In August 1970...Eddie Wilson and others opened the Armadillo. In addition to Wilson, pivotal figures in the early days included Vulcan Gas Company veterans Jim Franklin and Bobby Hedderman, Shiva's Headband frontman Spencer Perskin, and lawyer Mike Tolleson. Franklin became the club's artistic guru and emcee, living in an apartment he had built just offstage at the venue. Mike Tolleson joined Franklin and Wilson and championed the idea of making the Armadillo not just a concert venue, but a community arts incubator of sorts. Recently returned from London, Tolleson hoped to model the Armadillo after John Lennon's Arts Laboratory, which endeavored to combine film, dance, theater, and music under one roof.

00:33

Bingo

Eddie Wilson

In time, the Armadillo became perhaps the most recognizable representation of the 1970s Austin scene. Other live music venues arose over the decade with their own sub-cultural allegiances-blues and R&B at Antone's, a more locally-oriented progressive country scene at the Soap Creek Saloon, punk at Raul's-but the Armadillo put Austin on the musical map and went far to create the network of performers, audiences, and media that continue to nurture Austin's current musical community.

I'm not sure whether my all-time-favorite night at the Armadillo was watching psychedelic pioneer Roky Erickson share the stage with country-pop crooner Freddy Fender and hometown rocker Doug Salm, seeing a young Jersey kid named Bruce Springsteen for a dollar, watching Emmylou Harris open a show for Commander Cody, hearing the jazz of avant-gardist Ornette Coleman performed by his former associates Old & New Dreams, or listening to Dexter Gordon blow sax like it was meant to be blown. Or maybe it was hearing Van Morrison, or Captain Beefheart, or the Clash jamming with Joe Ely.

00:12

No preconceived notions

Van Morrison, Waylon Jennings, Toots Hibbert

There were no boundaries in the bookings and when punk broke, the Armadillo hosted the Clash, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, B-52s, Elvis Costello, the Ramones and so on. This was also where AC/DC played their first show on American soil, in July ’76. And in 1975 Jimmy Cliff's first stop on his first U.S. tour was Armadillo World Headquarters. It was the only place between the coasts where Carla Bley could get booked. Even George Clinton's Funkedelic commanded the stage.

The day the Grateful Dead made its third appearance at Municipal Auditorium on Nov. 22, 1972, Wilson received a call from Sam Cutler, a former Rolling Stones tour manager who'd been demonized after that band's deadly Altamont Speedway fiasco and later managed the Dead. Cutler asked the Armadillo to feed the band, and the venue's hippie kitchen served them tenderloins with bowls of joints as table centerpieces.

"During dinner, Garcia looked up at the place and said, 'I'd like to play here,'" recalls Wilson. "I said, 'Okay, I can arrange that. When?'

L-R Leon Russell, Sweet Mary Egan, Phil Lesh, Gerry Barnett, Jerry Garcia, Doug Sahm

“We would sit around for hours trying to figure out who we could get to play there that would actually break even or make money,” remembers Mike Tolleson, the Armadillo’s in-house lawyer. Cut off from the national touring circuit, Tolleson had to build connections with New York and L.A. booking agents, “just getting them to recognize [the Armadillo] as being a viable facility in Austin, Texas in those days when bands didn’t want to come to a redneck area.”

00:30

House That Freddie Built

Bruce Willenzik

Freddie King soon changed that perception. Born in tiny Gilmer, Texas, King grew up in Chicago and immersed himself in the blues scene, first sitting in with Howlin’ Wolf’s band at the age of sixteen. He developed an idiosyncratic take on blues guitar, combining Chicago’s electrified sound with a Texan wildness influenced by Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker. His booming voice traded punches with his searing lead guitar licks, sounding like a force of nature.