We Are Family.

The 13th Floor Elevators, 'Live', International Artists, 1968, Vinyl.

"We're all gathered together here for a psychedelic music, we all are a family."
So says the MC at the start of this dodgy "live" recording by the Elevators.

The saying goes you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family. Rock'n'roll in the late 60s opened up the possibility of picking your own family. Instead of DNA and family photos, rock'n'roll gave you the chance to create a family on the far more logical basis of music and drugs.

So rather than that L7 square fighter pilot brother who's always bumming your trip with his bogus speeches about GOD and COUNTRY, you can get yourself new brothers, new sisters (and you can have sex with these sisters), in a new family, bonded by the power of psychedelics and rock'n'roll, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Find yourself a messianic Big Daddy figure, a wise man, a shaman, to lead you to a new life away from all that hypocritical shit they feed you in the straight world, man. Because there's a war brewin', helter skelter, scoobie doobie, and we're off to the Hollywood Hills to kill some oink-fucking-oink, if you be trailing my vapour correctly, getting my drift, sailing on course for a big collision.

So sign up here, brothers and sisters, we're all a family, forged in the mind-altered goodness of a beautiful vision that only those with an open third eye can see. I'll know you're my brother, I'll know you're my sister, because I can see your third eye winking back at me.

Oh, and next time, when your trip has taken you on a detour through hell, be sure and say hello to Charlie, poke him in the eye with a rusty harpoon for me. That's the spirit. THAT'S THE SPIRIT.

20 Country Chartstoppers!

20 Country Chartstoppers! Vinyl.

An excerpt from the liner notes to 20 Country Chartstoppers!:

"Don't just look, but LISTEN TO COUNTRY like you've never heard before. Don't be surprised at what you hear. It's clear! COUNTRY OR POPS Chartstoppers is tops. STARS are our business. You've proven it by buying CHARTSTOPPERS Volumes 1 and 2. See them on TV, buy them in your record store and you're assured that when we say TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS . . . TWENTY ORIGINAL HITS . . . we mean it. That's our business . . . to give to you the greatest and the latest. So don't just look but LISTEN to TWENTY COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS. You'll find you're LISTENING TO COUNTRY . . . and that's what this exclusive record is all about."

All those caps are in the original liner notes, I didn't add them. More than wanting to LISTEN TO COUNTRY, I felt like I had been hypnotised into buying a sea monkey village or shares in an alpaca farm. The claim about TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS isn't even true. Twenty songs, but Johnny Cash sings three, Bill Anderson and Lee Conway sing two each: that's actually 16 ORIGINAL STARS singing 20 COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS!

This is a pretty stock standard late 60s K-TEL style compilation. Solid Nashville sound: none of that Haggard, Jennings outlaw malarkey. That said, this compilation does encompass a reasonable range of late 60s country styles. There was a lot of room for maneuver in the country and western genres judging by the representations on this disc. All of it is recognisably country, a unifying factor is the folksy storytelling nature of the lyrics. The strangest track on here is Dave Dudley's 'Fly away again'. This is a jet age update of the old standard 'on-the-road-again' story. Instead of mounting the horse or hitching up the wagon or getting a ride on a boxcar, the protagonist in this song seems to be waiting around for his flight in an airport lounge with his long-suffering lady friend.

What makes this updating of an archetypal country song strange is the synthesized strings, great slatherings phasing from one speaker to the other in tandem with the harmonica. Of course, the harmonica instantly evokes the great travelling hobo boxcar song tradition that modern country acquired from its dustbowl depression era roots. The combination of the synthesized (ARP?) strings and the harmonica works in creating a slightly queasy, compressed, flat sound. It's a sound that in its way conjures the empty feeling of hanging around airports waiting for loved ones to depart.

It's true son, I played jug in a rock'n'roll band.

The 13th Floor Elevators, 'His Eye Is On The Pyramid', Snapper Music, 1999, 2xCD Compilation.

The Sixties. If you remember being there you weren't really there. Or something. Sounds like what a super paranoid sub-Mansonite creep would say in an accusatory manner to an innocent schlep talking about something innocuous like going to his sister-in-law's graduation ceremony in 1967.

Innocent Schlep: That's right, of course, we went to Aunty Deniece's graduation, it would've been 1967. Here we go, I've got a photo right here.

Innocent Schlep points at a photo in photo album.

IS: You know Aunty Deniece was one of the first women in Australia to graduate with a degree in nuclear cybernetic biomechanics.
Sub-Mansonite Creep: It was the Sixties, man. If you remember being there you weren't really there, man! You're lying.
IS: But of course I was there, here's the photo and plus I remember being there.
SMC: Photos lie, man, they're a fabrication and your head, man, is filled with malignant genies. Haven't you ever read Descartes? Genies and hobgoblins, not brain cells and neutrons, man. When you ever gonna learn not to trust the man, man.

The Sixties. A time when a dude, with enough knowledge of Gurdijeff and cosmic philosophy, could get away with ruining perfectly good rock'n'roll by making cooing pigeon noises with an "electric jug". I'm referring here to the esteemed spiritual leader of The 13th Floor Elevators, Tommy Hall.

Tary Owen, a bandmate of Hall's in a pre-Elevators outfit called St.John and the Conquer Roots, explained Hall's use of the jug as instrument. "He would hold the microphone next to the jug and blow into the microphone with a real high pitch. He could have done it without the jug. The jug was a prop but it looked more like an instrument on stage," Owen says in the liner notes to His Eye Is On The Pyramid, a two-CD compilation of the 13th Floor Elevators.

The best known member of the Elevators is Roky Erickson. Roky is so well-known that he managed to make it into Richie Unterberger's Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More. Roky is now so well-known and loved that the likes of Henry Rollins, the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth have helped set up a foundation to look after Roky's royalties, releases and what-not. There's even a doco coming out about Roky.

But how about this other guy? Some chutzpah. Imagine walking into a rehearsal room with a bunch of musos and wailing away on your "electrified jug"?
"What are you doing, man?"
"I'm taking the sound of this band to a higher place. I'm blowing your mystical third eye with the sub-audible hum of my oracular jug."
"Yeah. Yeah! You're in the band. This is what we've been missing all along. A guy who cooes like a pigeon into a microphone."

And thus, with a jug player in their line-up, Coldplay could finally achieve corporate rock dominance.

Hall's jug playing sham is not that different to the blighted 90s phenomenon of 'heavy' bands suddenly acquiring a turntablist. Remember Mucky Pup? Urban Dance Squad? Frankston's very own 28 Days? Yeah, neither do I. Turntablists had a cultural tidal wave washing them into 90s 'metal' bands. Kids abandoned guitar playing in droves to learn the art of mixing smooth beats and fat rhythms. It was all about appropriating the discarded sounds of a decayed urban culture and remaking sounds anew in a decontextualised recontextualising mode. Just ask the French, I'm sure they can tell you all about it.

And in a certain way, Hall was doing the same with his "electrified jug". As the turntablist traced roots to 70s block parties, the jug player could trace roots to rudimentary dance musics from across the racial divide in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The jug can be seen as related to the fife, another basic wind instrument evident in early blues and old-timey music. So, in this regard, Hall's appropriation and bogus "electrification" of the jug was just another way for white rock bands to bend back and say hello to their black and white histories.

Though psychedelics have a slightly quaint connotation these days, in the late 60s they were still positively regarded as a possible means by which to improve the human mind - another step on the path to enlightenment. In the liner notes, Hall is quoted as saying: "I started taking psychedelics during this time because we thought they would take us somewhere, another stage beyond what we knew. We would perceive a new range of events that would help mankind."

The combination of psychedelic optimism in a song like 'Levitation' (co-written, incidentally, by Hall) with Hall's rhythmic pigeon cooes and the twangy, swampy guitars of Erickson and Stacy Sutherland creates something unique. It signals a time when rock'n'roll was still stretching its canvas; not always successfully but you could hear the excitement in what the players were trying to create. I don't hear much of that sort of excitement in rock'n'roll these days (grumpy old shit).

I've largely ignored Roky Erickson here because I'll get to him eventually with his solo stuff. Needless to say some of the greatest 13th Floor Elevators moments come from his weird Buddy Holly approximations, James Brown howls and Van Morrison growls. And 'You're Gonna Miss Me' remains one of the all-time great garage rock songs. Roky is also one of the saddest singers you'll ever hear, and that sadness and vulnerability is made all the greater by the hiccuping happiness of his Buddy Holly inspired high note skips.

The 13th Floor Elevators are one of the flag-bearers of the Texan acid rock tradition that takes in the likes of Janis Joplin, The Moving Sidewalks, The Red Crayola all the way up to the Butthole Surfers. Listening to a song like 'Barnyard Blues' you can also hear the greasy R'nB, early funk of Texans like Archie Bell & The Drells - though in a more loping, looser manner than most self-respecting funk bands would perform.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go practice my jug blowing. Anyone out there with a band that needs to be taken to a higher place?