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Paul Drummond: 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History book (Anthology Editions, 2020)
It’s been a while since I shared what I was reading, and this seemed like a good time as I spent the weekend plowing through this 2020 book on 60s Texas psych rockers the 13th Floor Elevators. Shout out to my mom who, when I failed to give her any gift ideas this year, plucked this from a years-old Christmas list I don’t even remember making.
The author of this book, Paul Drummond, also wrote the definitive biography of the 13th Floor Elevators, Eye Mind. I haven’t seen or read that book, but I’ve seen more than one person use the word “exhaustive” to describe it, so I assume it’s long and richly detailed. This book functions well as a biography on its own and there’s a good deal of text besides the pictures, telling the band’s and its members’ stories in a satisfying level of detail, but its main purpose is to document and share the group’s visual record in photographs, vintage show posters, ticket stubs, media coverage, advertisements for gigs and records, and any and every other place where the Elevators left their mark. As a piece of scholarship, it is a phenomenal achievement. There’s so much to see in this book, and it’s executed with the seriousness and attention to detail of an exhibition catalog from a world-class museum. Even familiar images from the Elevators’ records and their most famous gig posters come alive here, as they’re photographed like fine art rather than the flattened, amateurishly retouched versions you typically encounter on the internet. They certainly could have gotten away with less painstaking work, but I’m so glad they put in the extra effort, because this book really transports you into the Elevators’ world.
A few things strike me about that world. The first is the contrast between the world the Elevators presented in their music and artwork and what is documented in the book’s many photographs. As one of the first rock groups (if not the first) to fully embrace psychedelia, they helped to define the imagery associated with that sound, with its bright, saturated colors and its swirling and organic, art nouveau-influenced illustration and lettering styles. But when you see the photographs of the band in their environs, it all looks so dusty, dingy, and earthy. They didn’t live in a psychedelic wonderland; they lived in Texas in the 1960s. In many photographs of the band (particularly in their later years as their hair and beards grew), it looks like they could be a country rock group, as their world looks more like the faux-pioneer aesthetic adopted by bands like the Eagles and the Band. The Elevators weren’t reflecting their world; they were building a utopian alternate reality, one they sought to access through their music and the drugs they used. The other thing that strikes me—and this is an insight I owe to Drummond—is is how crudely executed much of the Elevators’ imagery was, which is part of what gives it its charm, particularly for someone like me raised on DIY punk. One fanzine review reproduced in the book complains about the artwork for Psychedelic Sounds, noting its chintzy feel and that the colors look more Christmas-y than psychedelic. Later in the book, Drummond notes that Easter Everywhere looks like a self-produced album from a hippie cult. The Elevators’ amateurish, exploitative record label International Artists gets most of the blame for the shoddy execution, but it also seems like a function of how early the Elevators were to all this. There wasn’t a rulebook or a template; they were making their own.
If you don’t know the Elevators’ story, it’s conveyed with fascinating detail here. Based in Texas, the group didn’t have the benefit of San Francisco’s liberal multiculturalism. The police viewed the Elevators as leaders of an insurgent group trying to corrupt Texas’s youth, and they made it their mission to stamp out the Elevators before the movement could take hold. They were aided by draconian drug laws that could put you away for decades for possession of marijuana and a culture where police brutality and corruption were the norm. Thanks to a drug bust early in their career, the band couldn’t leave Texas without written permission from their parole officers. Members were incarcerated repeatedly, with guitarist Stacy Sutherland serving multiple stints in prison and vocalist Roky Erickson notoriously shuffled into Texas’s brutal asylum system, where electroshock therapy and primitive pharmacological treatments certainly helped to shatter a mind already fragile from years of daily LSD use. It’s a sad story, and it makes you wonder what the Elevators could have done if they didn’t face such an uphill climb.
But the struggles, the missed opportunities, and the shoddy execution are much of what made the 13th Floor Elevators the 13th Floor Elevators. Despite his devotion to studying and documenting the band, Drummond is clear-eyed about their shortcomings, particularly in terms of their recorded output. This only makes this book more valuable, as there is no succinct document of the Elevators at their peak (despite how obviously brilliant and influential their recordings were). Instead, we have to triangulate from the available data, imagining what it would have been like to experience one of those magical nights when the sound, the vibe, the high, the environment, the company, and everything else came together perfectly.