Back in Austin, Jim Franklin had taken over as artist in residence at The Vulcan. After brief stints in San Francisco and New York, Texas-born Franklin was lured to Austin in the mid- Sixties by a chance encounter in Galveston with some of the “Ranger” crowd, including Travis Rivers and Bob Simmons. Soon after his arrival he helped open The Vulcan Gas Company. Much less inclined to imitate the prevalent San Francisco style than his peers were, Franklin began to evolve a distinctly Texas poster look through his de-emphasis on stylized lettering, and his pen and ink renderings rife with crosshatching, absurd juxtapositions, and an army of beatific armadillos. Contrary to popular belief, however, he was not the first to use the armadillo as a symbol of counter culture puckishness; after a prank letter convinced a faculty overseer that any armadillo appearing in a college publication suggested something perverse, Glenn Whitehead and Robert A. Burns had liberally sprinkled ‘dillos throughout the “Ranger”, beginning in 1966 with the tastefully tardy “Late October” issue. Nonetheless, it was Franklin who populated posterdom with an unending parade of the lovable local mammalian worm-eaters. He floated them over highways, orbited them in space, squeezed them from tubes of acrylic paint, and mated one with the State Capitol Building. Though not all of Franklin’s illustrations contain armadillos posed compliantly in unorthodox positions, his penchant for surrealist satire is inescapable, as in the ’71 Flying Burrito Brothers poster in which he’s depicted Wilbur and Orville launching a heavier-than-air craft with colossal enchiladas for wings. From the late Sixties through the Seventies and into the Eighties, Franklin was a major force in Texas music art, and when he’s in town he still produces the occasional street art drollery.

After his first exposure to the psychedelic art movement during a San Francisco trip in 1967, Lubbock-born Jim Harter returned to Texas and was recruited by Franklin for Vulcan poster duty. His work from that period often features extensive psychedelic-style lettering and a simple photo, as with two of his nicest pieces – Poco and the Texas Rangers. One of his designs appears uncredited on page 248 of Paul Grushkin’s “The Art of Rock”. Moving to San Francisco in ’74, Harter, who is primarily a collagist, sought out and became friends with Wilfried Satty and David Singer. Since then he’s traveled extensively and published several collections of visionary collages, as well as a popular series of engraving source books for Dover Publications.

Several other artists designed posters and handbills for The Vulcan, including Tony Bell, John Shelton (no relation), Don Evans, and Robert Rush. In the three years it was open, The Vulcan Gas Company played host to scores of local bands, and touring acts from Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Turner, and Canned Heat to Moby Grape, the Fugs, and the Velvet Underground. Yet mid 1970 saw The Vulcan close its doors for good. There was little time to mourn the loss of this seminal alternative venue, however, because in three months, just across the river, the Armadillo World Headquarters would begin its breathtaking ten-year run.

One poster artist, uncommon by even Austin standards, is Robert A. Burns, who produced 135 posters during the late Sixties and early Seventies, not one of which was for The Vulcan or the Armadillo. No longer an active posterist today, he is best known for his work with fellow Austinite Tobe Hooper, and as production designer and art director on films like “The Howling”, URe-AnimatorU, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, and “The Hills Have Eyes”. As a student at the University of Texas, Burns was introduced to screen printing in the Drama Department. He was supervisor of the “Ranger” during its last two years, and eventually created a poster and design business which he dubbed “the RH Factor.” Deliberately bucking the prevailing style of the day, his hand-cut screen-printed posters have a clean, mainstream feel that makes them unique among the posters produced during these psychedelic and cosmic cowboy years.