The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
Roky Erickson (v, g); Tommy Hall (jug, v); Dan Galindo (b); Stacy Sutherland (g); Danny Thomas (d)
Track listing: Slip Inside This House (S/US); Slide Machine; She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own) (S/US); Nobody To Love; Baby Blue (S/US); Earthquake; Dust; Levitation (S/US); I Had To Tell You; Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)
Running time: 41.29
Current CD: Charly SNAP132CD adds: Splash 1; Kingdom Of Heaven; You’re Gonna Miss Me; Reverberation (Doubt); You Don’t Know; Fire Engine; Monkey Island; Rollercoaster; Levitation (Instrumental) I Don’t Ever Wanna Come Down (Previously Unreleased)
Further listening: The Psychedelic Sounds Of (1966), their first album
Further reading: There are several good Thirteenth Floor Elevators websites; try ex-Elevator Danny Thomas’ www.geocities.com/ucdnlo/ or http://elevators. blinkenlights.org
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were the first band to describe or advertise their music as psychedelic, beating The Grateful Dead by two weeks. ‘I come out of Buddy Holly and then ran straight into Bob Dylan who then ran outta me,’ Roky Erickson said in 1996, ‘I was as Texas as I ever was, like a full dead creature could be.’ Which is about as articulate and succinct a statement about the Elevators as one could hope for today.
Producer Lelan Rodgers was a record business veteran – like famous brother Kenny – when he discovered the band playing in Houston. Signed to his optimistically named International Artists label, they hit Number 55 in the US with Roky’s You’re Gonna Miss Me. Rodgers was convinced he had hit makers on his hands but jug player/chief lyricist/resident Owsley-type Tommy Hall kept the band pioneering psychedelia and they never troubled the charts again, becoming Lone Star state legends instead.
Hall, his wife Clementine, virtuoso guitarist Stacy Sutherland (more responsible for the style of those Fillmore West acid guitar solos than Jorma Kaukonen or Jerry Garcia) and Erickson wrote songs whose lyrics were laced with a stoned mysticism. Coupled with their hypnotic music, the lyrics were supposedly enough to give the listener the answer they were searching for, as well as provide him or her with a real high. Ya dig? Rodgers deliberately underpromoted the band because, he claimed, he wanted their growing mystique (they caused the authorities in Texas as much worry as the Sex Pistols would in the UK) to snowball. Which meant outside Texas relatively few heard the West Coast/Gulf Coast power of Slip Inside This House or Nobody To Love, the sweet folkish balladry of I Had To Tell You or Sutherland’s stunning guitar leads or Erickson’s manic vocals (he had one of the most earnest singing styles in pop).
By the end of these sessions they were already too far gone (Erickson would take acid over 300 times) and the authorities were waiting to pounce. The band began a slow dissolution. Yet ask any Texas musician over 40 about them and they’ll tell you: the Elevators weren’t mere prophets, they were kings.
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
Gorilla
Debut from Britain’s best comic-rock troupe.
Record label: Liberty
Produced: Gerry Bron
Recorded: Regent Sound, Abbey Road and Landsdowne studios, London; May–July 1967
Released: October 1967
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Viv Stanshall (v, brass, ukulele); Neil Innes (v, g, k); Roger Ruskin Spear (brass, xylophone, bells); ‘Legs’ Larry Smith (d, tuba, tap-dancing); Sam Spoons (b, p); Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell (b, brass, banjo); Rodney Slater (brass, wind)
Track listing: Cool Britannia; Equestrian Statue (S); Jollity Farm; I Left My Heart In San Francisco; Look Out There’s A Monster Coming; Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold; Death Cab For Cutie; Narcissus; The Intro And The Outro; Mickey’s Son And Daughter; Big Shot; Music For The Head Ballet; Piggy Bank Love; I’m Bored; The Sound Of Music
Running time: 34.38
Current CD: BGO Records BGOCD82
Further listening: The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse (1968); Keynsham (1969)
Further reading: www.bonzodog.co.uk (official); www.iankitching.me.uk/music/ bonzos/ (excellent fan site)
Download: Not available in its entirety but much of it can be found on iTunes as part of Cornology
The Bonzos tumbled out of the heady, early ’60s art-school scene, an ever-changing troupe of eccentrics who delighted the college crowd with a riot of exploding wardrobes, archaic instruments, prewar novelty songs and jazz-age pop. In 1966 they decided to get a bit more serious. Recalls Neil Innes, ‘The New Vaudeville Band had a hit with Winchester Cathedral, but as they were a studio creation we were asked to be the band. Bob Kerr was the only one who went. But Viv Stanshall and I realised we had to write our own material. Gorilla is us in the throes of becoming modern.’
Some of those songs from the ’20s and ’30s (Jollity Farm, Mickey’s Son And Daughter) found their way onto the album, but now any idiom was fair game. Look Out, There’s A Monster Coming is a calypsoed comment on personal vanity, the brassy Big Shot lampoons film noir gumshoes, while the quite brilliant The Intro And The Outro starts with the jazz tradition of introducing the band and, as Innes notes, takes it to absurd levels. ‘That was a collective effort. Amazingly enough it was done on 4-track. We had a very good engineer – his name escapes me – who just kept bouncing things down.’ Lines such as ‘And looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes’ and ‘The Count Basie Orchestra on triangle’ ooze comic greatness. Innes – later to write the songs for the superb Rutles mock-umentary – contributed a dollop or two of Fabs-derived fare. ‘Sgt. Pepper had just been released, and of course it was a great influence. We were actually driving to Liverpool when the idea for Equestrian Statue came to me. I was reading Jean-Paul Sartre in the van, as you do, and there was some tosh about whether a lamp-post exists in the same way a human does so I thought, why not a statue?
‘The whole recording process was very spontaneous. We never really discussed what we were doing. We just had a shared sense of community. We all had problems with our shirts.’ Gorilla, with patronage from The Beatles (the Bonzos performed Death Cab For Cutie in Magical Mystery Tour), established them as acerbic court jesters to the burgeoning rock business; an essential role they performed admirably, in various guises, on into the ’70s.
Despite frontman Viv’s death in 1995, the remaining members reformed twice to play live. Their most recent UK tour included Brit comic types like Adrian Edmondson, Stephen Fry and Phill Jupitus in Viv’s place, proving some jokes were still funny 40 years on.
Country Joe And The Fish
Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Pioneers of psychedelic-protest mix acid and satire.
Record label: Vanguard
Produced: Samuel Charters
Recorded: Sierra Sound Laboratories, California; January–February 1967
Released: October 1967 (UK) May 1967 (US)
Chart peaks: None (UK) 39 (US)
Personnel: Joe McDonald (v, g, hm, tambourine); Barry Melton (v, g); David Cohen (g, o); Bruce Barthol (b, hm); Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsch (d); Bob DeSousa (e)
Track listing: Flying High; Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine; Death Sound