Reverberation
Trace back half a different sub-strains of alternative music, and The 13th Floor Elevators were lurking their at the beginnings. A group of Austin, Texas teenagers doped up to their eyeballs on péyote and LSD, they coin the term 'psychedelic rock' to describe their swirling, heavily-reverberated, electrified take on jug-band blues, thereby giving name to a whole new musical ideology.
Yet, the legacy they leave behind from their short, troubled tenure is the eternal single "You're Gonna Miss Me," which earns pride of place in Nuggets lore, and becomes a staple of garage-rockers for the next half-century. Those searching for the earliest vestiges of punk-rock have often turned to "You're Gonna Miss Me," hearing in the urgent, insistent, ready-to-explode screams of frontman Roky Erickson a voice so rough and raw that it distilled the entire punk spirit in its hoarse bleatings.
Erickson's voice shall forever be the Elevators' defining instrument, but his spooked wail wasn't the only element of their sound rewriting the tropes of rock'n'roll. Where their peers —if they really had any— were clinging to skiffle riffs, Elevators guitarist Stacy Sutherland played a dark, gnarly guitar, ran through swathes of reverberation and crackling with a peaking, snarling, sinister tone. And then there was Tommy Hall and his 'electrified jug,' in which he made spooky mouth noises inside a mic'd up jug, these amplified echoes creating bizarre patterns of unquantifiable arrhythmia across 13th Floor Elevator songs. And then there was everything Hall stood for, and all that he hoped the band to be.
Trip the Life Fantastic
Like The Monks, fellow genre-minting trailblazers of the mid-'60s, The 13th Floor Elevators benefited greatly —whilst simultaneously being destroyed by— conceptual guidance. Hall was a philosophy undergrad from the University of Texas who, awakened to the mystical yearnings of the era, became a fervent proponent of seeking enlightenment through LSD use. Hall served as the band's ideas man, and his wife Clementine Hall wrote the band's lyrics; which, at their simplest, are simple plays on drug culture, comparing rides on Fire Engines and Roller Coasters to getting high.
"After your trip life opens up," Erickson hollers, like Little Richard lost in a hall of mirrors, during "Roller Coaster"'s wild five-minute ride, "you know more than you thought you knew." Like, woah! Generations of musicians taking drugs to make music to take drugs to —from Television to the entire paisley underground, Spacemen 3 to Black Lips— have fallen under the influence of these Psychedelic Sounds. Not because of a sense of mindless, age-of-Aquarius optimism, but because, if you listen closely, there's darkness and danger in every note.
The Halls were interested in creating a mental utopia, about freeing the American mind from the bondage of McCarthy-era thinking, but they were forever mindful of what they were rebelling against, the feelings that were pushing them in that direction. The 13th Floor Elevators were dab hands at teenaged ennui, sarcasm, self-loathing, and —not surprisingly— a feeling of dislocation bordering on paranoia. In short, the lyrical building-blocks of so much alternative rock.
Record Label: International Artists
Release Date: November 1966
