A very good case could be made that the Armadillo World Headquarters (1970–81) was the most influential single element in Austin’s musical ascendancy. Eddie Wilson does just that in his valuable new memoir, Armadillo World Headquarters, appropriately titled because it really isn’t about his life, but about the colossus he birthed. Almost every page is a witness to history, an invaluable reference to the all-but-unbelievable chain of famous acts that took to the Armadillo stage, from blues to country to rock to punk. I mean, really, name a storied musician and there’s a damn good chance Eddie booked him or her. 

The Dillo, also known by its initialism AWHQ, defined a cultural time that, in Wilson’s phrase, forged the “connective tissue” to virtually all that followed, from Austin City Limits to South by Southwest. Its very existence was a relentless drive of daring, diversity, and virtuosity. Along the legendary path, it gathered adventurous and hungry allies from the ranks of the great bluesmen and rockers to country rednecks and psychedelic explorers, all under the ever-watchful eyes of reactionary police, narcs, and troopers. In case after case, even putative foes were transformed by the Dillo’s hard-working hippies into truces and mutual respect unimaginable today. 

Wilson’s account is for anyone interested not just in the performances, but in the backstory—the weird or ugly behind-the-scenes business of booking acts, pampering celebrities, and figuring out who gets paid what. Wilson offers numerous anecdotes, whether picking up Jerry Lee Lewis on the tarmac of the old Mueller Airport or facing down gun-toting managers and rowdies with ZZ Top or even Willie’s crowd. He lets us know those he liked and those he didn’t. 

Resonant with careful research by Wilson and writer/musician Jesse Sublett, Armadillo World Headquarters is for anyone who wants to remember, or discover, the core of what Austin represented before it got too pretentious for its britches. The archival photos and poster reproductions alone are worth the price of admission. 

In the book’s preface, Dave Richards, the great attorney and former husband of Gov. Ann Richards, sums up the larger meaning of the Dillo as well as anyone. I’ll leave that to him. 

I’d like to suggest another optic. Wilson’s book, though not saying so outright, is really a testament to the theory, developed by Karl Marx and others and borne out constantly, that a culture is the reflection of the economic forces that produce it. The superstructure bells and whistles of the so-called “live music capital of the world” as we know it would not have generated without the structural muscle and foundation of the Armadillo. It, in turn, would not have existed without the hard labor and sacrifice of Wilson and the many idealists and dreamers who joined him. It was that crew, a kind of informal, tempest-tossed, creative counterculture commune, that did the financing, the operating, the tearing down, building up, the managing of a huge and truly awful Quonset hut of a building just south of the river that had been a gutted-out national guard armory. 

While it is true that places like the Vulcan Gas Company and other venues helped clear the path, and are duly recognized in the memoir, the Dillo’s incubator status is based on simple persistence. It survived against crushing odds at a crucial time. Every musician who came to Austin to slay or fail on the Dillo’s stage did so because the stage existed. Nothing else in the city, wonderful and cherished as it might have been, came close to providing that power and focus, and likely never will. 

Wilson left the Armadillo in late 1976, though it hung on until 1981 when financial luck, pluck, and bucks finally ran out. Later it was razed and replaced with other businesses. Wilson went on to found more Austin icons. First came the Raw Deal, where I had many a pickled okra and many a longneck. Then Wilson created his current food and music empire out of Kenneth Threadgill’s old place on North Lamar, expanding it to a much larger version, Threadgill’s World Headquarters, on the same lot that once held the Dillo. 

Ever the hippie-who-tempts-business, Wilson published this memoir through his own brand, TSSI Publishing, which is a part of Threadgill’s, and got UT Press to distribute. In today’s book business, that’s not a bad move and anticipates larger future options. It also keeps creative control in Austin, where it started, and nothing could be more Eddie Wilson.