13th Floor Elevators – Sign of the Three Eyed Men
[MOJO review]
It’s March 1966, and the 13th Floor Elevators are playing the New Orleans Night Club in Austin, Texas: local station KAZZ-FM are broadcasting the show live. The first song is “Monkey Island” – a sharp comment on having to live in Texas with the rednecks and the police – but it’s on “Roller Coaster” that they really cook.
Taking its central metaphor from a hilly Austin drug drive, “Roller Coaster” takes you through the LSD experience. It begins slowly. The musicians are fighting to restrain themselves, and then – on the lyric ‘you’ve got to open up your mind and let everything come through’ – they accelerate so fast that it takes your stomach away.
‘Come on’ Roky yells, as the band whoops and Stacy Sutherland takes off on a vertiginous lead guitar run: ‘you’ve got to let it happen to you’. The musicians are tripping, and so are the audience. The electricity is such that it transmits, forty years later, into an intangible third force: the sound of communal ecstasy.
You can hear this extraordinary moment on Disc 2 of “Sign of the Three Eyed Men”. The result of five year’s research by Paul Drummond, this box is a labour of love that restores the Thirteenth Floor Elevators to their rightful position as the fearless trailblazers of psychedelia, and as one of the most kick-ass rock bands ever.
The Elevators cult began when Lenny Kaye gave “You’re Gonna Miss Me” pride of place on the original “Nuggets” compilation. From then their reputation has grown and grown, but no-one has gone back to the master tapes. Now you can finally hear the true Elevators –and it’s like sunlight bursting through cloud.
The set begins in early 1966. Within two months of their formation in late 1965, the Elevators had recorded their classic, “You’re Gonna Miss Me”, and had been involved in a pot bust – a very serious, jail matter. Wishing to get their repertoire documented, they recorded an album’s worth of material in February 1966.
‘The Contact Sessions” are split into two halves. The ‘teen’ side includes the hit, a couple of Powell St. John courting songs, as well as Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” – pure Elevators: with the line ‘you’re gonna make my life free’. The psychedelic side has early versions of “Rollercoaster” and “Thru The Rhythm”.
With lyrics like ‘after you trip, life opens up’, Elevators were way ahead of the psychedelic curve: only the Beatles, the Byrds and Bob Dylan were recording material like this in early 1966. Operating in near isolation, they were unique, grafting Tommy Hall’s complex LSD lyrics onto a super tough garage/ frat band base.
The Elevators had an extensive knowledge of blues, soul and the more experimental British groups: they had cut their teeth in beach bars and teen clubs. This immediately made them different to the emerging San Franciscan groups, who were, all too often, electrified folkies. Plus they did what others merely talked about: they recorded and played on LSD.
The dominant forces in the group were the 18 year old singer Roky Erikson, who was possessed of an unearthly shriek, perfected by months of practice, and Tommy Hall – the older, manipulative drug dealer, jug player and acid intellectual. Super talented lead guitarist Stacy Sutherland mediated between the two, providing the arrangements and the musicianship.
At bottom, they rode on John Ike Walton’s explosive rimshots and driving cymbal work. The result was a mutated R&B – short, kinetic songs made for dancing, with Roky’s testifying shriek – that twisted and turned in sudden builds, harsh peaks, and shafts of pure liquid distance. It was LSD made sound.
Discs 2 and 5 showcase the group live in 1966: the first has manic material from Texas, the second from San Francisco. Covering R&B standards like “Before You Accuse Me”, they also make Brit band classics like “You Really Got Me” their own. Disc 5 contains definitive versions of “You Don’t Know” and the Beatles’ “The Word” with Roky’s eldritch shriek.
In October 1966, the Elevators released their first album, “The Psychedelic Sounds Of…” that, which its eye-catching John Cleveland cover and LSD-saturated sleeve-notes by Tommy Hall, has become a recognised classic. It’s featured here in mono and stereo – the mono is superior. If you haven’t heard this record, you need to.
By this time, the Elevators were under severe pressure, harassed by the Texan authorities, who had failed to make the pot bust stick, Within the group itself, relations were strained: the constant LSD diet, relentless schedule, and lack of proper record company support all conspired to make their daily life unstable, if not unhinged.
At root was the central problem of a drug-based popular culture. Tommy Hall made huge efforts to articulate a true LSD cosmology, but the rituals that the group were attempting to perform were conducted under chaotic circumstances. Clubs and concert halls are not the best places to launch a new religion.
The consequent psychic fall-out took a serious toll. You can hear this on Disc 10, taped at a February 1967 Houston concert where Stacy Sutherland took too much acid and couldn’t play. At the same time, Roky Erikson began to show signs of disturbance. In this turmoil, however, the Elevators produced their masterpiece.
“Easter Everywhere” (Discs 6&7: mono/ stereo) is an all-time higher key document. With a measured Erikson vocal and a blissful Sutherland solo, “Slip Inside This House” is eight minutes of constant build: the guide for a new enlightenment. The rest isn’t bad either, with songs like “Nobody To Love”, “She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own)” and “Levitation”.
After this peak lay drug addiction, prison, madness. There are shards of possibility on Discs 8&9: the 1969 album “Bull of the Woods” and its unreleased 1968 run-through, “Beauty and the Beast”. Of particular note are an early, metallic “Never Another” and a super-phased version of “May The Circle Remain Unbroken”.
In a mid 1950′s letter to Aldous Huxley, the chemist Humphrey Osmond gave hallucinogenic culture its name: ‘to fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic’. LSD could be heaven and hell: opening up and letting everything come through can be very dangerous – especially if the conditions aren’t right.
The Elevators epitomised the ecstasies and the horrors of psychedelia, enshrining the questing spirit of “Furthur” as well as the excess that short-circuited so much of the hippie movement. But for two or so years, they burned with a flame so fierce that they still remain an inspiration, forty years later. Feel the furnace.