What do you get when a country music lover turned bootlegger opens a gas filling station? A legacy, nearly 90-year Austin institution that housed some of the music’s future stars and served as the poster child for the “Keep Austin Weird” mentality.
Back in 1933, Kenneth Threadgill moved to Austin and purchased a Gulf filling station off North Lamar Boulevard that, after securing a beer license from Travis County following the end of Prohibition, became a haven for artists traveling through Central Texas and seeking respite in between performances. Then dubbed Threadgill’s Tavern, the filling station’s unique crossover audience of both country lovers and hippies helped the tavern’s popularity burgeon well through the 1960s, and served as a birthplace for future rock star Janis Joplin — then attending classes at the University of Texas at Austin — to hone her craft and cultivate her individual style.
“Threadgill’s love for people and music smoothed out the conflicts that usually occurred when longhairs crossed paths with rednecks, and because of this, a new culture tolerance emanated from the tavern, which had a profound effect upon its patrons and the music that came from it,” the former business’ history page noted.
Threadgill’s Tavern evolves into Threadgill’s
Decades prior to its official closure in 2020, the legendary tavern ran the risk of a premature closure until then-Austin City Councilmember Lowell Lebermann Jr. saved the joint. According to the Texas State Historical Association, Threadgill closed the tavern following his wife’s death in 1974, before it was then purchased by Eddie Wilson, who helped open Armadillo World Headquarters — the heartbeat of Austin’s now-iconic live music scene.
In purchasing Threadgill’s, Wilson envisioned revamping the institution as a Southern-style restaurant, pulling from the menu success he found at the Armadillo. Exactly one year after Armadillo World Headquarters closed on New Year’s Eve 1980, Threadgill’s re-emerged under Wilson’s ownership as a restaurant on New Year’s Eve 1981 to “instant success,” the former business noted online.
That instant success propelled the opening of a satellite location in South Austin in 1996, named Threadgill’s World Headquarters. Its site resided next to the now-shuttered Armadillo World Headquarters. While its opening marked two Threadgill’s locations, Wilson classified the original North Lamar site as thematic of “Austin between the 1930’s and 1960’s,” while the south outpost paid tribute to the Armadillo’s renaissance days of the 1970s.
“The memorabilia of the Headquarters represents the hey-day of this era from the juke box which contains many of the artists who played the Armadillo, to the piano that hangs from the ceiling which has been played by artists as diverse as Jerry Lee Lewis to Captain Beefheart,” the restaurant wrote.
‘Thank you for making Threadgill’s a part of Austin’s DNA’
In December 2018, Threadgill’s World Headquarters closed on Riverside Drive amid rising real estate costs in the neighborhood, Austin’s ABC affiliate KVUE reported at the time. Roughly a year and a half later, the original, nearly 90-year-old outpost on North Lamar Boulevard announced its closure in April 2020, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a Facebook message to longtime customers and employees, Threadgill’s expressed sorrow over the closure and gratitude for the community members who treated the restaurant like a home away from home…