FEATURE:
Second Spin
13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere
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THIS is a Second Spin…
where I am highlighting an album that has got positive reviews but might not be well known. The other kind I do is albums that are underrated and were reviewed not so well but are well worth a listen – which is what I will be returning to for the next outing. A great album that turns fifty-five on 25th October, 13th Floor Elevators’ Easter Everywhere is not played and known as widely as it should be, and yet it is one of the finest Psychedelic albums ever released. 1967 was a terrific year for more experimental, Psychedelia-tinted, and trippy albums. The Beatles did that in style with Sgt. Pepper’s Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour. Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane and Cream also ventured into that territory. It was a remarkable time for music! I wanted to bring in a couple of reviews for 13th Floor Elevators’ second studio album. The Texan band released their aptly-named The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators in 1966. I think their masterpiece is the 1967 follow-up. It is a groundbreaking album that I am not sure how many people today know about. Maybe a lot of my parents’ generation (1950s and 1960s) remember the album and what it was like. How many people today can recall 13th Floor Elevators and their masterpiece sophomore album?! I fancy very few people will be able to remember. I don’t think I have heard them on the radio for a while. It is a perfect opportunity to spin this album and make people aware of it.
There are some wonderful and perceptive reviews and features concerning Easter Everywhere and the impact that it made. Released in a year that has seen world-class, culture-changing albums from the likes of The Beatles, the American band released something very different but hardly that inferior. Indeed, Easter Everywhere is one of the greatest albums of the ‘60s. This is what Glorious Noise wrote about 13th Floor Elevators’ sublime Easter Everywhere:
“Any decent rock and roll fanatic knows the story about Roky Erickson. They’ve heard the stories of his struggles with mental illness. They know the tale of his unjust incarceration(s). They understand that his legacy has been assured an honorable nod, thanks in large part by one of the only decent tribute compilations ever released (Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye) and the caliber of contributors on it.
Yet there is a good possibility that you only know Roky from only one song, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” from his band 13th Floor Elevators. And there is a good possibility that you only know that one song from the scene in High Fidelity when Laura leaves Rob and he cranks up the stereo, blaring that classic Elevators’ tune as she retrieves the last personal belongings from their apartment.
As good as that song is—and as wonderful as its source album is (1966’s The Psychedelic Sounds Of)—it isn’t the band’s defining moment. That moment would come with the second long-player, Easter Everywhere, an album that not only continues the 13th Floor Elevators road trip to mind expansion, it manages to send us the obligatory “Wish you were here!” postcard while the rest of us were still on the road trying to catch up.
Subdued, restrained, yet even more expansive than the aptly titled debut, Easter Everywhere shows the band mixing real emotion with the lysergic-fueled imagery. It’s still a mind-blowing listen, but not to the point where the band’s altered imaginations sound silly to the uninitiated. The straight and narrow can also enjoy the Elevators twists and turns through unchartered territories. It’s a communal affair that incorporates the band members themselves, a single mom with a maternal instinct that encouraged the member’s creativity, and the brother of Kenny Rogers who managed to capture the unique results on magnetic tape.
This is important to remember when understanding Easter Everywhere. It is not, as some may suggest, the work of an individual with enormous talent and unfortunate circumstances. It’s the product of several people, some of whom have back-stories that are almost as fabled as Erickson’s.
One of those members was Tommy Hall, a former chemical engineering major at the University of Texas. Thanks to an increasing drug intake and a growing resentment towards the intellectual establishment, Hall became so fixated on spreading his pharmaceutical gospel that he practically invented an instrument (the “electric jug”) and recruited a few local musicians to help with his lofty visions.
Since we’re clarifying Erickson’s role, let’s address Tommy Hall’s too. You notice the electric jug immediately on Easter Everywhere. The sound it produces is unmistakable and unique.
They’re also a sham.
Sources close to the band later revealed that Hall’s ceramic jug was merely a prop. The sounds being made were just noises made from his mouth with the jug providing minimal resonance and a distraction for people to focus on.
With that said, they are intriguing sounds, heavily reverberated, occasionally eerie and profoundly child-like when you consider the manner in which they were created: An intelligent young man with little musical ability that became so hell-bent on playing an instrument…any instrument…that he effectively made one up while managing to make it an intricate part of the band’s sound. By some strange manner of coincidence, the 13th Floor Elevator is probably the only band in existence where an “electric jug” sounds positively perfect.
Phony instruments aside, Hall’s other two roles seemed to play a greater part in the band’s creative arsenal: chief poet/lyricist and dispenser of mind-altering substances. Of course, the two roles were inherently intertwined and, as in any great acid-casualty story, the creative peak resulting from such substances is relatively short lived. For listeners, Easter Everywhere blends together the perfect balance of cerebral calisthenics and acid eating excess.
It begins with “Slip Inside This House,” an eight-minute song/poem modeled after the same linear structure of Bob Dylan‘s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” It’s the band’s epic and it remains the greatest song they ever managed to produce.
Speaking of Bob, there’s also a spot-on version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” where Erickson’s phrasing sounds sweetly exasperated. It’s perhaps the best version of this song that you will ever hear.
But the real jewels of Easter Everywhere are in the originals. “Levitation” may be the album’s closet thing to a single. “Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)” takes a slow Texas soul groove for six minutes and provides the album with an uncommonly collected closer. And then there’s the prophetic “I Had To Tell You,” a song Roky co-wrote with Tommy Hall’s wife, Clementine. Clementine Hall entered into the Elevators world as a single mother with a few years of seniority on the rest of the members. In addition to encouraging and praising the band’s creative direction, she occasionally participated in it. The band entrusted her with lyrics and, as is the case on “I Had To Tell You,” backing vocals. Their tender duet on this song is beautifully fragile and frighteningly prophetic. She penned the songs chorus, “If you feel I’d lose my spirit / Like some drunkard’s wasted wine / Don’t you even think about it / I’m doing fine,” while it could have easily serves as the departing words from Erickson himself. Shortly after the release of Easter Everywhere, Erickson met with legal turmoil and some suggest that it was Texas’ draconian methods in treating “drug abusers” that helped push Roky into the mental abyss. Whatever the cause of his subsequent breakdown, he never sounded more in touch with his talents than throughout Easter Everywhere.
As do the rest of the band. Their contributions are so vital and fluent that they even managed to carry on without Erickson for one more album. The third release, Bull Of The Woods was created amid Erickson’s legal and mental turmoil and Tommy Hall’s lack of initiative. But thanks to guitarist Stacy Sutherland‘s leadership, Bull Of The Woods managed to be a credible finale for a band that began to crumble after ascending beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
As under-appreciated as Bull Of The Woods is, it’s Easter Everywhere that’s been even more criminally overlooked. The album has been name-checked by fans and critics alike, but even lofty praise hasn’t prevented it from falling out of print for years on end and being subjected to limiting distribution.
Easter Everywhere is an album so good that it should always be offered an opportunity with prospective audiences, and now is the perfect time for this landmark to be resurrected and examined once more”.
I have only just reconnected with the eye-opening and mind-expanding colours, scents and sounds of the stunning Easter Everywhere. If people do not associate this album with defining the Psychedelic scene, I think that they need to shift their perspective. This is what AllMusic observed and discovered when they reviewed Easter Everywhere:
“On their groundbreaking debut album, the 13th Floor Elevators sometimes sounded as if they were still learning how to work with the strange beast of their own creation known as psychedelic rock. But their second set, 1967's Easter Everywhere, found them a great deal more comfortable and confident with their loose and hypnotically trippy approach. Easter Everywhere doesn't have an out-of-the-box classic cut like "You're Gonna Miss Me" or "Fire Engine" from The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, but in many ways it's a more cohesive and consistent work, and the subtle but effective structures of the longer tracks grow and develop through repeated listenings, while rockers like "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" and "Levitation" pack a surprisingly visceral punch. Stacy Sutherland was never a blazing guitar hero, but his concise aural punctuations on the epochal "Slip Inside This House" and a superb cover of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" are perfectly suited to the material. In addition, the rhythm section of Dan Galindo on bass and Danny Thomas on drums locks these songs into place with confidence and skill. The strange patterns of Tommy Hall's electric jug playing are as gloriously bewildering as ever, merging the music of the spheres with an alien attack, and Roky Erickson's vocals make even the most acid-damaged poesy sound passionate, graceful, and wildly alive. And Roky and the Elevators never sounded sweeter and saner than they did on the penultimate tune, "I Had to Tell You," with Roky seemingly offering a postscript to his many sad years to follow with the words "If you fear I'll lose my spirit/Like a drunkard's wasted wine/Don't you even think about it/I'm feeling fine." Even if less influential than The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere is every bit as compelling and a true benchmark of early psychedelic rock -- not bad for an album produced by Kenny Rogers' brother”.
I am going to end with a review that heaps the highest praise on 13th Floor Elevators’ Easter Everywhere. Head Heritage went deep with their exploration of the album. Their review ends with a line that seems to sum up the brilliance and essence of Easter Everywhere:
“The arrangements on “Easter Everywhere” are extremely psychedelic as The Elevators were both absorbing and channeling the highest illuminations, informed by the raising of their respective consciousnesses through not only LSD dropping, but by FEELING it and converting those experiences into songs coherent for the intake of more rational, less far out states of mind. The massive opening track, “Slip Inside This House” (running anywhere between 10 minutes and an infinity of guises of time lengths) often appears to be quite longer than it actually is due to its strong and steady rolling drums, bass rumblings from Don Galindo and the ecstatic high-ness that is “Slip Inside This House”: an ever-evolving, being into becoming, like an endlessly unfolding lotus of infinite layers as the panels of consciousness shift this way to that in a constant flow of change and motion. It’s like wandering around wasted in suburban springtime sunshine after gulping 10 grammes of hashish and the sheer body buzz of it makes the houses you pass into faces, the doors smile at you as they slowly recede behind you in a curved horizon all stylised late-60’s faux-Peter Max pop art that constantly rotates as though set in motion by your feet. The houses appear, grow larger then smaller and recede -- to be replaced by a constant row of houses in an uninterrupted scene of non-diminished and unchanging returns. And “Slip Inside This House” details all this with its changing static-ness that’s gotta be one of the highest plasma marks of American psychedelic rock and roll ever. The constant Tommy Hall “doot-doot-doot”-ings on jug working alongside the near-constant shifting of sonic patterning that is as ever-returning as the classic Roky vocal bridge of “There is no season/When you are gone/You are always risen/From the seeds you’ve sown.” And when it all finally and subtly fades on a Stacy Sutherland near-surf guitar coda that The Rolling Stones would cop for the main riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” you wish it didn’t end so soon (The Stones would later appropriate elements and stylings from The Elevators’ own “Monkey Island” for their own proto-hominid rant’n’roll piece, “Monkey Man.”).
The album wriggles on through into “Slide Machine,” opening as it does with a handful of sharp acoustic pickings, only to submerge into the pervious wash of sound where everything merges into a single torrent and it melts into itself, the sky and forever. Roky Erickson’s sweet intonations of “tryin’ to/tryin’ to/tryin’ to get back to you...” grounds the piece into human experience as the rest of the lyrics and music is sheer Cosmic-Speak through the rhythms, buffeted by Sutherland’s searing, fuzz/reverb guitar scatter shots.
“She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own)” sees Roky vocalising about a very special woman, shared by booming harmony vocals that sing the parenthetical title as once more Sutherland’s throws in his proto-“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” riff in the middle section, amidst the clatter of drums and the overall organic yet willful and organised cacophony. And the above-mentioned, nameless ‘special woman’ whose “time does not spin outside her/It’s in every breath she breathes” is forever immortalised in this devotional portrait.
Next, The Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love” is inverted as “Nobody To Love” with Sutherland intoning a dry, love-jonesin’ supreme as his spiky though sticky-as-molasses guitar riffing streaks across the track with uncontrollable yet barely-reigned in looseness as the sheer sustain of his guitar’s reverberation bleeds through just BARELY in time, zigzagging and ricocheting astonishingly free all over the place. But you’ll need the insanely rare lyric sheet that accompanied the original IA pressing of this mystic aural platter to make 100% coherence out of Sutherland’s sonorous Tex-Mesc drawl. The album finally simmers with a cover of Dylan’s folk/protest elegy, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” here elongated with a length and tempo completely gentle, relaxed and gracefully sad; especially with Roky’s barely detectable whispering of the title near the end that reinforces the sense of rebirth that hovers over the entire album.
“Earthquake” opens side two, and the previous wash of sound from side one is upon us once again as the staunch repetition of the drumming, jug blowing and bass clumping keeps the track with high tension wire humming, only to be interrogated by Sutherland’s hollow-bodied guitarus interruptus in the quick action breaks. So ragingly slinky is this song (what with the ever-steady hi-hatting’n’snare of Danny Thomas and the overwhelming snarl of Sutherland’s fuzz guitar like a mass of black seaweed that mats the surface of this particular roaring river rapids -- halting only for solo feedback and grinding fuzz counter-pointing), hinted at by Roky’s sung lines of pulling through ‘flesh and bone’/’earth and stone’ seems nothing less than cunnilingus of the Mother Earth Herself, all quivering quim and aching rim prompted along by Roky’s ecstatically freaking tonguing whine of ‘mmmmmmmmmmm...!’ And Sutherland’s fuzzed/shearing/searing guitar solo at the end may be one of his best. Although it’s practically the same notes he always utilises throughout the album, somehow THIS arrangement of them are particularly effective.
From here on in, “Easter Everywhere” has almost nowhere to go but to hunker down and take stock quietly, as they do with the plaintive Roky-sung “Dust.” Although primarily acoustic, Sutherland e-guitar prowls the perimeter with wisps of gentle vibrato, but wouldn’t you know it -- The Elevators come charging out full tilt with the last brash explosion on the album: “I’ve Got Levitation.” Here Roky is calling out for the Music of the Spheres over low-end surf guitar fills and an overall clattery blow-out that sees a weird edit right before the fade, failing to dissipate the energy or blow its spell one whit. But with its fiery passing, The Elevators take things way down with “I Had To Tell You,” sung softly by Roky and harmonized with jug-player Tommy Hall’s wife, Clementine. Their voices weave with acoustic guitar hi-hat, tambourine and harmonica as Roky comments on the chaos all around him, soothing to a degree, but none so more so than “Postures (Leave Your Body Behind).” Only here, the undulating rhythm lightly charge the scene, and it’s an ever-returning one that mirrors the album’s opener “Slip Inside This House” in terms of Roky’s reiterated lyric passages that are constantly re-inserted as soon as you’ve forgotten them. “Remember…remember…” he’ll sooth one minute, then onto a different line that gets repeated, like “etches that flow from your energy” or “keep on climbing.” And the more-hypnotic-than-Sam Andrews guitar keeps on lightly nudging your mind and body to “remember...remember” -- for there are “evolutions everywhere.”
A broader expanse was never mapped out by a rock’n’roll band of its time”.
Like I say with many of the albums featured in this series, you do not need to be a fan of the genre or artist to appreciate it. Easter Everywhere is an album that offers something phenomenal and new with every listen. Regarded as a classic, you do not hear it spoken about too much today. 1967 is one of the best years of music ever, and 13th Floor Elevators definitely contributed to that. The Psychedelia culture and scene of that year was history-making. Around the Summer of Love and everything that was happening on both sides of The Atlantic, the most remarkable and impactful music came through. Maybe not as commercial, celebrated, and accessible as something like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 13th Floor Elevators’ Easter Everywhere is an undoubted masterpiece! Give this a second (or first) spin and let it…
SEEP into your consciousness.