JOE NICK PATOSKI, November 15, 2009

As someone who came to Austin in 1973 to write about music, Armadillo World Headquarters was graduate school, exposing me to more different sounds than I knew existed, from Mance Lipscomb, Greezy Wheels, Joe Ely, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Doug Sahm, Freddy Fender, and Roky Erickson to the Clash, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the Ramones, AC-DC, Parliament-Funkadelic, Old and New Dreams (the quartet that backed Ornette Coleman on the groundbreaking album "Shapes of Jazz to Come"), Phil Woods, Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel.

Years after the Armadillo closed its doors on New Year’s Eve, 1980, I learned its back story – how it operated as a collective, how each person who worked there had a role, how it was always hanging by a thread financially over its 10 years of existence, and how the people who ran the place were really in it for the music. A key figure was Hank Alrich, who found money to keep the institution running more than once and who captained the ship over