Above: “On August 7, 1970, a new music venue opened at 525 1/2 Barton Springs Road in Austin. The city would never be the same. The Armadillo World Headquarters.” (“The Armadillo at 40,” KUT.org).

An article published by TIME Magzine on September 9, 1974, entitled “Groover’s Paradise,” recently came to my attention. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Back in the good old days in Austin, Texas, say 1970, a guy could risk trouble for deriding country-and-western music, or merely hollering the words “rock ‘n’ roll.” This was, after all, the ancestral home of Texas Swing, where the Light Crust Doughboys had helped elect a flour salesman, W. Lee O’Danile, Governor in 1938. Even such talented native Texas as Singers Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, blues rockers both, had been forced to head as far away from Austin as possible to make the big time.

That was just four years after the Armadillo World Headquarters opened in the Texas state capital, about a ten-minute drive from where Tracie P and I live now.

This week, KUT.org, the University of Texas at Austin radio station is playing every artist that ever played at the ‘Dillo (as it is affectionately known). And I’m here to tell you, people, that I’m glued to my radio, whether in the car or at home working on my computer.

You can find the stream by visiting KUT.org (9 a.m. – 3 p.m. local time).

My highlights for today were Jerry Jeff Walker’s version of “Mr. Bojangles” and his “London Homesick Blues” (and for guitar geeks out there, Eric Johnson’s early band The Electromagnets).

The title of the TIME Magazine article is culled from one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite Cosmic Cowboys, Doug Sahm, and it ends with a quote from him:

The Armadillo is filled each night night with a curious amalgam of teenagers, aging hippe women in gingham, braless coeds, and booted goat ropers swigging Pearl beer and swinging Stetsons in time to the music. Doug Sahm, a 32-year-old fugitive of San Franciso psychedelia, who sings there regularly, says that “leaving Austin now is like climbing off a spaceship from a magic place.” As he put it in a song, the whole town is a groover’s paradise.

O, man, I can almost smell the doobage wafting up Lamar Blvd.!