Music: Groover's Paradise

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Why a renaissance in Austin? Says Country M.C. Jim Franklin: "This has always been an anticommercial scene." Besides the sippin' and the stars, Austin happens to have one of the lowest costs of living of any metropolitan area in the nation, a benefice not lost on University of Texas graduates. Many stay on to drive cabs and show up during the daytime, when the musicians gather on street corners to trade hot licks and cool, mutual admiration.

What the Fillmores East and West were to the rock era, the Armadillo World Headquarters is to Austin's country-rock set. A cavernous old armory decorated with surrealistic murals of the burrowing, bony-plated mammal that now ranks second only to the longhorn in Texas esteem, the Armadillo is filled each night with a curious amalgam of teenagers, aging hippie women in gingham, braless coeds, and booted goat ropers swigging Pearl beer and swinging stetsons in time to the music. Doug Sahm, a 32-year-old fugitive of San Francisco psychedelia, who sings there regularly, says that "leaving Austin now is like climbing off a spaceship from a magic place." As he puts it in a song, the whole town is a groover's paradise.