Brass Trax

Texas provided unusually fertile soil for the development of psychedelic music. Strange but true. Blame the easy access to marijuana trafficking channels. Blame the heat or the geographic isolation. Blame the cow pastures rich with psilocybin mushrooms. Blame the psychological trauma of growing up knowing all the words to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But weirdness clings to Texas like stink on shit.

While Texas doesn’t have a special claim on the development of mind-boggling drug use or mind-expanding droney music—psychedelic movements were popping up simultaneously in California, New York, and London—but the scene in Texas had a more chaotic, less polished, and certainly less professional vibe.

Regional labels were the lifeblood of garage rock in the United States, and International Artists sustained the Texas psychedelic music scene. It was by most accounts a shady operation, run out of Houston by a bunch of cowboy lawyers. Lelan Rogers, the brother of country singer Kenny Rogers, played talent scout, despite a lack of obvious proficiency. Rogers’s taste for weirdness was much more astute than his sense for a hit record.

International Artists would release 12 albums between 1966 and 1970; its artists ran the gamut from freaky folk act Endle St. Cloud to Texas bayou blues master Lightnin’ Hopkins. But it was the label’s support for Texas psychedelia that had the most lasting impact on the development of rock music.

13th Floor Elevators

If Texas had a signature psychedelic sound in the sixties, it was the 13th Floor Elevators. The Elevators were veterans of the Austin surf and garage rock scenes. Roky Erickson, the band’s leader, was an Austin native, a Travis High School drop-out who had played in a handful of bands. His buddy Tommy Hall was something of an LSD guru, ahead of his time in 1965, who would invite Erickson and guitarist Stacy Sutherland over to drop acid and jam. Hall didn’t really play anything but a whiskey jug, which would seem to be a liability for a garage rock band. But the nascent Elevators worked Hall into the equation, and the aquatic, rhythmic tones of his jug would become the hallmark of the band’s sound. As Lelan Rogers put it, it left DJs to ask “What is that funny little noise in the record?”

The jamming sessions at Hall’s place quickly led to live shows and a recording contract with International Artists. The Elevators’ first single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me” was a nationwide hit, peaking at number 55 on the Billboard charts. From the classic three-chord progression to Erickson’s elemental howl and Sutherland’s echo-drenched guitar tone, the record became an instant garage rock standard.

Listen to “You’re Gonna Miss Me”

The success of the single sent the Elevators back into the studio to turn out a full-length. The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators emerged months later to massive local sales. Adorned with eyes, the LP cover was a riot of color on the front and a work of loopy LSD evangelism on the back. A short essay, penned by Hall, urges listeners to break through the Aristotelian categories of knowledge for something more trippy, using both drugs and the Elevators’ music as a means. The listener was to undergo a transformation that was perhaps put most succinctly in the tune “Monkey Island,” which, according to Hall, “expresses the position of a person who has just discovered that he no longer belongs to the old order.” He realizes that he lives on an island of monkeys.

Listen to “Monkey Island”

Austin in the sixties had few of the trappings that we know it by today. It was a redneck town with a university slapped in the middle. Social mores were conservative, and, despite the quick proliferation of underground music venues, counterculture types stuck out like long-haired whack-a-moles, ready to be slammed by the police. Nonetheless, the 13th Floor Elevators openly used and evangelized for drugs, wore long hair, and suffered from the predictable police harassment. No amount of mind-altering chemicals could change the fact that the band lived in Texas.

The Elevators’ 1967 trip to California must have been a breath of fresh air. It certainly freed the band’s sound. The Elevators were a hit with the Bay Area psychedelic rock scene—Texas expatriate Janis Joplin made the introductions—and the band soaked in longform jams for the entire trip. By the time the Elevators returned to Texas to cut a new single, they had done away with the simple chord progressions of garage rock. “Levitation” owes more to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Moby Grape than it does to the Rolling Stones, an exercise in bluesy modality that has an oddly static effect. It doesn’t drive like a garage rock song; it spins and swirls.

Listen to “Levitation”

The band quickly followed “Levitation” with the Easter Everywhere LP, its masterpiece. Beginning with the track “Slip Inside This House,” it’s clear that Easter Everywhere will be a listening ordeal. Hall’s electric jug is no longer mere ornamentation, as it was on The Psychedelic Sounds. Instead, it’s an ethereal pacesetter, keeping time for Sutherland’s woozy guitar licks. “Slide Machine,” the album’s second track evokes the desolation of the Texas landscape, “way down south where they use the slide machine” and where “the slide machine it sweeps bones right off the road. For the tandem trucks and the moats that they towed.” The Texas landscape stands in for psychedelic mental states, while the structure of the song remains slippery, chaotic, almost completely unpredictable. And so the album goes, an inscrutable wash of blues and reverb, glancing off song structure and evoking something completely alien, like the world of a woman who “lives in a time of her own.”

Listen to “Slip Inside This House”
Listen to “Slide Machine”

Heavy drug users, the Elevators were a band doomed from the start. They released little else of consequence after Easter Everywhere, partly due to Erickson’s marijuana conviction and subsequent stint in a mental hospital. Roky Erickson would record again, under his own name, and continues to perform today. The other members wouldn’t be so lucky. Tommy Hall moved to San Francisco, where he became something of a professional acid casualty. Stacy Sutherland was shot to death in 1978 by his wife.

Red Crayola

Red Crayola (later “Red Krayola”) was an art school band. Its members were students at St. Thomas University, a small Catholic school situated in the Montrose, a Houston neighborhood where money, high culture, and Bohemian counterculture have long interacted. They weren’t much. Lelan Rogers first saw them in a mall. “Three of them,” he recounted in the liner notes to the International Artists compilation Epitaph for a Legend, “up on a stage that had four or five different kinds of instruments and they could not play a note. They were just making noise and they were really putting the people on.” On a Texas whim, he gave the kids a record deal.

The band counted among its members Frederick Barthelme, the son of a prominent modernist architect and the brother of Donald Barthelme, who had already abandoned Houston—and a gig as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum—to write short stories in New York City. Frederick Barthelme, himself, would eventually become a writer. Mayo Thompson, the band’s leader, would later decamp to Houston native Robert Rauschenberg’s studio in New York and, eventually, to London where he’d remain a part of the avant-garde art scene long enough to produce a handful of post-punk records for bands like the Raincoats.

But in 1966, Thompson was still in Houston, with Barthelme, Steve Cunningham, and a 50-person cacophony known as the Familiar Ugly, shocking the hell out of the locals. Red Crayola’s music remains difficult to listen to precisely because it is so unmusical. The band’s debut Parable of Arable Land sounds like an exercise in musical deprogramming. The majority of the tracks are little more than arrhythmic banging on a collection of instruments, a shambles that the band declares a “Free-Form Freakout.” The chaos is punctuated by moments of occasionally beautiful guitar melodies that turn into something resembling songs, although without the usual verse-chorus structure or a musically competent vocalist. The recording has little in common with the accomplished blues freak-out of 13th Floor Elevators (although Erickson was reportedly a member of the Familiar Ugly) or the Golden Dawn and a lot more in common with the Godz, their New York City contemporaries who had a similar, ad hoc approach to music.

Parable of Arable Land has become a touchstone in the history of psychedelic and lo-fi music, but it didn’t sell well at the time. It’s an album of music approached as an art project, rife with studio experiments, like goofy backmasking, and pretentiously earnest lyrics. (Perfunctory protest like “War Sucks (Remember What Happened to Hansel and Gretel)” and dippy, clumsy surrealism like “Hurricane Fighter Plane” are only the most egregious examples.) Still, there’s something to be said about uncompromising experimentation, and, in that regard, there’s a lot to like in Parable of Arable Land.

Listen to “War Sucks (Remember What Happened to Hansel and Gretel)”
Listen to “Hurricane Fighter Plane”

No matter its artistic integrity, a pop record is expected to turn a profit, and neither Parable of Arable Land nor the band’s more austere follow-up God Bless The Red Krayola And All Who Sail With It were able to do that. Rogers’s bet didn’t pay off, and International Artists found itself on the edge of ruin. And then Bubble Puppy came along.

Bubble Puppy

By 1969, International Artists hadn’t had a hit in three years. 13th Floor Elevators records still sold well, in Texas at least, but the label had not seen anything like the success its owners had hoped for when “You’re Gonna Miss Me” cracked the pop charts. The label was desperate to sell some records.

Bubble Puppy had gotten its start in San Antonio, but it had quickly moved to the more hospitable hills of Austin. Its music was closely attuned to the bluesy psychedelia of the city. Bubble Puppy plainly worshipped at the altar of Jimi Hendrix and its members were devoted enough acolytes that they had not one but two lead guitarists. Between the two, the band had a heavy, bluesy assault with shades of its contemporaries, Blue Cheer and Steppenwolf. Bubble Puppy had one foot in the sixties—the searing guitar parts were held together by loopy, folkloric lyrics sung in harmony—and one in the seventies. The band captured the Zeitgeist well enough that its first single, “Hot Smoke and Sasafrass,” became the first International Artists hit since “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”

Listen to “Hot Smoke and Sasafrass”

Executives at the label couldn’t be more pleased. Bubble Puppy’s full length A Gathering of Promises quickly hit store shelves, the band posed on the cover like time travelers from a mid-nineties live-action role playing game. Bubble Puppy had chops, and its record sold nicely. But Bubble Puppy had an adversarial relationship to International Artists. It wanted to get paid.

Lead guitarist Rod Prince would later describe International artists as an organization “made up of no- talent lawyers, thugs, and the spawn of the shallow end of the gene pool-clueless all,” and the band thought it was getting shafted. In a familiar refrain from the annals of rock, Bubble Puppy complained that International Artists provided insufficient promotional support, no touring budget, and didn’t pay checks on time.

Bubble Puppy felt that the success of “Hot Smoke and Sasafrass” should have led to greater fame. Indeed, A Gathering of Promises is a great rock record. The band had the melodic complexity of the Free Design or Love, the guitar wankery of Cream, and the heaviness of Steppenwolf or Deep Purple. Its best tracks, “Lonely” or “I’ve Got to Reach You,” are miniature masterpieces, a moment where the blues, folk music, and rock each have an equal voice. It’s music that would make anybody feel ambitious, and Bubble Puppy was. They quickly left Texas, fleeing to California, hooked up with Steppenwolf’s Nick St. Nicholas, released one more album under a new band name, and disappeared.

Listen to “Lonely”
Listen to “I’ve Got to Reach You”

Now, over 40 years since the surfacing of the 13th Floor Elevators, Texas continues to nurture psychedelic musicians, a legacy left by the pioneers on the International Artists label.

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