Texas Spotlight: The 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me/Tried To Hide

The region by region Battle of the Garage Bands moves on to Texas. It is a documented fact (from the1966 Census of Garage Bands) that every kid in Texas between the age of 13 and 23 was in no less than three garage bands at each time. Even that weird kid, Marvin, from Waco. He was in three bands just like everybody else. It's a fact. Look it up.

We launch our Texas spotlight with an infamous record from a legendary band. The 13th Floor Elevators. They need no introduction. The song needs no introduction. But I guess we have to say something about it.

You're Gonna Miss Me was composed by 17-year old frontman, Roky Erickson. Roky had already recorded the number in 1965 with his high school band, The Spades. When he met up with The Elevators, they gave the song a fresh coat of paint, changed the tires and added a big fuzzy jug to the song. They recorded the number in '65 and released it in the first week of '66 on Contact Records. Four months later it was released again on International Artists Records in May.

I think we all agree, this is one of the all time greats. Particularly the ominous bridge with the brilliant chord progression that lifts the song to new heights (just like a bridge should).

I gave you the warning
But you never heeded it
How can you say you missed my loving
When you never needed it
You're gonna wake up wondering
Find yourself all alone
But what's going to stop you baby?
I'm not coming home (x3)

Let's be honest, every casual 13th Floor Elevators fan knows both these songs as they are both on the debut album. But what you may not have known is that this Flip-Side, Tried To Hide, is a very different, earlier take than what appeared on the album. We present to you today, that single version. Faster, bassier, boppier. Even a little bit like Love's My Little Red Book there at the opening.

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

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: 13th Floor Elevators - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Day four of our celebration of Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Austin Texas' 13th Floor Elevators released this very unique version of Baby Blue on the Easter Everywhere album in November, 1967. It was also released as the flip-side of their 4th single, She Lives. This is one bitchin' version if you ask me. Slow, brooding and as trippy as they come. All that without getting to the more cartoonish aspects of psychedelic music. The double lead guitar builds throughout the song and Roky Erickson, as always, is perfect in his vocal delivery. Interestingly, Tommy Hall's jug playing seems to be absent throughout the song -- even in the long musical close of the five minute song.

Flip-Side Trivia -- The 13th Floor Elevators were the first ever post back in October of 2008 at On The Flip-Side. It was even a song from this same album. The song was I had To Tell You. This same album also produced this post about the song Levitation back in 2010. Three posts from one album is without question a Flip-Side record. 

One of my favorite music blogs, Derek's Daily 45, has also done three posts on the Elevators. Here is a link to their post about Slip Inside This House.

The First Flip-Side Birthday!!!

Can it really be? Yep, it's true. One year ago today the brain trust at Flip-Side International posted it's very first Song of the Week. It was the song that drove us to create On The Flip-Side. A song so beautiful, delicate and rare that we couldn't help but climb to the virtual roof top and scream out loud: "you've got to hear this song!" That song was the 13th Floor Elevators' sublime recording of their own composition I Had To Tell You, from their second album, Easter Everywhere. As first postings tend to go, that song was largely overlooked. We're still so in love with that song (and always will be!), that we urge you to go back and listen to it again. Click here to revisit that very first post.

In this first year of On The Flip-Side we have had quite a bit of action. More than we had ever hoped for to be honest. For instance...

• We've never missed a week's submission of Song Of The Week. How cool are we! Thinking back on the 52 Song of the Week submissions we've done, we think we are most fond of this one from January 3, 2009. It's about the Irish band, The Undertones and their kick ass song of false bravado and lust. It's of course Teenage Kicks. Clicky here for a look/listen back to that SoTW posting.

• Speaking of cool, in the past year we've had ten postings of original recordings of Buskers performing on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Music that all too often escapes the ears of commuters and tourists bent on getting from point A to point B. We've had African drummers, traditional Phillipine folk music, bluegrass, rock-n-roll, jazz, country and blues. One of our favorites (it was hard to choose) was this recording from February, 2009 of the blue-grass inflected band, The Human Condition with their original song, Never Again. Clicky herey to hear them perform this wonderful song and stop to pause what you may be missing next time you rush past a busker in San Francisco (or anywhere else for that fact).

• And we've also had ten never before heard songs presented by four different unsigned artists as part of On The Flip-Side's Original Song Project. Songs that can't be heard anywhere else (unless you happen to live in the basement with one of these artists...and if you do, be very careful if they start fattening you up and taking measurements. It's not a good sign). We're smitten with all of the songs but we would like to draw your attention to two in particular. The first is the first song ever submitted. It's by the Street Preachers and the song is called Last Dance At Ipatiev. The second is by River Jack and it is a beautifully finger-picked number he calls Olivia Is Here.

• And we've also had specials, like our Seven Days of Summertime which featured a distinct take on the George Gershwin classic. You can revisit that here.

Lastly, we would like to complete the circle of our anniversary by giving you the option to hear another song from the artist and album that started the entire idea of us giving you the gift of music. So, without further pause, we present the 13th Floor Elevators performing their original number, (I've Got) Levitation. Enjoy and thank you for taking a look, a listen, and most of all for taking time to join the conversation and leave a comment.

See you on the flip-side.

Video Diary: Roky Erickson, "The Right Track"

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