Armadillo Man: The Trips of Jim Franklin

- T for Texas.

(people cheering) Thursday Greezy Wheels, Friday and Saturday Mr.

Freddie King.

- [Nakia] Jim is like a living, walking piece of art.

Most people every night saw Jim on stage.

Most people every day passed Jim's posters.

He's just this guy who has so much amazing stuff inside of his head, and he figured out at a young age how to put it into art, and we're all better for it.

(upbeat rock music) - [Jim] It's amazing what will happen in a town this size.

They respond so well I just don't know if I can stand it.

(audience cheering) Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Some of this acrylic sometimes gets real set up in the tube and doesn't want to flow as a paint when it comes out.

It's like its own object.

I'm not your liquid.

Go find another liquid.

That's what it's saying to me right now.

- [Leea] Austin would not be the place it is today without him.

I think that he is actually the original person who made Austin weird, and I'm not sure I love that word, but unusual, and unexpected, and delightful, free thinking.

- [Billie] Yep, that's the OG, and it's just so simple and so brilliant.

The armadillos on the world.

Yeah, and I guess that is why it's, you know, he's one of the best 'cause I'm still to this day finding things out about his art - [Jim] My father never looked at my work.

He went fishing and hunting.

He didn't know how to compliment me.

He didn't know how to get the best out of me, which every kid wants from their parent.

No response.

The year I got outta high school I went to San Francisco.

San Francisco was, you know, an attraction magnetic point in the country for progressive thinking based around the Art Institute, I was there for a year.

The first day of the class, all the other guys and girls were standing terrified in front of their easel, and I was painting away because I'd been painting since the first grade, and by the time I was in junior high, I could do Rembrandt.

It was so good my parents thought it was normal.

At the end of that year, my family wouldn't hear it.

My father wasn't supporting me anymore.

He didn't realize that I was well advanced as an artist.

He didn't understand anything about art, and that's one part he didn't understand about me.

So I was in San Francisco on the streets without any support.

Then I realized, you know, I can live cheaper in Texas, and so I came back to Texas and I was living cheaper, and painting, and having big studio spaces in those old buildings in Galveston, but I was lonely.

I didn't have anyone who understood what I was doing, you know?

I came to Austin on the recommendation of someone that I met in Galveston on the beach.

Fell into a pretty creative group of people and there was a lot of stimulation.

Some friends of mine had worked around bands and started producing concerts, and then eventually opened the Vulcan Gas Company.

Gilbert Shelton at the time was doing posters for them.

After a few months, Gilbert went to California and I took over his job doing the posters.

- I had found a handbook on the animals of Texas, and there was one page with I think it was a drawing of an armadillo.

The way the armadillo has survived all these millennia is by looking like a watermelon with a snake under it.

Who's gonna mess with a watermelon if there's a snake under it?

The tail looks exactly like a snake.

I was asked to do a hand bill for a, you know, drug bust benefit, and that armadillo was on my table so I just did a drawing of it smoking a joint in possession of a matchbox of pot, which is $5 worth at the time.

Overnight it caught on.

All the beatniks were looking at armadillos and smoking pot.

They got the message.

Turned them on, and I turned the armadillo on.

(gentle bluesy music) The armadillo has this romance with the highway.

You know, it's the only thing that really undoes an armadillo is the highway.

In this one, I've got the armadillos getting his revenge.

He's eating the tire instead of being hit by the tire.

- [Leea] They're everywhere in Texas, but, you know, they're like, they're nocturnal.

They don't see well, they avoid confrontation, they live in burrows, they really get to do whatever they want without many people noticing.

So did we.

- [Spencer] 1969 we were starting a record label, and so I ran down to the Vulcan Gas Company to ask Jim Franklin to design me an armadillo label.

He was at the time working on an armadillo comic book that he had all spread on the wall, and he had a live armadillo in the bathroom there that he was using for a model.

- [Jim] By the time the Vulcan Gas Company closed, we decided that the new place, you know, should have the name armadillo, some form of the word armadillo.

- [Videographer] Howdy, this must be armadillo.

(people cheering) - [Jim] There is a paradise.

Take a look at it.

Armadillo World headquarters.

Music, beer, food, a lot of people in the afternoon, and of course we have an abundance of armadillo mythology to keep you from feeling isolated.

- [Bobby] Jim Franklin and I the last two weeks the Vulcan Company was open, opened up a bank account under the name of Armadillo Gas Company in order to keep some money away from other people that were trying to get at it.

- [Jim] It was Eddie Wilson, Spencer Perskins of Shiva's Headband, and I were the principals that were gonna expand the Vulcan Gas Company.

- [Bobby] They found the building and came up with the name Armadillo World Headquarters we were trying to improve on the Vulcan, bringing in talent that wasn't what you see on your regular TV show or perhaps what you find in your regular rock and roll club.

Count Basie, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Charlie Daniels, Bruce Springsteen, Dr.

John, Leon Redbone, Ravi Shankar, Pointer Sisters, Frank Zappa.

- [Jim] We were putting it on ourselves.

It was our deal.

People understood that.

They got the feeling from it 'cause we're believing what we're doing.

You know, we're championing the music.

- Thank you very much.

(audience cheers) - [Jason] Keep Austin Weird beco such a kind of a stale and easily satirized slogan, but to understand the roots of it is to look at Jim Franklin as an emcee.

- [Jim] And on the 25th of Janua which is a Friday night, the one and only Waylon Jennings.

(audience cheers) (horn toots) [Nakia] You've got Jim Franklin introducing the bands in a cape and an armadillo on his head, and imagine being someone who was just visiting Austin and walked into that, you know, and how transformative that must have been because this was not an area where this was what people were known for.

- [Eddie] Nothing about the place made sense, but you had characters that assumed roles.

- [Jim] Pan American International Intergalactic Transportation Systems are anxious to announce the arrival of Zizka, Queen of the Nile.

- [Leea] He typically would have some sort of costumery on, he had a piece of conduit piping that he would play like a horn, and he would talk through it and introduce the bands.

- [Jim] Welcome to the fourth year of the Armadillo World Headquarters.

(patrons cheering) - [Announcer] Thousands of demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam War assembled in the nations capital for a mass protest.

- [Jim] At that time, the Vietnam War was the biggest sin in American history, and we were trying to correct it We who were opposed to it and were doing, we wanted art to take the place of this military, mindset that they had locked us in with.

- [Leea] There's nothing like a direct drawing that lets you in on what's going on.

Jim's piece that's called "Cross-breeding", that's the armadillo humping the Capitol.

People get the message.

- [Jason] Texas at the time, lik like for most of its history, was a quite conservative place.

The kinds of coloring outside the lines that Jim Franklin did was not po In fact, it was completely resisted.

Symbolized by things like long hair, like it's something as simple as that.

Long hair on men put them outside the bounds of the community, and it sounds like a really simple thing, but this notion of like, who belongs, who fits, who participates, who speaks.

That's the lightning rod of the 1960s.

- [Nakia] I don't feel like I ever really came out until I moved to Austin, and the reason that that is a possibility is because of the culture that had been created and cultivated by the time that I got here.

- [Jim] I wasn't gay growing up.

I was attracted to guys.

If I was lucky, I had some experiences.

That wasn't the thing I did.

I did art and I just happened to like ******.

(chuckles) You know, so what's the big deal?

The vibes went out, the message went out, and ladies and gentlemen, tonight, you're gonna see some magic.

- The thing that really sets the Armadillo World Headquarters apart from so many other like classic venues was the poster artists.

- [Micael] For a long time up until a business is able to afford radio advertising, probably the most effective thing they can do, especially for entertainment-oriented business, is hand bills and posters that are put out on the streets, are handed out by people, you know, person to person.

- [Jason] It's not one artist, it's not two artists.

It is a collective of artists who come to be called the Armadillo Art Squad.

Each of them with their distinct styles, but they're in kind of the broad sense of this Texas counterculture.

- [Leea] Jim's responsible for the art squad.

They all came to the club to spend time with him and do the same things that he was doing.

- [Nakia] Those artists, especially Jim, really created the mythology of what we know to be the reason that Austin is so cool.

Sure Willie was here and the, you know, Armadillo World Headquarters, all those things were here, but Jim was literally putting out the imagery of all of it.

- [Jim] My work was going up around the state in these towns that didn't have a scene, or a club or anything like that, but they knew the poster world.

They saw it.

- [Danny] I went down to the Armadillo and went up and found you there, and that's where you were working on the Mother Earth poster.

- [Jim] Oh yeah, and so I said, "Here, try this."

So that was your first poster that became your whole career.

- Yeah, yeah, Juke came in later, right?

- '72.

- Yeah, yeah, I think I met you just prior to you going up to Leon Russell's.

- Leon wanted me to paint all of the rooms in the guest house where the musicians were gonna be staying when they were out there.

He wanted to make an environment that would make people wanna stay there instead of driving in from Tulsa They built a studio, recording studio.

The pool was right outside the entrance door.

So I saw the swimming pool and I thought, man, I wanna paint that.

[Jason] Later people will frame him as like a poster artist or an underground comics artist, and he always kicks back at that because for him, that was just one channel of this larger field of creativity that was rooted in a classicism that he took seriously.

- [Jim] My first success with a drawing, I had lost my notebook.

My father takes me to Galveston.

He wanted to introduce me to horses, and the rump was the first thing I noticed.

That massive contours.

The next day, the teacher came around before the notebook period and put a piece of poster board down for us to draw anything we wanted, so I drew that horse with a view from the rear.

Those contours were easy to remember.

I was completely electrified by this experience.

So I remembered every aspect of that horse, and the teacher comes by and she says, "James, you just keep working on that."

And so I didn't have to confess to losing my notebook.

Not only did I discover that I could draw, but I also discovered it could save my ass.

And so from then on, I was an artist.

Oh man, this is a good book.

I've seen a lot of these paintings before, but not all of them.

You know, how can you not be interested in something so dynamic?

You know, it just draws you in.

- [Jason] Jim Franklin educated himself in art history at a very high and traditional level, right?

He wanted to know the masters, and what they did, and how they did it.

- [Jim] We had one art book in our elementary school library called "Famous Paintings", and a beautiful collection of the classics of Western painting, and I kept it checked out, turn it back in, check it out.

I wasn't copying their paintings but I was emulating them.

I was learning it from them.

- [Billie] I always love coming across his paintings.

Oh, there's a Jim, a figurative.

This might be charcoal, but with the crosshatching, the chiaroscuro, which is the really light next to the really dark, which he does in both styles.

You can see the foreground has a really light edge next to the darkness, which is kind of the same.

Almost exactly the same composition here.

Imagine that was his head.

- [Jim] This is mine.

It is fine art.

You know, I was not a poster artist.

You know, I had rejected, totally rejected commercial art.

- [Leea] He has accepted a few commissions along the way, but he's never bowed down to the bourgeois money machine.

- If I'll agree to do some project, I'll usually say, don't make any suggestions.

I'll do your poster, but don't make any suggestions because you might suggest exactly what I'm thinking, and if you do, I won't use it.

If my idea is too easy for somebody else to pick up on with just a couple of elements of it, then it's too easy.

- [Videographer] Mr.

West.

Wild, wild.

- I was taking mescalin and peyote.

We were anticipating the arrival of some LSD, and sure enough, it did arrive.

I was high on the new LSD and wind up in the hands of a policeman and they wanted to see my ID.

Well, you gotta present it to them.

So I unzipped my pants and presented my ID.

(laughs) They called my mother and she drove up from Texas City and picked me up, and so I stayed down there for a couple of months really.

The electroshock is supposed to wipe out your memories.

You know, in my case, they were wanting to erase my memory of the LSD that I had acquired.

I had 18 of those shock treatments.

What I wanted to do was come back to Austin and reconnect what had happened before I left.

Although I didn't know, I didn't remember exactly where it was that I wanted to go.

Well, it's a small world, but it's no longer a small town.

I can tell you that.

I used to say what one of the things I like about Austin is that you can walk out of town in 15 minutes, and it's kind of still that way, but, you know, you better be driving if you're leaving town.

This one big curving structure's been empty since it was built.

Why don't they give me a studio up in there?

You know, I could do paintings until they rent it out.

But I guess they don't value art that much.

It's just a pastime for people who don't have anything to do.

- [Eddie] On one level, Armadillo is shared by over a hundred people as a job with some pretty strange working conditions and some pretty low wages.

- [Bruce] It's been horrible pay.

In fact, I don't think anybody would work for these wages for anybody else but Armadillo.

But people love this place.

Nobody works here for the money.

Everybody works here because they believe in what they do here, they believe in what Armadillo is.

Back in the winter of '77, '78, we missed 13 outta 18 paychecks and nobody quit.

People were getting evicted from their places moving into the building, we were giving away free beans and bread.

But nobody quit.

- [Jim] The amount of money that we were able to do without and still make all that stuff happen is almost unbelievable.

You know, it was so low, low budget that it was almost no budget.

I think that's one of the things that made it so meaningful to people.

You know, I mean, it's not just like another club that's going out of business.

- [Jim] The Armadillo stood over there.

You can see the backside of the Armadillo, that white wall, that was the actual building.

- [Jason] The Armadillo World Headquarters closes for a reason that many venues close.

It's about real estate.

Venue owners over time have come to realize that owning the piece of land that the venue is on is the really important thing for survival.

(bulldozer revving) - [Charlie] Armadillo's a special place to play.

There's no doubt about it.

When they put that few inches of asphalt over the top of this place, they'll be burying something it'll be a long time before anybody ever realizes what they buried.

- [Bruce] I've had a lot of fun in Austin since the '70s and Jim Franklin and the Armadillo World headquarters.

(instrument droning) - [Jim] Are you ready?

(audience cheers) Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

(Jim growling) Are you ready for Freddie King?

(audience cheers) - [Jason] These ideas of authenticity were so important to the '60s counterculture, and at the heart of a lot of those was a perceived tension between art and commerce not wanting these establishment figures and institutions being able to dictate your own creativity.

- [Jim] I wanted the galleries to come to me basically.

I didn't wanna go pursuing that, you know, because I didn't wanna paint for sale.

You know, I wanted to paint what I wanted to see, and it didn't matter for me about sales.

I mean, it would've been nice if I could have sold something.

I mean, I would've been, you know, really pleased by it, but it was not gonna be, you know, something I was seeking.

I'd kind of developed an esoteric approach that sales was not hip.

- [Nakia] He's one of those people that truly sees the world through his own lens, and it's one of the things that really sets him apart as a real true artist.

There are so many people today who use that word artist to describe themselves.

Very few people who actually live an artist's life the way that Jim has lived his.

- [Jason] Jim Franklin really did want to make the work and have it exist in the world in this old romantic sense, and again, this is almost this him being steeped in a longer history of fine art, or at least dating back to like 19th century romanticism.

That idea of the artist as a person existing in this pure world of creativity, and as much as it might seem impractical, there's no reason not to respect that.

- [Jim] How many millions of people live without doing anything creative except reproducing.

Good thing that I was persistent in maintaining my stance because although I didn't make any money, I was still able to do the work that I want and it built up a body of work that I can be pleased with.

People always asking kids, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I'm an artist.

Do you feel a little bit cooler than you did last week?

(gentle bluesy music) When I think of all the worries people seem to find And how they're in a hurry to complicate the minds But chasing after money and dreams that can't come true I'm glad that we are different we've better things to do May others plan the future I'm busy loving you One, two, three, four Sha-La-La-La-La-La, live for today Sha-La-La-La-La-La, live for today And don't worry about tomorrow Sha-La-La-La-La-La, live for today We were never meant to worry the way that people do And I don't mean to hurry as long as I'm with you We'll take it nice and easy and use my simple plan You'll be my loving woman, I'll be your loving man We'll take the most from livin