Smugglers, Legends, and Margaritas: Unraveling Austin's 'Keep Austin Weird' Roots
When folks cry for us to Keep Austin Weird, conscious or not, they’re saluting the industry that fueled the city’s creative explosion in the ‘70s — drug smuggling. A whole lot of cash needed to be cleaned, and it flowed through clubs, restaurants and real estate.
“For a minute there, some cats were flying right into Austin. A stretch of Loop 360 hadn’t been connected yet. So the planes would just dip and drop.”
Bruce Spelman’s the front man for local funk band Extreme Heat. One album in the ‘80s was funded by $250,000 that arrived in a plastic garbage bag.
“We played a lot of sold out shows where there were only 10 people in the audience. Didn’t matter, every single night there needed to be something on the books."
Bands gigged all the time, genres overlapped, and the music got tight. Then outlaw country made Austin cool to the world. Legendary club owner Eddie Wilson summed up the ‘70s by saying the city was reshaped by “cheap beer, cheap pot and cheap rent.”
Wilson, after starting the Armadillo World Headquarters, bought Threadgill’s. During prohibition the joint sold gas in the front and liquor out the back. Owner Kenneth Threadgill, a country western yodeler, hosted music nights. In the ‘60s, he was one of the first to offer a stage to a hippy girl from UT named Janis Joplin.
One of Eddie’s partners for a minute in the early 00s was developer Abe Zimmerman, who’s been playing in this sandbox for half a century.
Zimmerman arrived in 1968 from Houston, went to law school, and started out as a criminal defense lawyer. He migrated into real estate and business, investing over the years in institutions ranging from Threadgill’s to Book People, Katz’s Deli to Hotel San Jose. He and his partners were the most prominent developers of a stretch of South Congress known as SOCO, some of the priciest dirt in Austin.
Their story, their legend, is now literally part of the landscape.
The plaque’s all that’s left of the original building.
Abe takes out his phone, shows me a picture.
“One of those new bars named a drink after me, my friend texted this. No one even called me, no one asked.”
He pulls on a joint. Then a staccato burst of sentences, between puffs.
“Not that I care, but had they asked I would
have told them my drink is a margarita.”
“That’s my go-to, what I like. What I make.”
“Who comes up with this stuff?”
“It’s money people out of New York.”
“Think we met the guy once.
Talked briefly on a sidewalk.”
“He had nice shoes.”
