Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 96

Record label: International Artists

Produced: Lelan Rodgers

Recorded: Walt Andrus Studios, Houston; late spring 1967

Released: September 1967

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Roky Erickson (v, g); Tommy Hall (jug, v); Dan Galindo (b); Stacy Sutherland (g); Danny Thomas (d)

Track listing: Slip Inside This House (S/US); Slide Machine; She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own) (S/US); Nobody To Love; Baby Blue (S/US); Earthquake; Dust; Levitation (S/US); I Had To Tell You; Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)

Running time: 41.29

Current CD: Charly SNAP132CD adds: Splash 1; Kingdom Of Heaven; You’re Gonna Miss Me; Reverberation (Doubt); You Don’t Know; Fire Engine; Monkey Island; Rollercoaster; Levitation (Instrumental) I Don’t Ever Wanna Come Down (Previously Unreleased)

Further listening: The Psychedelic Sounds Of (1966), their first album

Further reading: There are several good Thirteenth Floor Elevators websites; try ex-Elevator Danny Thomas’ www.geocities.com/ucdnlo/ or http://elevators. blinkenlights.org

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were the first band to describe or advertise their music as psychedelic, beating The Grateful Dead by two weeks. ‘I come out of Buddy Holly and then ran straight into Bob Dylan who then ran outta me,’ Roky Erickson said in 1996, ‘I was as Texas as I ever was, like a full dead creature could be.’ Which is about as articulate and succinct a statement about the Elevators as one could hope for today.

Producer Lelan Rodgers was a record business veteran – like famous brother Kenny – when he discovered the band playing in Houston. Signed to his optimistically named International Artists label, they hit Number 55 in the US with Roky’s You’re Gonna Miss Me. Rodgers was convinced he had hit makers on his hands but jug player/chief lyricist/resident Owsley-type Tommy Hall kept the band pioneering psychedelia and they never troubled the charts again, becoming Lone Star state legends instead.

Hall, his wife Clementine, virtuoso guitarist Stacy Sutherland (more responsible for the style of those Fillmore West acid guitar solos than Jorma Kaukonen or Jerry Garcia) and Erickson wrote songs whose lyrics were laced with a stoned mysticism. Coupled with their hypnotic music, the lyrics were supposedly enough to give the listener the answer they were searching for, as well as provide him or her with a real high. Ya dig? Rodgers deliberately underpromoted the band because, he claimed, he wanted their growing mystique (they caused the authorities in Texas as much worry as the Sex Pistols would in the UK) to snowball. Which meant outside Texas relatively few heard the West Coast/Gulf Coast power of Slip Inside This House or Nobody To Love, the sweet folkish balladry of I Had To Tell You or Sutherland’s stunning guitar leads or Erickson’s manic vocals (he had one of the most earnest singing styles in pop).

By the end of these sessions they were already too far gone (Erickson would take acid over 300 times) and the authorities were waiting to pounce. The band began a slow dissolution. Yet ask any Texas musician over 40 about them and they’ll tell you: the Elevators weren’t mere prophets, they were kings.