![]() It was a touchstone of all the things they heard were going on in California and in a few other hip pockets of the country, a cool place to hang among like-minded people, maybe score some drugs, and have a good time. The Vulcan functioned as more than a music venue to the regulars who frequented the place. The Texas blues institutions Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb appeared so frequently they were regarded as family. Hyde brought in blues players Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Williams, and John Lee Hooker- who requested Mexican food when Hyde picked him up at the bus station. Touring bands such as Steve Miller and the Velvet Underground, and bands that rarely toured, like the Fugs, an obscenity-slinging New York street band led by poet Ed Sanders (who were barely known outside Greenwich Village), played the Vulcan in front of full houses. Their slash-and-burn single "You're Gonna Miss Me" actually snuck onto the Top 40 pop music chart, and they sold out the club three nights in a row before the band fell apart. The Vulcan became home to a wide array of bands, including the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the first psychedelic band anywhere, led by a Travis High School dropout named Roky Erickson and Tommy Hall, a UT philosophy major who played electric jug. Doug Brown and George Majewski helped set up concessions. Joining Hyde in running the Vulcan were Houston White, Gary Maxwell-Scanlon, and Sandy Lockett. The Vulcan featured live music and psychedelic light shows with the unspoken understanding that the music and the lights were a whole lot more fun under the influence of LSD, which Hyde had plenty of - particularly the Clearlight, or Windowpane, variety. He decided to try to replicate what he saw going on in San Francisco by opening the Vulcan Gas Company in a former dry goods store at 316 Congress Avenue, the low-rent part of the grand avenue, in the fall of 1967. Why slave and toil in the blazing July heat when you could be immersed in the clear, cool sixty-eight degree artesian waters of Barton Springs, the soul of Austin and its wellspring of cool?ĭon Hyde traded mescaline for the last of the high-quality batch of White Lightning LSD that had been made for the Human Be-In in 1967, one of several events where crowds converged to hear live music and trip on hallucinatory acid. Compared to those places, Austin sometimes felt so downright idyllic that work could be distracting. People in Dallas and Houston worked harder, Austinites liked to reason, because those places were so butt-ugly there was nothing worth looking at, much less playing in, so a person might just as well keep their nose to the grindstone. Overall, the climate was tolerable enough - and the hills, woodlands, creeks, rivers, and lakes of Austin were inviting enough - that locals responded to the environment in a manner that seemingly escaped folks living elsewhere in Texas. Whenever heavy rains fell on the rocky undulating hills west of Austin, the steep terrain transformed in a matter of minutes into Flash-Flood Alley, one of the most dangerous flood-prone areas of the United States. The Hill Country's Swiss-cheese-like karst topography harbored an abundance of caves and underground pools that emerged at the surface in the forms of artesian springs that fed the region's extensive system of creeks and rivers. Oaks flourished in the thin layer of soil that covered the limestone and granite subsurface of the region. The Balcones Fault uplift, where the landmass rose abruptly out of the coastal plain, began less than a mile west of the capitol. The landscape in and around Austin could be described as pretty, an adjective not often used to describe the natural surroundings of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Midland, Lubbock, Port Arthur, or other Texas cities - even San Antonio.Īustin looked like nowhere else in this particular corner of the world because it was where five distinct eco-regions converged - the Edwards Plateau, South Texas Brush Country, Western Gulf Coastal Plain, Texas Blackland Prairie, and East Texas Woodlands.
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