Armadillo World Headquarters (site) — Austin's outlaw country venue

The Armadillo World Headquarters operated from 1970 to 1980 at 525 Barton Springs Road in Austin — a converted National Guard armory that became the primary venue of the progressive country and outlaw country movement that made Austin a music capital in the 1970s. Its significance lay in the audience it gathered: young, rock-influenced listeners who had no particular investment in Nashville's conventions and who were willing to embrace Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and others who were trying to make country music without the Nashville industry's intervention.

Willie Nelson's relationship with the Armadillo was central to his reinvention as an outlaw country figure. He played there repeatedly from 1972 onward, performing for audiences of students and hippies who had not previously thought of themselves as country music fans and who responded to what he was doing without the genre loyalty or genre prejudice of an established country audience. The image of Nelson on the Armadillo stage — long hair, bandana, acoustic guitar — is the image that replaced the Nashville rhinestone suit he had been expected to wear.

The Armadillo closed in 1980 and the building was demolished in 1981 to make way for a bank. An office building now occupies the Barton Springs Road site; an image of the original Armadillo mural has been reproduced on the exterior of the building that replaced it. The venue is memorialised in Austin music history as the crucible of the outlaw movement, the room that established Austin's identity as a city where music operated by different rules.