Yes, there are two record stores on this list—and that’s without Waterloo Records, which is well-known worldwide, close to festival grounds, and sponsor of an autograph-signing event at the fest. Antone’s, meanwhile, has offered one of the largest selections of used vinyl in central Texas—heavy on blues and Texas artists—since 1987. It’s also purportedly one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites.

The now-iconic mural started as a drawing by late Austinite and 1990s indie rock poster boy/cautionary tale Daniel Johnston—it’s the cover of Johnston’s cassette album Hi, How Are You, though the drawing’s title is Jeremiah the Innocent. It helped make him a worldwide cult-famous musician and artist when when Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with the image on it to the 1992 MTV Music Awards. In 1993, Sound Exchange record store (also iconic, though defunct) commissioned Johnston to paint it on the side of the store. After several defacements and restorations, as well as negotiations with subsequent business owners in the building and countless reproductions on everything from coffee mugs to onesies, it has become a mainstay of the Austin tourism franchise, though it means something quite different to Austin old-timers.

Deep Eddy Pool is a little west of Barton Springs, just as historic, fed by the same spring, and generally much more peaceful.

The Driskill Hotel was built for a cattle baron in 1886, and its vintage grandiosity is still largely intact. For many decades, it was the finest and best hotel in the city, the place where politicians, socialites, and other fancy or powerful people gathered. That includes its bar, which is lauded for its bar-ness as well as its historic atmosphere. (Tip: The lobby bathrooms are reliably a civilized, quiet place to go for a few moments of regrouping and reflection.)

Formerly located just north of the UT campus, Toy Joy is a venerated (yet iconoclastic!) place where people have gotten their bacon-strip band-aids, boxing-nun puppets, Hello Kitty paraphernalia and other novelty/fun items for decades—as well as real toys for actual children.

The Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on Lady Bird Lake is, rightfully, a symbol of Austin. But Willie is one of the cosmic cowboys who started Austin down its strange and wonderful path. Stop by and give the dude his due; his statue is right there on Willie Nelson Boulevard.

Owned and run by a rare-books expert and longtime Austinite, South Congress Books is a great, intimate place to find all kinds of (real) Texana, (real) Austin writing, and (real) Austin cultural artifacts, especially related to music. It's also a welcoming oasis when you're overwhelmed by SoCo crowds—even Patti Smith and Zoey Deschanel thought so, and spent some time there (not at the same time, though). If it’s good enough for them, it’s certainly good enough for us.

The gem of a record store specializes in all kinds of fantastic, commercially problematic music, but its large selection of new and used vinyl spans all genres. It also has great in-store performances by mostly local bands and the kind of highly knowledgeable that used to be de rigueur at this kind of idiosyncratic, increasingly rare music store. It had to relocated from the now-closed "Slackerville" complex a few years ago, but it still keeps turning out the hits, or nonhits, at its new location.