austin didn’t have the big-city feel, which worked out well, ’cause hippies had entered that “movin’ to the country” pupal phase.

There weren’t a lot of options, of course: Hippies couldn’t countenance the reality presented, and reality wasn’t crazy about them (unless they could pound nails). Hippies were left to find another way, an alternate reality. In the late ’60s–early ’70s, you might say, Austin became a city full of hippies finding themselves, finding what worked for them. This included artists, writers, musicians—the whole range of fanciful spirits—besides your ordinary-but-longhaired folks.

Then, as today, the chief medium was music, as the baby-boomer mob focused on, and coalesced around, the tunes of the time and their pumped-up ideals. A short-lived scene developed in Austin at the Vulcan Gas Company, where you could hear the likes of Conqueroo, Shiva’s Headband, and 13th Floor Elevator, but it succumbed in early 1970. Still, music filled university-area garages, as every hippie who could carry a tune or fake a chord on a guitar hacked away at an “original sound” (for then, as now, Austin prized creativity). Clubs like the Jade Room, Alice’s Restaurant, Chequered Flag, I. L. Club, and One Knite offered a limited number of small venues for those who persevered.