This week in Texas music history: Armadillo World Headquarters closes

On December 31, 1980, Austin’s iconic Armadillo World Headquarters staged its final concert.

The Armadillo World Headquarters is one of Texas’ most storied venues and arguably the origin of the modern Austin music scene. It opened in August 1970 as a “community arts laboratory,” helped along by psych group Shiva’s Headband’s record deal, seed money from Capitol Records, and the imagination of Shiva’s manager Eddie Wilson and Jim Franklin.

The countercultural denizens of the cavernous ex-armory pieced together weekends of psychedelic rock, blues and folk in the early years, and the place’s reputation slowly grew. Many see Willie Nelson’s first show there in August 1972 as a turning point not just in Willie’s career, but in the birth of a singer-songwriter-y, rock-inflected “progressive country” style that would put Austin on the musical map.

The recording of live albums there by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Freddie King, and Frank Zappa with Captain Beefheart in 1974 and 1975 furthered raised its national profile.

Its arts laboratory ambitions stretched the club thin, though, and Hank Alrich took over and restructured the club on a firmer financial footing after its 1976 bankruptcy – which is ironic, because the biggest challenge the Armadillo faced was perhaps its success, or at least the way that the growth of the Austin scene raised area real estate values. The Armadillo owned the business, but not the land, and it was sold out from under them in 1980.

The last night at the ‘Dillo featured an appropriate bill. There was Kenneth Threadgill, the grand old man of the Austin scene and mentor to Janis Joplin. There were Armadillo favorites Maria Muldaur and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the latter a national act who spent so much time at the Armadillo they might as well have been locals.

And, of course, Asleep at the Wheel led by Ray Benson, the decade’s paragons of western swing revival who have done so much to carry the torch for the Armadillo spirit, poignantly playing Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” as a close to this chapter of the Armadillo’s story as New Year’s Eve passed into New Year’s Day.

Sources:

Ray Benson, Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History fo Asleep at the Wheel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

Eddie Wilson with Jesse Sublett. Armadillo World Headquarters. Austin: TSSI Publishing, 2017.

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.