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King Of The Hill

Without the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Pretty Things on one hand and the Incredible String Band on the other, there would have been no Led Zep. But don’t hold that against the better bands. Roky is one of a multitude of patron saints for anybody who was ever detained for a crime that is no crime, but he never died for the sins of Plant and Page so they’ll have to answer for themselves by themselves. That day, like Jah, will not soon come, so while you’re waiting just check out the Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and Easter Everywhere LPs (and whatever boot tapes are floating around--their 3rd, Bull of the Woods, has some fine work as well); utterly essential psychedelia and top-drawer 60s rock&roll. Fuck the 60s, in fact, this stuff is timeless. OK, it only could have been conceived in the 60s, but that’s precisely why that decade casts the long shadow it does to this day. I don’t wanna have to spend the next millennium nostalgic for the damn 1960s, and it’s hardly my fault if so much was being done so brilliantly back then that the cycle (or at least the mainstream) hit a downward turn for the next twenty-five years.

Anyway. (*cough, cough*) The Elevators. Phenomenal band. There was a lot of great stuff coming out of Texas at the time, and this was the very cream of it. They did more acid than ten other bands of wider reputation but lower stature, and for all that they never forgot how to rock and roll. From the earliest boot tapes to the final outtakes, no matter what sort of shambles they were in they always managed to deliver that. They were the first band ever to describe themselves as “psychedelic.” (They drove the point home in their first album title but used the word freely in their ads and posters as well; they beat the Grateful Dead and whomever else by weeks and months.) They had everything a person could possibly ask for in a 60s cult band, except for the fact that they’ve remained a cult band to this day.

Say the name Velvet Underground and anybody with even a shred of (pseudo?) hipness knows exactly who you’re talking about. Stop by Borders or Barnes and Noble and every song they ever released is available in this or that lavish boxed set featuring state of the art digital mastering techniques. Wander over to the book section and you have your choice of over half a dozen VU/Lou Reed books on the shelf or in the catalog. There’s a reunion video, there are fanzines, there’s an Appreciation Society, there’s everything a band of such monumental stature rightfully deserves. Ask about the Elevators (who had every bit as much charisma purely as a rocking-rolling audio unit, no arty subtext but nearly as twisted a tale) and you’ll get a blank stare. They’ll have a few crappy budget-priced CDs if you’re lucky, but in the USA you won’t be very lucky at all because they’re on the Contemptibles...er, I mean the Collectables label, which means they sound as if they were mastered by high-school students who found a way to hook up two tin cans and a string to daddy’s DAT machine. (In other words, buy the imports or get the vinyl or don’t bother.)

One of the best things they had going for them was the sound of Roky’s voice--if you can imagine a male Janis Joplin, that would pretty much cover it. (Janis considered joining the Elevators at one point but wound up in San Fran instead. We could have had the two of them ululating in tandem, but we were not worthy.) Going all the way back to his first recording of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” in 1965, Roky has earned distinction as the first white male rock and roll singer of any consequence to come out with that bluesy soprano “I’m a freak” shriek that Bobby Plant later ripped off and launched an entire genre thereby...not to mention an entire (and unfortunate) school of macho/castrati vocalization that outlived its usefulness by a good fifteen years.

As I said, none of that was Roky’s fault, nor even his idea. I have one interview wherein he discusses the Yardbirds and what a liberating force they’d been on a purely musical level; when the talk turned to the heavy metal that came in their wake he dismissed it completely, waving it away “like the Yardbirds being played by robots.” The Elevators as a musical unit? Murderously intense R&B on their “classic” first LP (which is, but not nearly as much so as Easter, which saw them pulling away from that influence and finding the sound that was purely their own), augmented not only by Roky’s various and utterly Texan wails, gasps and war-whoops, but by liner notes that began: “Ever since the days of Aristotle...”

There was also the matter of that “funny little noise in the middle of the record.” It sounded a little like the chimpanzee from Ray Stevens’ “Gitarzan,” working behind far too much methedrine and heard at 78rpm singing “gergergergergoogoogoogoogooGOO!,” but that would have been too obvious. It was not a sound effect, nor was it a gimmick. It was a band member, playing an electronically amplified jug. Don’t ask me how, or why. It worked. It meshed perfectly with the rest of the music, driving it along rhythmically much as a second percussionist would have, but rather more melodically and sympathetically as well. It was one of the veriest trade secrets of this band and far more outré in its way than even the Prince of Wales, John Cale and his magickal viola. As the bootlegs attest, the one thing that has robbed the Elevators’ 1972 and 1984 reunions of half their sparkle (and even Roky’s solo career to some extent) is the absence of The Jug.

But far be it from me to cry over spilt reverberations. That’s for you to do, once you finally hear this band. Texas in the 60s was not the most freak-friendly of places; it got to where the Elevators’ manager would vacuum their van before every road trip, so as to prevent even one illegal seed from traveling along with the band--if some loyal footservant didn’t regularly clean the chariot of the gods, the police who followed their every move would be doing so with glee. The denouement was inevitable, particularly in an election year: they were busted. Roky beat the rap by claiming to be from Mars. Sometimes he still does. Perhaps he even is.

Roky’s mother of course would beg to differ, but so would have Clark Kent’s. On a stack o’ bibles. This being (lest we forget) Texas in the 60s, the über-society was itching to make the point that there was no room and (burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp!) zero tolerance for such a sunshine superman. A daily ration of kryptonite was duly prescribed. Roky landed in a mental hospital, where he languished for years (it took a court case to get him out), writing poetry as he was force-fed medication and electroshock. The poems were printed by one Pyramid Publishing Company in April of 1972 (just in time for Easter) in a little white book. A lovely thing (even if the paper is a bit gamy), it was entitled Openers and is still in its first printing. (More recently it has been joined by Openers II, a collection of his more recent work--readily available, and a major source of his income these days.) The poems were printed in ALL-CAPS, WHICH AS WE ALL KNOW IS A CLASSIC SIGN OF MENTAL PROCESSES MOST OF US PREFER TO SHY AWAY FROM. It was credited to one Reverend Roger Roky Kynard Erickson (is Roky a ULC minister? I am, and so can you be too, just click here). There are poems of self-consolation such as “Ye Are Not Crazy Man” and comfort for the rest of us in the form of “Unforced Peace,” “When You Get Delighted,” and “Lets Have A Never Ending Love Contest.”

Those ministers of loving grace, the vested authorities of the state of Texas, saw to it there were daily doses of shock and “medicine,” intended to prevent him from having such evil thoughts and nearly succeeding in keeping him from forming any thoughts at all. It took two or three years after his release for him to get a working band together. His solo lyrics are a grimoire of nearly-coherent satanic and horror-comic imagery, and that’s why. He still bays at the moon with such monomaniacal intensity that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s singing, except that he never sings Elevators songs anymore. Not a one, except for “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” And since he rarely even plays out these days, we already do. Any of his albums (even the crappy “legal bootlegs”) are well worth checking out (especially since there are so many of them and you’ll be buying them just for the sound of his voice), but buy the Elevators first. You will never regret it that you did.