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!

Song of the Week: "Levitation", 13th Floor Elevators

The bad ass boys from Austin, Texas who started off the flip-side are back with Levitation. I don't feel the need to sing the praises of the 13th Floor Elevators, so I'll just say, cool photo I had never seen before and great song I've heard 100,000 times before.

Song of the Week: The 13th Floor Elevators - I Had To Tell You

The other night I finished watching a documentary entitled Your Gonna Miss Me. It's a doc about Roky Erickson, the troubled front-man from the legendary 60's garage band, the 13th Floor Elevators whom are perhaps best known for their 1966 single, You're Gonna Miss Me.

It's certainly more about Roky than it is about the Elevators, but there is a lot of juicy stuff about the band nonetheless. As is so often the case, one comes away wondering "what could have been"? What could have been if they had better production, better management, better decisions in terms of drug use? But more than that cast of woulda, shoulda, coulda usual suspects, you wonder what could have been if Roky had better legal counsel, a better mother (the home film footage of mom's self-made Beast King movie is very, very odd), a better father, and of course, a better sense of what is real and what is not real. What could have been? As with Syd Barrett, one gets the sense that Roky was a brilliant musical mind that heard things that others didn't. But you also get the sense, as with Barett, that things were terribly wrong inside the head. Add an alleged 300 drops of LSD, and suddenly the cracks in the House of Usher become unfixable fissures.

Needless to say, I turned to their records not long after watching the doc. More and more these days I turn to their second album, Easter Everywhere. While it is not as "cool" as Psychedelic Sounds of..., EE has better production values and represents some of the bands' best songwriting.

The standout from the album, in my opinion, is the sublime "I Had To Tell You." I can't get enough of it. It's filled with warbly out of tune guitar, funky Rick Danko-like (of The Band) harmonies, a twittering straight tuned harmonica that hits the highest registers, and some of the best lyrics you can get outside of Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry.

The line from the song that always tugs at my ears is a quixotic line that plays up the contradiction between control and chaos. A line that raises hope in the same instance that it dashes it. A vulnerable Erickson pleades, "If you fear I'll lose my spirit, like a drunkards wasted wine, don't you even think about it, I'm feeling fine."

It never fails to get me. Just click on the post title to listen to it. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Morgan