13th Floor Elevators

No need to beat around the bush. "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators" (International Artists, 1966) is, quite simply, the prototype of garage rock and one of the cornerstone works of psychedelia tout court.

Although they weren't the first to use the term psychedelic in a musical context (ask the Holy Modal Rounders), the 13th Floor Elevators deserve credit for making this term unmistakably identifiable with a new rock subgenre. Not only by putting it in an album title ahead of the curve (albeit virtually simultaneously, in November 1966, with the Blues Magoos' "Psychedelic Lollipop" and the Deep's "Psychedelic Moods"), but above all by explicitly mapping out its philosophical and musical coordinates.

From a purely sonic standpoint, what comes out of the speakers is basically raw R&B (genuine punk ante-litteram), shaped by the British Invasion (Kinks and Yardbirds above all) and by the deconstruction of black music pioneered by bands like the Kingsmen and the Trashmen. In other words, what would later be filed under the heading garage rock.

But for this Texan band, psychedelia is an attitude with deep roots on a philosophical, sociological, even religious level. An attitude expressed right from the very name they chose, which (beyond simply debunking the superstitious American habit of not labelling a building's thirteenth floor) points meaningfully — as shown in the image reproduced on the back of the album — to the 13 steps of the pyramid of knowledge, at whose summit sits the all-seeing eye. Right there, where the pyramid meets the eye ("Where The Pyramids Meets The Eye", as the 1990 tribute album would aptly be titled) lies the apex of a path to enlightenment, one that winds through lyrics and instrumental effects heavily shaped by the use of hallucinogenic substances.

Frontman Roky (Roger Kynard) Erickson (b. 1947, Dallas, Texas) would also become rock's first "victim" of acid abuse, paying the price with a latent madness that would occasionally surface in dramatic fashion (as in 1969, when he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Austin after publicly proclaiming himself to be a Martian).

His raspy, howling delivery is without doubt one of the band's defining traits — a band that came together in Austin from the merger of three different groups: Erickson's own Spades, the Lingsmen in toto (bassist Benny Thurman, drummer John Ike Walton and lead guitarist Stacy Sutherland), and the Conqueroo. The latter supplied lyricist Powell St. John (author of three songs on this record) but, most importantly, together with Tommy Hall, the band's original and unmistakable electric jug sound.

What exactly is that? Essentially a glass jug with a microphone at its mouth, into which the player breathes to produce a distinctive vibration — a continuous quaver that indelibly underpins the rhythm section on every track of the album, making it clear to the listener that they're entering an alternate dimension. Fuelling the connection between this instrument's sound and the altered state of consciousness brought on by drug use is, according to legend, the fact that its pitch was determined by the amount of marijuana (of which Hall was indeed a well-known connoisseur…) packed into the bottom of the jug.

In deciphering the deeper meaning of the album — a genuine concept record (before that term took on a historically shared meaning in music) about the expansion and redefinition of one's identity and its relationship to the outside world through the use of drugs — we can turn directly to the liner notes penned by Hall, whose general introduction is worth quoting in full, in its Italian translation:

Since the time of Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically into separate, unrelated groups — Science, Religion, Sex, Relationships, Work, etc. The focal point of this language, its system for filing knowledge, has been the identification of objects rather than the relationship existing between them. He is now forced to use these tools of reasoning separately, one situation at a time. In the past, man was able to view this hypnotic way of thinking, at times with suspicion (like Einstein), and he reorganized his knowledge so that it could be related horizontally, realizing the perfection of a system that allowed him to relate to his own life as an integrated whole. Recently it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state, so as to change his point of view (which is, ultimately, his basic relationship with the outside world, determining how he files information). Man can then restructure his thinking and change his language, so that his thoughts can produce more relationships with his life and his problems, bringing him closer to them in a more balanced way. This is the quest underlying the songs on this record.

Among Hall's chief sources of inspiration was the Polish philosopher/mathematician Alfred Korzybski, known for formalizing a new discipline called "General Semantics", whose principles are laid out in his major work, "Science And Sanity", published in 1933. Korzybski argued that human beings are limited in their knowledge by the configuration of their nervous system and by the structure of their languages. Human beings do not experience the world directly, but only through their abstractions (non-verbal impressions arising from the nervous system, and verbal markers). At times, our perceptions and our language distort our grasp of facts, which is why the correct, conscious use of abstraction is of fundamental importance. Through certain techniques (such as attaining a state of inner and outer stillness), it's possible to change the way one approaches the world, perceiving it in its indissoluble wholeness and in the multiplicity of its relationships. It's precisely this thesis that Hall latches onto, championing drug use as the foremost technique for achieving that goal.

In fact, contrary to what such weighty cultural references might suggest, the album's musical canon is rustic, whole-hog and uncompromising, with sonic choices whose intent is direct and easy to grasp. The acid-drenched spirit here doesn't manifest itself in sci-fi interstellar journeys through black holes and unreachable galaxies of the kind imagined by the cerebral Grateful Dead. We're closer, instead, to the territory of the Jefferson Airplane, but flying low over the here and now, in a kind of return to man's original state through liberation from every superstructure.

Written back in 1965 for the Spades by Erickson (though its first version dates all the way back to 1961, when he was just fourteen), "You're Gonna Miss Me" is the masterpiece that could hardly do anything other than open the phenomenal run of tracks on this milestone record.

The song's historical significance (beyond the modest chart success it achieved as a single, peaking at No. 55 on Billboard) is indelibly cemented by its central place on the legendary 1972 compilation "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968", essentially the bible of garage rock.

And though, having obviously been written earlier, it's shoehorned into the concept album's narrative thread, it already contains, in embryonic form, all its defining traits. Right from the opening, which pounds out the 4/4 beat with authority, staking out the boundaries of a sound that's rough and primitive yet utterly real, fresh and direct, before giving way to Erickson's wild howl and achieving myth status with the astonishing entrance of Hall's jug. Few ingredients, but wonderfully spicy and flavorful ones, for one of the most delectable dishes in rock history. The rhythmic pause halfway through the track evokes the tense standoff of a High Noon duel to the death, with Clint Eastwood nervously rolling a cigar between his lips. Finally comes the cathartic chorus and Erickson's orgasmic vocal (to which Robert Plant surely owes at least a small debt of inspiration), before a wild, unbridled harmonica lets loose the last remaining emotional tension. Just 2'30" for a highly concentrated dose of energy.

"Reverberation" (the second single pulled from the album, No. 129 on Billboard), with its brooding rhythm and the frontman's animalistic yelps (it's like listening to the Stones at their most stoned), ultimately reveals a festive, communal hippie spirit in which nobody cares what anyone else thinks, and in which primal instincts, otherwise forcibly restrained in the darkest recesses of the mind, are free to surface. Metaphorically, you step into an impenetrable jungle and, as if in a trance induced by the pounding rhythm, you emerge from it exhausted but finally free.

The title of the track can be explained this way: doubts cause negative emotions that reverberate (hence the title), obstructing positive thoughts. Only by organizing one's knowledge according to what we might call a holistic approach is it possible to completely eliminate every uncertainty or hesitation.

Even the opening of "Fire Engine", halfway between the full-throttle wail of a fire siren and the howl of a pack of werewolves, with a vocal performance that crosses Wilson Pickett with Screamin' Jay Hawkins, describes a different mental space, immediately accessible hic et nunc, where the soul finds ideal nourishment. Here, more than ever, is proof of the effectiveness of a brutal but sincere rhythm and blues (cradled at birth by Mother Africa), acidically transfigured by a rhythmic haze that underpins Sutherland's cutting guitar solos, focused on high notes like some six-string Jerry Lee Lewis.

The Black music of the origins, stripped bare in the guise of a psychedelic spectre, also takes centre stage in "Roller Coaster" (the fruit of a collaboration between Erickson and Hall), necessarily the longest and most elaborate track on the album, as it describes in detail the discovery of the new system of thought that frees us from unfounded fears, and the unfolding of the movements that lead us in that direction through the psychedelic journey.

After your trip life opens up

Gets what it has from you poster

The mounting emotional tension and an overall sense of estrangement are reinforced by the sound of the jug, over which the lead guitar hovers, sketching out possible escape routes. The opening feels like a B-movie thriller, but the pattern is the kind that quickly burrows into your brain. Unusually "subdued" is the vocal delivery, pushed into the background behind the instrumentation, as if coming from somewhere else, and darker than ever.

The trigger that grants access to altered states of consciousness can come from the most unlikely source. Even a simple but catchy bassline like the one in "Thru The Rhythm", essentially a protest song against schooling. The vocal is delivered in a kind of Dylan-esque spoken voice, like a rock Virgil guiding and accompanying us along the mind's twisted paths. The new paradigm reached at the end of the journey can propel the individual toward an epochal evolutionary leap, beyond which the old human race will finally and clearly appear to us in all its mental backwardness.

Unlike Dante's Inferno, here it feels as though we're crossing into a ghostly yet festive world, where problems are swept away by the energy and power of the mind. Just change your perspective, and the world changes with you. This simple insight manifests musically in the rudimentary restraint of the distortion effects (listen to Sutherland's fuzz guitar on "You Don't Know"), which colour, with the muted force of pastels, the image of an alternative that's easily within reach, immediate, barely veiled by the false shared reality. Here lies the difference between the archaic way of thinking, based on constant worry over the objects around us that traps us in a kind of permanent blindness, and the infinite potential guaranteed by this "new" reason.

In a handful of tracks, however, psychedelia stays in the background. For instance, making room for a relaxed, Byrds-like folk-rock complete with jingle-jangle touches. That's the case with "Splash 1", an airy ride through Western prairies describing the warm encounter between two people united by the search for true feeling; here even the vocal expresses a bucolic serenity, barely scratched by the melancholy streak of the counter-melody.

Or in the cheerful, madcap rockabilly of "Monkey Island", where Erickson's musical madness first plays out through extreme vocalizations and then, true to the title, in a delightful monkey-like warble at the close, representing the primal exhilaration of someone discovering they can no longer relate to the established order.

The Yin and Yang of the record, in terms of atmosphere, are represented by "Don't Fall Down" and "Kingdom Of Heaven". The Yang is the disenchanted lightness of the former, which relies from the very start on the unmistakable recognisability of a sixties-style chorus that carries us through the whole journey. Absolute relaxation, standing in for the love needed to maintain a state of perpetual balance, with a final, forced, ironic falsetto flourish to close things out. The Yin is the heavy rock-blues toil of "Kingdom Of Heaven", with deep bass, distant echoes of jug, and a slowed-down, weary, almost pleading vocal. The guitar forays seem sealed off, with no way out, trapped in the circularity of everyday life. Here the lyrical references are even religious, biblical, drawn from the "Book of Proverbs", where it's stated that the only way to escape the end, the apocalypse, is to redefine the very concept of God.

Little to note about the closing "Tried To Hide", which revisits the trend set by "You're Gonna Miss Me" (not by chance chosen as its B-side), with Hall's usual jug underpinning the bass-and-drums rhythm over a blues backdrop barely charged with the acidity of Sutherland's lead guitar.

It's precisely on this point, namely the perhaps excessive homogeneity of the album's atmospheres and sounds, extraordinary as their intensity may be, that the only critical objection can be raised.

To continue with the culinary metaphor mentioned at the outset, what the 13th Floor Elevators serve up is a hearty meal made with humble ingredients but bold, decisive flavours. Worth trying sight unseen, with no fear of disappointment. After repeated listens, however, it's undeniable that one might feel the need to try slightly more elaborate dishes, even if, perhaps, built on the same fundamental culinary/musical foundations.

So much so that, once that unrepeatable long-term artistic vein was soon spent, on an equally excellent second album like "Easter Everywhere", the influence of Erickson and co. permeated (more or less visibly) different phases of rock history. From new wave (see the cover of "Reverberation" by Echo And The Bunnymen) to the dreamlike distortions of Spacemen 3 (who even recorded two versions of "Roller Coaster" across their debut EP and LP). And while "You're Gonna Miss Me" pops up on the legendary 1977 debut by Australia's Radio Birdman, "Fire Engine" became a fixture in the live sets of the seminal Television.

The cult surrounding the Texan band and its frontman (who has since resurfaced on the scene, though still plagued by serious mental health issues) becomes fully evident, at last, in the aforementioned "Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye: A Tribute To Roky Erickson", where, in aid of a fundraising effort on his behalf, one finds explicit tributes from a diverse array of artists, each hugely significant within their own field, including Rem, Zz Top, Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Thin White Rope and Julian Cope.

Erickson's most recent recordings date back just a few years, to 2010 to be precise, the fruit of an extraordinary collaboration with fellow Texans Okkervil River ("True Love Cast Out All Evil"), which earned glowing reviews and a warm reception from audiences.

Then, in 2012, his tour of Australia and New Zealand racked up a striking string of sold-out shows.

Ah, crazy old Roky. The mad world (of rock) simply can't do without you.

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27/04/2014