Red Crayola

Lelan Rogers, head of the label International Artists, first saw the Red Crayola play in a shopping mall. Thinking about it now, it sounds almost comical, but those were different times. It was the Sixties, the age of utopias, counterculture, psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelia is a word that has sparked plenty of debate, but to get straight to the point, it's enough to remember that it combines two Greek roots –  ψυχή (psykhé, soul) and δῆλος (dêlos, clear, manifest) – indicating the expansion of consciousness through the use of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. It was coined in 1957 by the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. He was convinced that LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide-25) – a substance first synthesized by the scientist Albert Hoffmann in 1938 – could reproduce the effects of schizophrenia on the human brain. Osmond even penned a few lines to pay tribute to his new "creature": “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/ Just take a pinch of psychedelic”.
History (if you've done your homework, none of this will be news to you) tells us that Hoffmann was the first to test the effects of LSD on himself, describing the experience as a mix of horror and euphoria: “Dizziness and a sensation of fainting became so strong that I could hardly keep myself upright; so I lay down on a sofa. Everything around me had transformed in the most terrifying ways. Everything in my room was spinning, and the objects and furniture most familiar to me took on grotesque and menacing shapes. They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner restlessness. The lady from next door, whom I barely recognized, brought me milk – over the course of the evening I drank more than two liters of it. She was no longer Mrs. R., but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask”.

It didn't take long for Sixties rock music to get entangled in that revolutionary climate, and "psychedelia" became the brand of a music that wanted to help change consciousness and, if possible, the world as well.

“The 'psychedelic revolution', then, boils down to this simple syllogism: transform the predominant mode of consciousness today, and you will transform the world; drug use (…) transforms the predominant mode of consciousness; therefore make drug use universal and you will transform the world”. So said, in the late Sixties, the historian and social critic Theodore Roszak, credited with coining the term “counterculture”. To the young people of that era, in short, the so-called consciousness-expanding drugs appeared as the prime tool for breaking down the limits of a consciousness blinded by the forms and structures of the dominant culture. Naturally, music became one of the most fitting channels for spreading these new ideas.

The psychedelic spectre began circling over the Stars and Stripes, and with the 1966 release of “The Psychedelic Sounds of…” by the 13th Floor Elevators, the term “psychedelic” officially entered the rooms of “youth” music. The 13th Floor Elevators, led by Roky Erickson, came from Austin, Texas, one of the most conservative states in America. A state where it wasn't hard to come across signs reading “Whites Only. No Negroes or Spanish Allowed”. Some could also be found in Houston, one of the major cities of the so-called “Lone Star State”. Here, in 1965, guitarist Mayo Thompson, back from a trip to Europe, meets drummer Frederick Barthelme (brother of the writer Donald) and proposes they start a band together. With the arrival of bassist Steve Cunningham, Red Crayola finally becomes a reality.

The three of them were musically omnivorous, but from “youth” music they barely rescued Velvet Underground and John Fahey, while everything else struck them as far too “normal”. Other loves, though in different fields, went by the names of John Cage (whom Barthelme knew personally), La Monte Young, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane. For Mayo Thompson, at that point in time, doing something truly “intense” meant rising to the level of “Bells” (Ayler's 1965 piece) or “Ascension”, Coltrane's free-jazz masterpiece, released in 1966… At first, though, the three of them practiced with “abstract” covers of “Hey Joe”, “Louie, Louie,” and “House Of The Rising Sun”, then, backed by Lelan Rogers, they decided it was time to get truly serious. The plan: record a “freak out record”.

“Freaking out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and to the social structure as a whole”. These are the words of Frank Zappa, who in 1966 had debuted with an album titled, fittingly, “Freak Out!”.

Red Crayola weren't hippies, but they were, in effect, the “hippies' natural allies”, as Barthelme would later put it, sharing their deep-seated anti-militarism. Bringing together the rejection of war – this is 1967, and “war”, in the States, means nothing other than “Vietnam” – and psychedelic getting-high-as-liberation came naturally. On “The Parable Of Arable Land”, a landmark album of psychedelia and of rock as a whole, “War Sucks” is one of the five, let's call them, “normal” tracks, while the rest of the record is taken up by cacophonous interludes called “Free Form Freak-Out”, in which the band – aided by the Familiar Ugly (a group of friends, varying in number but almost always over 50 strong!, who played practically anything, from bottles to a motorcycle, etc. – Roky Erickson often joined them too, and on a couple of tracks on the album he plays organ and harmonica) – poured out its ideas on sonic anarchy.
Amid the chaos, between the psychedelic gems “Hurricane Fighter Plane”, “Transparent Radiation”, “Pink Stainless Tail”, “Former Reflections Enduring Doubt” and the concrete-poetry dispatch of the title track, “War Sucks” is the mocking scream against the trappings of patriotism and the “beautiful death in war”. Disgust openly flaunted against the cut-rate rhetoric surrounding every coffin bringing home what had once been a carefree young man.

Opened by the metallic sound of the bass, the track uses the hammering percussiveness of a war dance to reveal its fabric of savage parody. The sonic impact is explosive, while the lyrics are a mix of rage and mockery. America is the land of a freedom won on the blood of indigenous peoples. War is in its DNA. So there's no problem for it if it means sending thousands upon thousands of young men to the slaughter, behaving rather like the parents of Hansel and Gretel (“You Remember What Happened To Hansel and Gretel” is the track's subtitle) who, in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale, abandon their own children in the woods (the Vietnamese forests?), risking death at the hands of an old witch (the American political establishment) who had lured them into her clutches with various treats (the promise of a “better” world, free from the (?) communist threat).
So, as the percussive uproar rages on, in the “primitivist” style of Maureen Tucker (Velvet Underground), Thompson declaims: “Then there uncle General he does weep/ When he sends his troops out into battle/ I’m sick to death of your endless prattle/ Cuz’ you remember what happened to Hansel and Gretel/ War sucks”. The parody goes even further, when the lyrics directly quote lines from the patriotic anthem “America The Beautiful” (written in 1895 by Katharine Lee Bates and set to music in 1910 by Samuel A. Ward), pairing them with the anti-war slogan of the title: “America, America, god shed his grace on thee/ And crown they good with brotherhood/ Sea to shining sea you know / War Sucks/ You know war sucks”.
God too is targeted, since, without batting an eye, he lets men slaughter one another: “Well Mr. God are you sad this week/ Had we treat sugar bad you know your/ Silence is part of a fad you know that/ You do nothing just makes me mad”.

As if that weren't enough, the track ends up plunging into a Babylon of rattles, hisses, clangs, feedback, reversed tape, and shrieking splinters of screams. The trappings of patriotism and of the “beautiful death in war” get the treatment they deserve. It's noise – no, actually, it's the ghost of kraut-rock already dreaming of industrial and the most radical new wave. It's the sonic rendering of Ken Kesey's acid tests: people were losing their minds thanks to music and psychotropic drugs, so just imagine whether they'd have had the time or the desire to travel thousands upon thousands of miles away to go shoot at the Viet Cong!
It's the abyss of rock growing up, the abyss that sucks in “forms” and breaks them down into a succession of small personal deliriums, nonetheless forced to reckon with an increasingly Babel-like and terrifying context. Here, unlike the other “free form freak-outs” (which drifted dizzyingly far from the track they introduced or followed), the chaos produced by the Familiar Ugly stays in the groove of “War Sucks”, offering a catastrophic version of it, in which only bass and drums keep the memory of its structure intact, performing an even more obsessive dance. It's the transfiguration of a consciousness that no longer tends to expand, but implodes upon itself, projecting us into the realm of darkness.

For Mayo Thompson, the “free form freak-outs” were, in effect, a way of highlighting the difference between “data” and “information”: while the latter already represents an attempt to organize what is perceived, the former is nothing but the reflection of that indeterminate universe lurking beneath consciousness. So, while the tracks on “The Parable Of Arable Land” show how the song-form (albeit a particularly oblique one) can be used to convey a certain amount of information, the “free form freak-outs” work essentially by accumulating “data”, aiming to represent the unconscious of every conscious sonic structure. On one side, then, organized sound; on the other, the boiling magma of noise, the true primal force of all music. The “songs”, then, appear as flashes of light amid the darkness, as structured streams of meaning right in the middle of the psychic disintegration suggested by the noisy scuffles of the Familiar Ugly.

Back in 2005, Mayo Thompson played in Naples with Red Crayola, in a completely new lineup featuring ex-Slovenly guitarist Tom Watson on second guitar and George Hurley on drums (yes, the one from Minutemen). If I remember correctly, they played “War Sucks” at the start: it was a very “dry”, more punk version, obviously without the noise coda (well, no… the Familiar Ugly weren't there, and anyway the stage at Galleria Toledo was small, with no room for fifty people). Mayo, dressed all in black, was focused on his guitar with the same energy as ever, while the Galleria Toledo hall was wrapped in a reverent silence. And to think that the first time they played it, at the Catacombs in Houston, a brawl broke out on the dance floor… Different times, indeed.
Mayo, a true gentleman. When I nervously introduced myself, it was he who thanked me for coming to his show. Between a photo and some chat about “the old days”, there was even a little trip to the bar, with the Neapolitan bartender who, besides mistaking Hurley for an old American actor (“isn't this the guy who used to make those Hercules movies?”), desperately tried to tell a bewildered Mayo the story of his romantic conquests…
On my way home, I listened to “War Sucks” once again, and the thought that a world without war might truly be impossible flashed through my mind.
But in the Sixties it was almost a duty to believe that war could be stopped forever. After all, utopia only works as a catalyst for hope. And besides, just think: would we ever have gotten to hear all that great music without Vietnam, without the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, without the campus uprisings, without racial hatred, without the Black Panthers, without all that huge mess? If God didn't keep minding his own business, as is only right, by now we'd probably be drowning in a syrupy mess of songs hailing peace without even knowing why it's called “peace”…

(09/10/2016)

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13/03/2026