STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)
By:
December 2, 2023
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn. Also check out our proto-punk playlist (a work in progress) at Spotify.
THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS | “YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME” | 1966
It doesn’t sound like the dawn of 1966, does it? Those sour, urgent chords, those wild raspy yalps… that mad, scattershot, puffing and panting electric jug! It sounds more like it’s stranded on a promontory outside of time, space, and American pop culture, and yet, there it sits: “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” the debut single of a quintet of weird, stoned kids from Austin, Texas, the 13th Floor Elevators. The first explicitly psychedelic rock single, a whole year and change before the Summer of Love brought the word into staid American living rooms.
What made these Texas boys fuse together garage-guitar rock with elements of old-timey music and ’50s rhythm and blues? A whole lot of drugs? Sure, the Elevators would have told you that themselves: they put it on their business cards, soaked themselves in a sea of LSD and DMT, kept their pot in the bottom of Tommy Hall’s electric jug. Their out-and-out unabashed self-identification as “heads” made them literal enemies of the state in post-JFK-assassination Texas, where pot users were routinely sentenced to lengthy terms or even life.
But it wasn’t merely the youth drugs zeitgeist that allowed them to spin out this singular tune into a fractal array of 45s for a bunch of different labels, including one on the blink-and-you’d-miss-it mid-’60s recording arm of, yes, Hanna-Barbera animation. It was that genius ability to synthesize raw garage-rock power and haunting, plaintive blues-rock (the Elevators plainly cribbed this single’s title and rousing chorus from the unrelated Muddy Waters track of the same name), born of the fecundly weird soil of Austin, Texas that brought the Elevators to prominence.
And, of course, the very personal genius of Roky Erickson.
It wouldn’t do me any good to reiterate the hosannas and victory wreaths laid upon the third-eye-beaming brow of Roky Erickson since the release of “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” his subsequent institutionalization and lengthy struggles with mental illness, his surprisingly pop-conscious outsider music of the ’70s and ’80s, and his re-(re?)-discovery in the early 1990s. Like many folks of my generation, I first came to Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators thanks to a 1990 compilation of indie rock covers of his work solo and with the Elevators, Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye. (To my mind, the standout track on that compilation is Knoxville, Tennessee’s Judybats rendition of “She Lives (In a Time of Her Own),” which I knew primarily from the band’s debut album Native Son.) The ever-cool writers of The X-Files tipping their cap to Roky, naming a character after him in series standout episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” didn’t hurt either.
But this Roky isn’t yet the lauded wild-man music legend, the alien possessee, the shut-in taping his and his neighbors’ mail to the walls in an effort to make the world make sense. It’s hard to believe listening to the pain and heartbreak and worldweary despair of Roky singing “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” but this is an 18-year-old kid! A kid howling his heart out, channeling the Older, Weirder America churning underneath all that novel psychedelic generational energy. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” gets called epochal and a harbinger of what’s to come an awful lot, but the real shock of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and the Elevators brief meteoric career might be that it offers the possibility that the place where the pyramid meets the eye was here, all along.
STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mandy Keifetz on The Trashmen’s SURFIN’ BIRD | Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono’s MOVE ON FAST | David Cantwell on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 TEARS | James Parker on The Modern Lovers’ SHE CRACKED | Lynn Peril on The Pleasure Seekers’ WHAT A WAY TO DIE | Lucy Sante on The Count Five’s PSYCHOTIC REACTION | Jonathan Lethem on The Monkees’ YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA | Adam McGovern on ELP’s BRAIN SALAD SURGERY | Mimi Lipson on The Shaggs’ MY PAL FOOT FOOT | Eric Weisbard on Frances Faye’s FRANCES AND HER FRIENDS | Annie Zaleski on Suzi Quatro’s CAN THE CAN | Carl Wilson on The Ugly Ducklings’ NOTHIN’ | Josh Glenn on Gillian Hill’s TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT… | Mike Watt on The Stooges’ SHAKE APPEAL | Peter Doyle on The Underdogs’ SITTING IN THE RAIN | Stephanie Burt on Pauline Oliveros’s III | Marc Weidenbaum on Ornette Coleman’s WE NOW INTERRUPT FOR A COMMERCIAL | Anthony Miller on Eno’s NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL’S EYE | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sonics’ STRYCHNINE | David Smay on The New York Dolls’ HUMAN BEING | Michael Grasso on the 13th Floor Elevators’ YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME | Holly Interlandi on Death’s ROCK’N’ROLL VICTIM | Elina Shatkin on Bobby Fuller’s I FOUGHT THE LAW | Brian Berger on The Mothers of Invention’s WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE? | Peggy Nelson on The Kingsmen’s LOUIE LOUIE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!