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.
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