The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators (1966) / Easter Everywhere (1967) / Live (1968) / Bull of the Woods (1968)

The mid-1960s saw the rise of countless local garage-rock scenes throughout the U.S. that, in many ways, laid the groundwork for the psychedelic movement later in the decade and also the punk movement that first cropped up in NYC in the mid-1970s. While most of the bands comprising these local scenes were short-lived and destined for permanent obscurity, The 13th Floor Elevators, from Austin, TX. and fronted by one of the most tragic figures of the rock-era, Roky Erickson, arguably rock 'n' roll's first real counter-culture "wildman" figure and electric jug player and self-styled spiritual leader Tommy Hall, who claimed to have participated in LSD experiments at UT Austin in 1964, transcended their provincial origins by being one of the first bands to openly advocate the use of psychotropic drugs as a form of mind expansion as well as allowing the effects of this practice to overtly influence their music. Hall: "Everything I wrote was inspired through my taking LSD. I invented the electric jug totally out of my desire to find a place onstage with this new group, so I could be a part of it, and so I could communicate my new ideas through the lyrics I wanted to write." What set The 13th Floor Elevators apart from their garage-band contemporaries was their musical sophistication, which manifested itself not only in their playing, but also in their tendency to draw from multiple genres to create their distinctive brand of melancholic psych-rock. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was the driving force in achieving the band's unique sound. Hall: Stacy was a consummate guitarist, far ahead of his time. He had deep fears about his dying young under violent circumstances. This manifested itself as a deep, mysterious, soulful feeling in his music and gave the Elevators a profound base to our overall sound. His sense of impending doom was indeed prophetic."

The 13th Floor Elevators led a dangerously precarious (in a legal sense) bohemian existence in amidst the ultra-conservative culture of their home state, something that eventually necessitated an extended stay in San Francisco in 1966-1967, where they helped foment the quickly developing Bay Area psychedelic scene and reconnected with fellow Austin native Janis Joplin (Joplin is rumored to have been influenced by Erickson's distinctive vocal style). Just before their visit to the Bay Area, the band had released their classic debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, which was something of a clarion call for an impending revolution in rock music. Aided by a breakthrough single, "You're Gonna Miss Me," which landed Erickson, Hall & co. on, of all things, American Bandstand, The 13th Floor Elevators' debut album was a minor commercial success despite their humble garage-band origins; however, what truly set the album apart was its palpable sense of its own pioneering status. In 1966, there were a number of bands toying with adding psychedelic elements to their songs, but in the case of The 13th Floor Elevators, they were pretty much inventing psych-rock from scratch by investing their songs with a manic sense of emotional urgency and broadening their musical palette to include sonic textures falling far outside the purview of conventional pop music (not the least of which were Hall's simply bizarre contributions on the electric jug).

Stacy Sutherland

After returning to Austin in early 1967, the band began recording what would become their masterpiece, Easter Everywhere, an unparallelled piece of late-sixties psychedelia that features a more polished and confident sound than its precursor matched with a cohesive set of consistently fine songs. From the acid-drenched slow-burner "Slip Inside This House," to the beautifully mournful folk ballad "I Had to Tell You," Roky Erickson's vocals are simply stunning in their ability to convey everything from unhinged passion to wistful melancholia, and Stacy Sutherland's lead guitar work is an exercise in understated melodic brilliance. Sadly, a year after the release of Easter Everywhere, Erickson was arrested for the possession of a single marijuana joint, which, in Texas at the time, was prosecuted in outlandishly harsh ways. In order to avoid a 10 year prison term, Erickson pleaded insanity; consequently, he was institutionalized and repeatedly subjected to electroshock therapy until his release in 1972.  As a result of Erickson's fate, The 13th Floor Elevators slowly fell apart, finally disbanding in 1969 after releasing Bull of the Woods; however, few if any bands were as instrumental in the rise of psychedelia and the unprecedented revolution that rock music underwent during the late 1960s. Tommy Hall: "Most people got caught up with illusions, failing to see truth provided by the psychedelic experiences. You must look past the pyramid, into its shadow, to find the truth."

The 13th Floor Elevators - "You're Gonna Miss Me" (1966)

This mid-sixties Austin garage band, led by the legendary Roky Erickson and featuring the electrified jug playing of Tommy Hall, is pretty much ground zero for the psychedelic rock movement. But who came up with the idea of having them play a teeny-bopper pool party?

Notes from the Paisley Underground: The Salvation Army - Happen Happened (1982/1992)

Michael Quercio was one of the pivotal figures of the paisley underground, not only because he gave the scene its moniker (which most, including himself, eventually came to hate because of its emphasis on image over musical substance), but also as the leader of The Salvation Army, a punky garage-pysch band who would later become the more overtly psychedelic and equally important Three O'Clock. If you're only familiar with the latter, then Happen Happened will come as something of a surprise because The Salvation Army had a much darker, grittier sound than the later, renamed version of the band, and the album itself happens to be one of the most vivid documents of the early days of the paisley scene in L.A., and some, including Rain Parade guitarist Matt Piucci, consider it the finest slice of neo-psych to emanate from the paisley underground. The origin of The Salvation Army begins with Quercio, then using the pseudonym Ricky Start, sending some home demos of his fledgling band in to Rodney Bingenheimer, the legendary Los Angeles-area disc jockey and unofficial curator of the growing alternative music scene that was soon to explode in the U.S. Inspired by Bingenheimer's enthusiasm for the band's sound, Quercio and band-mates Troy Howell and Johnny Blazing recorded a few professional-quality demos at a local studio, which ended up netting them their first big break. Quercio: "Our original 45 was released in the fall of 1981. We were all still in high school or just graduated. It was on the Minutemen’s label which was called New Alliance. There was a place where a lot of bands played called Alpine Village in Torrance that’s kind of like a German biergarten. Anyways, D. Boon from the Minutemen saw us there and after our show he came up and asked if we had anything and we had just made this little demo tape that we made with money we saved up from our parents and stuff. He liked two of the songs and said he wanted to put them out and he put them out on his label as a 45."

Michael Quercio

Soon after the release of The Salvation Army's debut single, Blazing was kicked out of the band (for flubbing up the photo session for the picture sleeve of the 45) and was replaced with Gregg Louis Gutierrez, a guitarist whom Quercio knew from his college days. With the new lineup in place, the band recorded a follow-up EP; however, it never saw the light of day because fate came knocking before it could be officially released. Quercio had sent Rodney Bingenheimer an advanced copy of the EP, which the disc jockey began promoting on KROQ. Lisa Fancher had just started her own record label, the seminal L.A. underground mecca Frontier, when she heard one of Salvation Army's songs on Bingenheimer's show Rodney on the Roq. She signed the band immediately and put them in a studio to work on a full album. It was during these sessions that Danny Benair, former drummer for The Quick and Choir Invisible, would join the band, replacing Troy Howell, whose limitations behind the drum kit were becoming more and more apparent. The compilation Befour Three O'Clock collects the first single, unreleased EP, and the result of the sessions for Frontier, Happen Happened, The Salvation Army's final recording before changing their name to The Three O'Clock. It begins with one of Quercio's earliest recording sessions, which yielded the excellent 1981 "Happen Happens / Mind Gardens" single. This early version of "Mind Gardens" is built around a simple Punk-inspired chord progression and Quercio's snarling vocals, and represents quite a contrast to the album version recorded the following year, which loses much of its directness beneath all the reverb and jangle. Despite this, The Salvation Army's sole original album is full of great Nuggets-inspired tracks such as the blues-psych cover of The Great Society's "Going Home," a song featuring a swaggering guitar-based hook and one of Quercio's better early vocal performances. Happen Happened is one of the most essential releases related to the paisley underground, as it both a great album and a rare snapshot of the scene's early roots in the L.A. hardcore/punk movement.

Unreflected - A Genealogy of Mazzy Star in Five Chapters: Chapter I- Rain Parade

 

"We thought it was way more punk to play slow, spooky, sometimes gentle, sometimes hard, but always melodic music, because punk was about doing your own thing and fuck everybody else." - Rain Parade guitarist Matt Piucci

The story of Rain Parade, and in many ways, the paisley underground scene itself, begins in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood in West L.A. during the mid-1970s, where a pair of brothers, David and Steven Roback lived on the same block as a friend and schoolmate named John Hoffs, who happened to have a younger sister named Susanna. What would eventually bring David and Susanna Hoffs together was a mutual love of sixties-era music and Roback's alienated intellectual tendencies. David Roback: "I was fairly different from the other kids, I didn't get on with them [....] We didn't have many common interests. My hobbies were psychiatry and history. I'd psychoanalyze my friends." Eventually, David formed a band with Susanna and John Hoffs called The Unconscious, though the it was destined to be short-lived. David Roback: "There's an old film of us playing in that band, it's pretty interesting but we moved on because we were holding each other back. We didn't want to sing together, we didn't like the sound of male and female voice together." Susanna Hoffs has a different recollection: "What happened was my brother was sort of irritated with David and I for becoming a couple. I was his kid sister, and suddenly I’m stealing his best friend away. So then it was just David and I, and we never did get a bass player or a drummer. We never did a show, and all we did was make some living–room tapes.” By the time the summer of 1977 had rolled around, David had already gone off to college in Minnesota where he, quite by chance, met a guitar player named Matt Piucci, whom he eventually shared a dorm room with and formed a short-lived punk band called The Beatnicks. As if beckoned by fate, Piucci would end up following David back to L.A. several years later. Meanwhile, Steven had immersed himself in the burgeoning L.A. punk scene and was listening to New York art-punks like the Talking Heads and Television. However, it was an L.A. band called The Last, whose sound was defined just as much by melodic power-pop as it was punk aggression, that had a lasting influence on him. After David had returned from college, they formed The Sidewalks and began playing obscure L.A. clubs as an electric folk band; however, it would not be until the arrival of David's college buddy Matt Piucci at the dawn of a new decade, the 1980s, that a new direction for their music would come into focus. Matt Piucci: "I finally moved to LA in 1981 and we formed a band. By then the LA punk scene, which was never any good besides X and the Circle Jerks, had become this fascist thing, much like hip hop today where it was the only allowed style of music considered to be cool. Most of these bands could not play worth shit and had no melodies or songs either. We got REALLY into Television and Love, as well as, of course the Byrds and Beach Boys, pretty much anything that began with B."

Along with keyboardist Will Glenn and drummer Eddie Kalwa, the Roback brothers and Piucci formed Rain Parade in 1981. Piucci: "It did seem like we were completely on our own. I moved out in April of 1981 and we didn't play live until May of 1982, by then we had recorded out first single. Meeting Green on Red and the Dream Syndicate was nice in that they appreciated what we were trying to do, although they didn't sound much like us. We already knew the Bangles." The band recorded their first single in early 1982 at Ethan James' Radio Tokyo studio in Venice, and it didn't take long for it to garner immediate attention from indie communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Nigel Cross of the UK indie mag Bucketfull of Brains: "That first 45 on the Llama label 'What's She Done to Your Mind' b/w 'Kaleidoscope' was one of life's epiphanies- not only one of the great 7"-ers of all time but one of the first signs that psychedelic music was about to have its second flowering. Hearing those two songs filled me with a missionary zeal [....] I wanted to tell the stupid world that there was was this absolutely beautiful, mind-altering music being made again on the West Coast- as good as anything that LA had offered up in the mid-60s. The chiming electric 12-string guitars, the delicate acoustic guitar strummings, wispy organ sounds that could carry your heart, mind and body away from a grim Cold War world."  After recording some demos at Lyceum Sound (a makeshift studio created out of a two-car garage and run by The Last), which ultimately came to light on the compilation Warfrat Tales, Rain Parade found themselves at the center of a quickly growing and unusually coherent music scene, which Michael Quercio of The Three O'Clock would soon dub "the paisley underground" in a magazine interview. Guitarist of The Long Ryders Sid Griffin: "For what its worth, the original Paisley Underground was the Dream Syndicate, Three O'Clock, the Rain Parade and Bangs [....] All these bands drank beer together and lent each other amps. If one of my strings popped during a gig, I'd just hand the guitar to Karl Precoda of the Syndicate and he'd fix it. Nobody had roadies, and nobody was trying to do each other down. The whole thrust of the thing was more social than musical. Okay, so all the groups were vaguely sixties-influenced guitar-pop bands who'd moved on from punk, but the main thing about the scene was that everybody hung out. I mean, face it- the Bangs were pretty terrible when they started out."

In March of 1983, the band entered Contour studios in Los Angeles to record their first LP, the esoteric title of which was dreamed up by David Roback: "I was going through a subway in San Francisco and I noticed it was written on a sign. I thought I've got to write this down because I'm so high, I'll forget it. It reads so well, I wrote it down on a matchbox and suggested it to the band and they liked it it a lot." What they ended up recording was one of the few definitive albums of the paisley underground scene. Emergency Third Rail Power Trip is an enduring and unassuming gem of post-sixties (neo) psychedelia. While certainly taking inspiration from purveyors of 1960s jangle-pop such as The Byrds and Love, as well as the darker, more claustrophobic psychedelic textures of bands such as The Doors and early Pink Floyd, Rain Parade's debut LP is much more than simply an homage to their psych-rock forefathers; rather, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip bristles with the desire for re-invention. Led by the fuzz-guitar interplay of David Roback and Matt Piucci and Steven Roback's shamanic basslines, Rain Parade successfully integrate the blissed-out jangle of songs such as their first single, "What's She Done to Your Mind," with the dark, thick haze of songs like "Look at Merri," which sounds like a blueprint for Jason Pierce's neo-psych excursions a decade later as Spacemen 3 and later Spiritualized. Matt Piucci recalling the recording sessions: "We really did our homework. Every sound on there is well thought out and we were pretty rigorous about it. By the time we recorded, most, but not all of the parts had been decided upon." Steven Roback: "The lyrical themes and song content have a sort of punk ethos to them [....] The state of mind we were all in was pretty dark, and it was like personal therapy for everybody in the band. We were all feeling kind of hopeless and helpless about things, and the band was this sort of idealistic attempt to create some space where we could all feel really great."

Rain Parade - "This Can't Be Today" (1984)

For fuck's sake, this is a rare find- a David Roback-era Rain Parade video. The first installment of the new series on Mazzy Star is coming soon. Chapter 1 will feature the Rain Parade and include excerpts from some rare early interviews. Stay tuned...

Notes from the Paisley Underground: 28th Day - The Complete Recordings (1985/2003)

Hailing from Chico, a small Northern California college-town that was one of the lesser-known corners of the 1980s-era paisley scene, 28th Day was several cuts above the plethora of neo-psych and jangle-pop bands that then littered the landscape, as they featured Cole Marquis' darkly evocative guitar-work (reminiscent of Karl Precoda of The Dream Syndicate) and a young Barbara Manning who would later go on to become a well-loved and semi-legendary fixture on the S.F. music scene. While 28th Day was fated to only remain together long enough to release a self-titled mini-album on Enigma Records (produced by Russ Tolman of True West), in doing so, they managed to leave behind what is simultaneously one of the best neo-psych albums of the 1980s, and one of the most under-appreciated albums associated (albeit marginally) with the paisley movement. 28th Day was Manning's first tour of duty in a band and Marquis was not much more than a neophyte himself as they set about searching for their distinctively folky post-punk, psych-drenched sound. Manning: "28th Day's first year was similar to any beginning band's first one. By this time Cole knew all our songs, being a fan of ours, so when our guitarist quit because he wanted to be a professional DJ, Cole stepped in and it was awesome. I was afraid our relationship would kill the band (as it did), but the magic really worked when we played together. We lived together. We went to school together. We wrote songs and helped to arrange them. But we were very bad at being faithful to each other."

Barbara Manning during her Chico State days

Marquis: "We were so green in the beginning, we could hardly play, but we all believed in what we were doing. We were having fun, and we didn't hold anything back. We made up for the lack of skill with energy, fear, alcohol and faith." What skill deficiencies the band may have had at the time seem completely irrelevant on songs such as "25 Pills," the lead track on 28th Day, a somber jangle-pop gem about drug addiction that pushes close to the brand of melancholia that Joy Division specialized in. And then there's the beautiful "Burnsite," featuring Marquis and Manning's hauntingly intertwined vocals and a paranoia-inducing arrangement (including screams from Manning) that it occasionally reminiscent of David Roback's Opal. Nevertheless, what sets 28th Day apart is their ability to mix in a song such as "Lost," a folky garage-rocker that should have become a paisley anthem, but instead was fated, like the band itself, to footnote status. Marquis: "We were a couple then. I was really into Joy Division at the time, Wire, The Beatles, The Doors, Dream Syndicate. Bobbie [Manning] and I were never that much into punk rock. I started writing these three chord songs like "25 Pills" or "Holiday," it just had that psychedelic sound 'cos that's what I  was listening to and it was easy to play for me." Manning: "How Do I explain it? We were very young. It was our first band. We thought we were the best band in the world. We started to hate each other. Isn't it only natural?"

Notes from the Paisley Underground: Various Artists - Warf Rat Tales: Unabridged (1983/2005)

At the dawn of the 1980s, the L.A. underground music scene was comprised of a heady mix of bands and styles that included punk, post-punk, cow-punk, neo-psych, power-pop, jangle-pop, rockabilly, and everything in between. In addition to its quite unprecedented musical diversity, what also set this underground scene apart from others before it and those since was the genre-defying camaraderie between the various bands involved. As such, it was not unusual to see someone like Chris D. of The Flesh Eaters- ferocious purveyors of an exceedingly dark blues-punk hybrid that made them legends among the hardcore crowd- befriend and support a band such as The Dream Syndicate, who were in the process of spearheading a psych-revival that would come to be known as the Paisley Underground. Many of these relationships were forged through shared ties with the indie record labels that mushroomed in and around the scene whose rosters often reflected the amazing variety of the L.A. underground itself, a phenomenon that helped give rise to the era of the indie compilation as the best way to promote the music.

A storied example of this was Warfrat Records, a tiny artist-run label, whose recordings were made in a (literally) makeshift studio called Lyceum Sound, which was actually a sound-proofed two-car garage (we're talking egg-cartons on the walls here) that had been rented out by members of The Last as a rehearsal space. The "studio" was originally conceived as a much preferred return to sonic austerity for The Last after having had their sound subjected to the sterilizing effects of the professional recording process on their debut LP, L.A. Explosion!  Eventually, Lyceum Sound played host to bands such as The Gun Club, Rain Parade, The Long Ryders and Savage Republic to name but a few, all of whom engaged in something like recorded rehearsals. As The Last's manager Gary Stewart remembers, the WarfRat record label was born out of necessity: "I didn't so much dream up the WarfRat label as I was forced to start it, as a way of releasing a single [...] that was getting some airplay on Rodney Bingenheimer's Sunday night radio show." The compilation WarfRat Tales was intended as a way to promote many of the bands who regularly passed through Lyceum Sound as well as to pay off some bills (according to Stewart, the album accomplished only one of these objectives).

The album itself is one of the better comps to emanate from the L.A. underground, and has the added advantage of being primarily comprised of unique "demo" performances that are often superior to the more polished versions available elsewhere. The opener, "Try to Rise," a creepy, campy psychedelic rocker by The Last that sounds a bit like Frankenfurter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fronting The Doors, sets the tone for this consistently great and intensely moody set of songs. Another highlight is "Stop the Clock" by the Earwigs, a strange mash-up of punk, ska and early new-wave that functions as a tension-filled time-capsule of cold war paranoia. WarfRat Tales also features some wonderfully scruffy cuts from Paisley Underground mainstays Rain Parade, including a stunning rendition of "This Can't Be Today," later re-recorded for their debut LP, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. Perhaps the most essential track is "Creeping Coastlines of Light" by The Leaving Trains, a twangy, moody, transcendent slow-burner that is the equal of anything recorded by the scene's more well-known "roots" bands such as The Long Ryders and True West. WarfRat Tales is worth revisting because it offers a significant glimpse into an amazingly vibrant music scene long since gone; however, what makes it truly distinctive is the way its austerely-recorded tracks capture the passion and camaraderie that made the L.A. underground what it was.

The Easybeats - "Sorry" (1966)

Easily one of my favorite mod-beat songs, probably because I never get enough of scratchy guitars and go-go dancers...