It's an On The Flip-Side 5th Birthday Party!

Five years ago this week, we humbly launched our little music blog dedicated to spinning some of our favorite dusty records. That's right, On The Flip-Side is blowing out some candles this week and making a bucket list. 60s Garage, Rockabilly, Jazz, Original Songs, Original Busker Recordings, Blues, Soul and Punk Rock has all had a chance to crawl out of the analog crypt and get a little digital love from us. In that five years we've grown quite a bit. The earliest rambling posts have hits in the single digits. Today each post gets hundreds of hits...in minutes. We've written too many "in memorium" posts and we've been thrilled to become a connecting point for many artists who thought their record was long forgotten. The best thing about writing On The Flip-Side is hearing from the musicians who recorded the music or hearing from the children of the musicians who beam with pride that their mom or dad's work is still touching other people. And, of course, we love hearing from you in the way of comments!

We're going to look back all this week at some of our most pivotal posts, personal favorite posts, and, of course, our most popular posts ever. We may even post more than once a day. That's how excited we are to be strutting around in our birthday suit, letting our Flip-Side hang out for all the world to see.

Let's start our celebration by looking at the band and song that inspired our first ever On The Flip-Side post way back on October 15th, 2008. It was a song that strikes me so deep in the core that EACH and EVERY SINGLE TIME I hear this song I want to scream to the world about the greatness that is contained in this little off-key warble of an offering from a bunch of kids in the 60s. The song is I Had To Tell You by The 13th Floor Elevators, the Austin, Texas band from the mid-60s that busted doors down and created an odd music that sounded nothing like anything before. I Had To Tell You was tucked away on the Flip-Side of the band's criminally underrated second album, Easter Everywhere, released on International Artists in November of 1967. The band was, at that time, singer Roky Erickson, guitarist Stacy Sutherland, bassist Dan Galindo, drummer Danny Thomas and jug player, Tommy Hall.

I Had To Tell You was written by Roky Erickson and poet Clementine Hall, Tommy Hall's wife. I think you'll agree, it was a great place to start. I'm giving you some newly found photos of the earliest days of the 13th Floor Elevators playing a high school dance as well as a scan of the original dust cover of Easter Everywhere with the lyrics to I Had To Tell You. Enjoy. 

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!