***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
This Week in Texas Music History, an artist starts a Halloween tradition, and mayhem ensues.
During Halloween week in the Austin 1970s, the artist Jim Franklin oversaw the annual ritual of the Pumpkin Stomp. History often pegs Jim Franklin as the “poster artist” of Austin’s venues the Vulcan Gas Company and Armadillo World Headquarters, the man who made the armadillo a Texas countercultural symbol.
The pumpkin stomps are but one indication that “poster artist” does not quite contain Franklin’s significance to the Austin scene. “Master of ceremonies” was closer to the mark, and Jim always said if that was going to be the title, he would need a ceremony to master. Hence, the pumpkin stomp, for which Jim recruited the 50s-style rockers of the band Ramon, Ramon, and the Four Daddy-Os.
The stomps started at the Armadillo in 1970, though Franklin had played with pumpkin imagery at the Vulcan and in Houston. They ran for much of the ‘Dillo’s life, with additional manifestations at the Steamboat and the Ritz Theater on Sixth Street, where they transformed Halloween celebrations in Austin’s party district. Ramon typically accompanied the pumpkin massacre, but other artists like Asleep at the Wheel stepped in now and again. One writer described the ’74 stomp thusly: “Franklin . . . in his legendary armadillo bonnet, hushed the crowd, fixed his goggles, and held a small pumpkin in the air. ‘Then he began the mystical chant, Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,’” dropped the pumpkin, and dancers stomped it into the ground.
At the 1972 Pumpkin Stomp, mystified police arrived at the Armadillo. The door man asked, “Are you in costume?” Then, quickly, “Do you have a warrant?”, and the police stormed into the venue just as Franklin and crew were tearing out pumpkins innards and shooting bottle rockets. The police retreated. Jim Franklin mastered many ceremonies in his day—touring Europe with bluesman Freddie King, hanging with Leon Russell in Tulsa—but these Halloween pumpkin stomps distilled Austin’s surreal spirit of those years.
Watch more:
Sources:
Robyn Turner. Austin Originals: Chats with Colorful Characters. Amarillo: Paramount Publishing Company, 1982.
Eddie Wilson with Jesse Sublett. Armadillo World Headquarters. Austin: TSSI Publishing, 2017.
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