October 05, 2007

Julian Cope's review of EYE MIND on Head Heritage

On Julian's psych blog "Head Heritage."

http://www.headheritage.co.uk/addressdrudion/101/2007/

Hey All You Rock’n’roll Children,

EYE MIND by Paul Drummond
Hope yooz all well and hanging this autumnal morning. I’m dedicating this October Drudion to my dear friend Psychedelic Paul Drummond, in celebration of the forthcoming release of EYE MIND, Paul’s stupendous biography of Texas’ own 13th Floor Elevators. Yup, geezer birds, the book that nobody believed could ever be completed is lying upon my desk next to me as I write, 424 pages rammed with arcane facts, interviews, colour plates, discographies, a foreword by Yours Truly, and as scrupulous an oral history of this most essential bunch of Gurdjeffian refusenecks (or should that be redniks?) as only the truly Utopian voyager could have delivered to our doors. Psychedelic Paul’s achievement is nothing less than heroic and I want the world to know it! Nine years in the making, the research for EYE MIND was so protracted, so costly, so haphazard, so beset with long distance problems that it even destroyed Psychedelic’s marriage. Hell kiddies, this Drummond druid not only sought out and interviewed band leader Tommy Hall (Psychedelic Paul having to hand over his passport to dodgy-looking armed guards as Tommy’s still living in a maximum security asylum), but Herr Drummond even located and interviewed the original policemen and FBI agents whose evidence would bring the Elevators down and see Roky Erikson imprisoned for a long ‘70s spell in Rusk Mental Asylum. Everything’s there in the pages of EYE MIND and everything’s explained.

You wanna know why I recorded the Elevators’ ‘Levitation’ in 1986? Or why, in 1990, I contributed my own version of ‘I Have Always Been Here Before’ to a Warner Brothers Roky Tribute LP when I otherwise never ever touch those fucking things with a barge pole? Well read this book, motherfuckers, and dig dig dig. And it took a genuinely psychedelicized Limey to nail that fucking American tragedy to the floor (and he ain’t called Psychedelic Paul for his paisley ruffs, neither!). As a biography of this most insightful and deeply forward-thinking rock’n’roll band, EYE MIND is absolutely the shit, the Ult, as high as it gets. But as an excavation of that primary rock’n’roll impulse that dared to flaunt its post-war celebration of everything non-Christian, EYE MIND is even greater, being an essential and detailed explanation of those Christian Hangover post-WW2 times for all and anyone who needs to contextualize just how we all got heathenized into the Right Now!

Like the Detroit story of John Sinclair and the MC5, the saga of the 13th Floor Elevators was an Old Testament tale and Roky Erikson was its Job (with The Man playing Jehovah, natch!). Get to know this book, brothers’n’sisters… get to know it and begin to understand what these pioneers went through; that without the Uber-confrontation of the (armed and blank-eyed) Texan authorities that Roky and the Elevators were forced to endure, our own Metaphysically Feisty rock’n’roll take on the world would have been catastrophically reduced.

Read the rest here.

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