13th floor elevators, a visual history

This is a pretty beautiful book* and not only is it amazing that so much ephemera - handbills, small press, photographs - has been preserved from the late 1960s, but also that so much of it is such high quality, artistically speaking. I'm at least as pleased by the original graphics as I am by the text, which is a great oral history of the 13th Floor Elevators (naturally) compiled from past and, I guess, present sources. Beautifully done.

There is one weird aspect to the overall - yes I do really like the 13FEs but as you know my real thing is the Red Krayola, the 13FEs' label mates on International Artists and also, I guess, their friends too. Roky Erikson appears on the first RK album, etc. But the RK are not mentioned once in this book - other IA artists are, but not the RK. At all. 

You'd almost imagine that Paul Drummond perhaps just hates the RK (people do), but I'm going to suggest that's probably not the case as he has, in the past, written sleeve notes for the reissues of RK material from the IA archives. So I guess... huh... it just didn't come up or something. 

That's not really the most important thing, it's just a point I wanted to make.

The important thing is that the 13FEs made it a point of honour to never do anything as a band without taking a massive dose of acid first. I am not sure that anyone in this book even implies that's not a good idea to pursue as an artistic approach, although I guess it's somewhat mixed in with the realities of the run-ins (runs-in?) that they often had with the law over their drug taking and the fact that between a grotesque anti-drug legal regime (including OTT punishment), and a horrendously inept and exploitative record label in International Artists (I was pleased to have the question I never knew I wanted to ask, answered here - why was the label called International Artists? I mean to me, they were/are all International but to them, they were just Texans! Well, the answer is that it was essentially something akin to a company name bought off the shelf by clueless fools). 

I am frankly, perhaps this is embarrassing, not massively au fait with the first 13FEs album but I really like Easter Everywhere and I really, really like Bull of the Woods, which I recognise in some eyes possibly makes me a faux 13FEs fan (a fauxn). But I'll wear that. BotW was an album of (great) Roky-era offcuts plus a bunch of tracks written and sung by Stacy Sutherland, and be fair, he was really, really good. Clearly while there's a tragedy at play with Roky and the 13FEs generally, there's another whole different tragedy going on with SS, who barely did anything after BotW and was then killed in the late 70s.** 

Back to this book: it's a testament to graphic and other artistic talents of a bunch of marginalised nonprofessionals (some of whom probably did get to be professionals down the line) in the service of the counterculture. Very impressive and a marvellous, horrible story. I recommend it. 

*That said, I don't 'get' what's being attempted with the cover, which could obviously have been printed in full colour (like much of the book is) rather than this weird die-cut triangle opening onto some very simple text on a purple background. I mean, I don't hate it exactly but I don't understand it. 

** Can you believe that thirty years ago I had a joke, when someone who died in, say, the 70s or any time earlier than that, I'd say, 'he/she never had a fax machine!' I can't even tell you now, how this was a joke in any sense. 

more product recommendations

Just wanted to say this is the best completely cohesive and nothing-below-par Red Krayola record since, probably, I don't know, years ago. Sensational piece of work. The drums-piano combination overall is quite spectacular.

best band

new red krayola record soon

Can't wait for this. Gina Birch is on it which is the best news I've heard all year. They should have asked me to do the cover though.

25!

Sitemeter tells me 25 people visited this blog yesterday alone, so I feel I really should be more productive here, but I have been doing a lot of academic writing right now and it's taking its toll. Can I just say however I got ahold of three great albums this week:

1. Hand Hell - Phonography
2. Red Krayola - Sighs trapped by liars
3. Kush - Snow white and the 8 straights

The first two are brand new, the third a reissue (that's a poem with resonance).
I also got Red Krayola's Japan in Paris in LA but I haven't listened to it yet.

Oh, and since I'm here I should say that even though Kevin Rudd is my friend in myspace I disagree with him re: capital punishment (I was about to make a joke based on something I recently saw again - 'except in the case of people who dramatically shake imaginary moisture/oil from their hands when eating' - but I'm over that slacker-styled culture jamming of flip commentary supposed to both veil and expose a greater truth. Veil and expose? Yes, that is what that kind of humour tries to do. But you can't veil and expose something. And plus it's not funny.)

one thousand songs you must hear before you die

Doug Parkinson’s single Love is like a cloudy day, written and produced for him by Vanda and Young, is one of those songs. Why it wasn’t a monster hit when released (whereas ‘Let’s hear it for the boy’ and the works of Meatloaf, to name just two varieties of music I thoroughly disapprove of, were) is a thorough and complete locked and sealed box of a mystery. The song has everything and a little bit more. It has, firstly, Doug Parkinson which is not always enough, but it’s pretty great, and he belts the fucker out. It has a ridiculously catchy singalong chorus that your grandma would love (and she possibly did, since she was 14 when it came out). It has a hot drummer who does the most fabulous fluttery fill just before the chorus as well as being rock-solid in the bulk of the song. It has horns perfectly tuned to the aura of Doug Parkinson. It has, probably, Vanda and Young doing backup. It has piano played by a gorilla in a gorilla suit, using large concrete bananas to hit the keys. It has a gospelish bridge and fabulous wheedley but not inconsequential guitar as well. It has the dumbarsest central concept. ‘Love is like a cloudy day, it comes and goes and that’s the way… someone soon will blow those clouds away.’ What is possibly, probably really meant is that ‘LACK OF love is like a cloudy day, if love be like a sunny day’. 

Monte Video and the Cassettes’ Shoop Shoop Diddy Waka waka etc’ is a lost classic, with Monte Video as a cross between Jona Lewie and Sid James (with a big ostentatious nod to Eric Idle’s ‘Nudge, nudge’ character). It is also, surely accidentally, is quite gender-transgressive, in ways that Jona Lewie and Sid James tended not to be, if you ask me. Not because it is primarily about an interaction between a horny feller at a ‘little party, nothing formal’ and a girl who ‘looked like normal’ but turns out to have unexpected sexual tastes which affront, yet do not ultimately put him off. No, the gender transgression is as the song fades out, and Monte asks ‘what kind of girl do you think I am?’ That throws me completely into confusion. Are Monte and the girl both girls? He certainly sounds like a bloke. In fact the tail-out lines are: ‘What sort of a girl do you think I am? Well, alright. Now you’ll think I’m awful! Got a light?’ 

Pete Wingfield’s 18 with a bullet might well be the best record ever made by anyone ever. I mean, there are surely other contenders, I know Friday on my Mind has a strong case, and Micro-chips and fish by the Red Crayola, and The Flood by the Blue Orchids. But 18 with a bullet has something those three songs don’t, which is an absolutely impeccable combination of crushed, fucked metaphor that doesn’t make sense, and totally perfect metaphor that is funny and witty. Is that throwaway? Maybe; I tend to see it as the genius of Wingfield peering through the cracks of his own conceit, showing us he knows how fragile it is, and yet making something more heartfelt out of his theatrical frippery. The song is riddled with joke references to the charts. The title, obviously, which is also the first line, though the second line is the first poke (‘got my finger on the trigger – I’m gonna pull it). ‘I’m picked to click now’ is a bit of jive speak which might have come from some bad DJ; then ‘I’m the son of a gun’, which goes back to the gun reference and delightfully doesn’t make no sense. ‘I may be an oldie but I’m a goodie too’ says Wingfield (but he’s only 18; how old is that?). ‘I’m a super soul sure shot – a national breakout’, then he wants to ‘check your playlist momma’ – what’s that mean? This is when the song totally freaks out, with a blissful soaring chorus-like element and the sensational line, ‘we got a smash double header if we only stay together’ and a grouse sax solo. Wingfield gets cute when he says that ‘Right now I’m a-single, but pretty soon you’ll see…’; he advocates ‘raising a whole LP’ with his beloved and then tells her the house is too small. This is when you realise and appreciate what Wingfield is doing. It’s not some guy making cracks about the charts. It’s a SONG singing to a SONG, using SONG. It’s pop seducing itself. How could anything be more wonderful to listen to? It’s a peacock display. I mean, Dave Graney can sing about being deep inside a song, or about being a star pretending to be an imitator of that same star, and so on. But Wingfield goes beyond reflexive and has created a record with needs and wants. I’d love to know what record ’18 with a bullet’ had his eye on. I suspect it might be Sylvia’s ‘Pillow Talk’ (which, by the way, Graney used to cover). 

Meh, after 18 with a bullet, you just think ‘meh’ about BCRs' Rock ‘n’ roll love letter, though it is still in the top 1% of genius. It’s got these lines, soon after the singer tells his parents that he loves them: Cos I see a nascent rhythm In a man’s genetic code I’m gonna keep on rock ‘n’ rolling Till my jeans explode. That is almost certainly not what is being sung there, though it is most certainly what it most sounds like. And that is hot. 

I don’t ‘get’ drummers like Virgil Donati, who seem too virtuoso for the real world, never able to play the same thing twice, Ian Wadley style, I mean always ABLE to but when was the last time either of them did it? But I gotta say on Taste's 'Tickle Your Fancy' he nails it like jesus to a child. And the rest of Taste are totally ballsy, and the song is totally all about being a member of Taste, and playing a show and some girl is sexy and Taste want her to give it (her fancy, I imagine) to them. Buh! And there are funny lines in amongst the bluster about how the singer of Taste ‘didn’t want to meet your father’. I think this is a b-side but it should've been B+