In August 1970, almost two years to the day before Michael Murphey composed the song “Cosmic Cowboy” during an engagement at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, Texas’ most fabled dance hall came to life in an old South Austin armory. Named the Armadillo World Headquarters by Jim Franklin and owner Eddie Wilson, it occupies a preeminent place in the hierarchy of Austin entertainment institutions. With its eclectic booking policy and hippie- idealist ideology it launched a substantial musical and cultural movement, the most clearly- defined manifestation of which was the cosmic cowboy phenomenon. In illustrating this movement, the Armadillo artists created a powerful and singularly appropriate iconography that helped to unite performers, flower children, and rednecks in an on-going common celebration. As with Willie Nelson’s 4th of July picnics, the ‘Dillo facilitated a triumph over deep-seated prejudices and an abolition of previously inviolable aural and visual taboos. More significantly to the Austin poster panorama, however, the Armadillo offered artists an inspirational and nurturing environment, a supportive fraternity, and a mission. It became during the Seventies quite possibly the single most important poster patron this side of Haight Ashbury.

In contrast to The Vulcan era posters, which owed much stylistically to their San Francisco brethren, the posters generated for the Armadillo World Headquarters began to evince a homegrown, distinctly Texas style. The ‘Dillo designers, following Franklin’s lead, began to appropriate over-used Western visual clichés, twisting and stretching these traditional symbols into interesting, even subversive, new configurations. Lettering was typically less ornate and “trippy” than the West Coast look. Production costs were kept to a minimum by printing in only one color and by foregoing halftones in favor of crosshatching and stippling. And running consistently throughout the body of work produced for the Armadillo was a pervasive playfulness and irreverence – part of the Shelton/Franklin legacy and in keeping with Texas’ time-honored tongue in cheek tradition.

While Franklin’s influence cannot be overstated, several other important artists emerged during the Armadillo era. After Franklin himself, the most influential of these is Micael Priest, who succeeded Franklin as the Armadillo’s art director. More than any other artist, Priest has captured on posters and handbills the spirit of the cosmic cowboy years. With pieces for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Kinky Friedman, the September 1972 Willie Nelson and Michael (Martin) Murphey concert at the ‘Dillo, and for the 1973 Murphey shows (for which he created an especially tasty illustration of a longhaired mustang rider in space lassoing a comet), Priest has given us a vantage point from which to view a colorful cultural phenomenon. With a fondness for horses, a gift for life-like, action-packed caricature, and a formidable facility for lettering and typography, Priest created the graphic landscape out of which one cannabis-toking cowboy after another stepped into the real world.

De White, better known as Guy Juke, moved to town in 1973, and by 1974 Priest had enlisted his help at the Armadillo. Blessed with an effective mastery of form, an enviable command of color, and an indefatigable imagination, Juke produced some of the finest Armadillo designs. More than any other Austin poster artist, his work exhibits a strikingly broad cross-section of styles – from realistic portraits to Merrie Melodies takeoffs, from old-style ersatz woodcuts to new wave minimalism. Particularly noteworthy is his 1976 series of two dozen or so Butch Hancock handbills displaying an assortment of the many styles at Juke’s disposal and indicating the predisposition Juke has to wry twists and visual puns that rivals Franklin’s own. Juke dominated the Austin poster field during the early Eighties; and his series of colorful screen prints begun about that time and created for the Austin Chronicle Music Awards is worth seeking out.

Kerry Awn, like Shelton, Franklin, Priest, and Juke, has a distinct tendency to comic touches. As Kerry Fitzgerald, he moved to Austin in 1970 in search of Franklin, whose posters for the Armadillo he had seen and admired while living in Houston. Within a year Awn was creating posters for the Armadillo, but it was as a political cartoonist for UT’s “Daily Texan” that he adopted the “nom de guerre” “Kerry Awn.” He tends to a broader, more cartoonish style than most of his ‘Dillo contemporaries; and through his work with the country radio station KOKE-FM he helped visually define the cosmic cowboy/roper doper persona. Although he did work for the Armadillo, Awn is best known for the series of poster calendars he created for Soap Creek Saloon. Surviving a change in ownership and three location shifts, Awn’s calendar series spanned more than a decade. It was inaugurated in February 1974 and the calendars that followed soon gained a reputation for their lusty eccentricity. The first one in the series features an intricate illustration of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s James Gurley, penned from a Bob Seidemann photo that had coincidentally been used as the centerpiece for the 1967 Avalon Ballroom poster FD-48 by Kelley and Mouse.

Rick Turner did few posters for the Armadillo because he found the dominant style too time consuming. Along with Awn and fellow posterist Tom “Tommy Bee” Bauman, Turner journeyed to San Francisco in 1971 to try and sell Shelton’s Rip Off Press an underground comic they’d produced called “Neigborhead”. Unsuccessful, they re-named the book “Austintatious” and published it themselves with help from the Armadillo’s legendary Big Rikki the Guacamole Queen. Turner is responsible for the “Burgers from Heaven” design for Daryl Rhoades & the Hahavishnu Orchestra – a phalanx of hamburgers floating in formation above the Texas State Capitol. This design proved so popular that it was used not only as a poster and an album cover but later reproduced by Turner as a mural in New York’s Max’s Kansas City. Possibly Turner’s most readily identifiable work is that done in the punk collage style. During this period he often collaborated with local artist Debra Ingram (a.k.a. Deb-X and Deb X-it), and their collaborative designs were signed with the anagram “drastic” as seen in their unattributed poster on page 439 of “The Art of Rock”.

Returning home from Vietnam in 1970, Danny Garrett, like Awn, was first introduced to Franklin’s art in Houston. In 1971 he moved to Austin, looked up Franklin almost immediately and jumped headlong into the Austin poster melee, producing a number of exquisitely-crafted posters for the Armadillo. Garrett also worked extensively with Castle Creek and the Austin Opry House. Some of his most memorable and sought-after work may be found in the series of posters he has created for Antone’s, Texas premier blues venue. The delicacy of his pen and ink stippling and his tendency to traditional or classically realistic illustration contrasts sharply with the surrealist tendencies found in many of the other Austin posterists. In his most recent posters for Antone’s, Garrett has favored black prismacolor on coquille.

One of the most gifted young artists drawn to the Armadillo World Headquarters was Ken Featherston, who had grown up in Corpus Christi with ‘Dillo muralist Henry Gonzalez. Though he worked predominantly with delicate stippling and crosshatching, Featherston occasionally combined airbrush and pen and ink techniques in a single piece. His work often has a gentle, spiritual feel to it. Among his most well-known designs are the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Searchin’ For a Rainbow” album cover, and the illustration of an ethereal locomotive floating above its tracks in the star-spangled blackness of space, which he created for Austin’s archetypal head shop, Oat Willies. Tragically, in 1975, after working security for a Pointer Sisters show at the Armadillo, Ken Featherston was shot and killed by a deranged patron.

Cliff Carter, Bill Narum, and Sam Yeates were also valuable artists on the Armadillo roster. Carter moved to town in 1971 and produced several posters for the ‘Dillo, including three colorful Balcones Fault pieces. His primary contribution to the venue, however, was as head recording engineer from 1973 until its closing in 1980. Narum was born in Austin and raised in Houston; he began producing posters in junior high. During the late Sixties he worked with Houston’s underground newspaper “Space City News”, and was active as a poster artist and political cartoonist. Narum returned to Austin in the early Seventies and produced several posters for the Armadillo. His most well-known designs are the album covers he created for ZZ Top. Beginning in June 1988, Narum produced a series of designerly poster calendars for the popular Austin nightspot the Continental Club; and most recently he has specialized in art for LPs, CDs, and cassettes. Sam Yeates graduated from North Texas State in 1974 with a degree in drawing and painting, and then moved to Austin with the intention of attending graduate school. The ‘Dillo intervened and he was wooed away from academic life and into postering. One of his most spectacular pieces was created for a Bob Seger concert. He brought the art, rendered in pencil on cold press illustration board, to printer Terry Raines and together, by using a split fountain technique and running the poster through the press from top to bottom and then from side to side, they engineered a very powerful effect. The finished poster features the head of a tiger, “a la” Ringling Brothers glaring at the viewer out of a ferocious vortex of red and orange, mouth open and the curling neck of a guitar for a tongue.