1965: Beginnings

We’re jumping back to 1965 and Austin, Texas, home of The University of Texas and center of Texas government. A scrappy local garage band, The Spades, played all the college town’s regular nightclubs – among them the Jade Room, Club Saracen, and Swingers Club. But the band was plagued from the beginning with constant personnel changes and struggled to stay together. Just before being kicked out of William B. Travis High School in south Austin only weeks before his graduation, Roky Erickson joined the band as lead singer and rhythm guitarist, along with his classmate, guitarist George Kinney. The band soon recorded I Want a Girl and Do You Want to Dance at Austin Custom Records for release on Austin music promoter Gary McCaskill’s Zero Records. On the heels of the single’s release, another of Roky’s classmates, drummer John Kearney, joined the unit as it returned to the studio to cut its second single, Roky’s original screamers We Sell Soul and You’re Gonna Miss Me. It would be fair to say 1965 marked the beginning of Austin’s rock band explosion (fueled mostly by hot frat bands The Wig, the Baby Cakes, and the Fabulous Chevelles), but it was also the year in which The Spades finally succumbed, due in large measure to the arrival of a south Texas band, the Lingsmen, on the Austin scene late in the year. Hearing both The Spades and the Lingsmen perform and sensing an unfulfilled promise in each, University of Texas philosophy and psychology student Tommy Hall proposed some novel if not odd musical ideas to both bands, and the core members of the Lingsmen (Stacy Sutherland, Benny Thurman, and John Ike Walton), Tommy, and Roky formed the 13th Floor Elevators to explore those ideas, which would become the roots of psychedelic rock. The Elevators’ story is amazingly deep for the band’s short life span and is the subject of dozens if not hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and books over the past 56 years; the Elevators’ story is nicely condensed at the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas Music but is given definitive treatment in Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound (2007) and 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History (2020).

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Enter Ralph Y. Michaels

At the same time the Elevators formed, Ralph Y. Michaels, an avid amateur photographer and dedicated Austin radio and rock music fan, was serving as an Information Specialist in the VIII US Army Corps. He worked in the Brown Building in downtown Austin, only a few blocks west of KAZZ-FM’s studio and offices in the Perry Brooks Building. When he was off-duty evenings and weekends, Ralph frequented Austin’s live music venues – New Orleans Old World Night Club, Swingers Club, Jade Room, Club Saracen, and The Vulcan Gas Company. And he visited KAZZ, where he befriended the deejays, including Rim Kelley, who would become a co-founder of Sonobeat Records in 1967. In 1966, KAZZ-FM was notable for its eclectic – even eccentric – block programming format featuring discrete segments of movie soundtrack and Broadway cast albums, pop standards, folk, jazz, and... rock ’n’ roll. When KAZZ began its rock block in 1964, it was an anomaly in American FM radio, where rock music was shunned in favor of “high fidelity” music. But KAZZ was even more unusual than most radio stations: it programed live remote broadcasts three, sometimes four nights a week from Austin-area nightclubs, featuring dozens of Austin and Central Texas musicians and bands. Using an open-reel tape deck, Ralph would aircheckAn aircheck is a recording of a radio program made for archival purposes. An aircheck can be used by a station to compare its content and “sound” to that of other radio stations in the same market, by deejays to demonstrate their on-air talent, and by radio aficionados to preserve memories of favorite stations and deejays. KAZZ frequently, often recording many of its live remotes.

In ’66, Ralph took candid photos of the KAZZ-FM deejays in action, a selection of which we offer in The Ralph Y. Michaels KAZZ collection. Ralph also took candid shots at many Austin nightclubs, particularly when The 13th Floor Elevators performed. We’re honored to present a selection of Ralph’s candids from an undated 1966 Elevators’ performance at Swingers Club in north Austin.

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Teodar Jackson benefit concert

Ralph was also on hand to photograph the Elevators performing at Austin’s Methodist Student Center on March 12, 1966, in a benefit concert for Austin fiddler Teodar JacksonTeodar Jackson was a beloved Texas fiddler who lived in Austin, Texas, from his late childhood until his death in 1966. Teodar was noted for performing blues, early 1900s standards, ragtime, and square-dance tunes., who at the time was in Brackenridge Hospital suffering from a severe heart ailment. At the benefit, the Elevators shared the stage with many other Austin music icons of the ’60s, including headliner Mance Lipscomb and Janis Joplin, Kenneth Threadgill, and Powell St. John.

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The New Orleans Club

Shortly after the March 12, 1966, Teodar Jackson benefit concert, The 13th Floor Elevators were a week away from a tour of Houston and Dallas, Texas. Among their final shows in Austin before going on the road, the Elevators performed at The New Orleans Old World Night Club. Although they would return to Austin two months later, after successful engagements throughout north and south Texas, it was at this March 16th gig that Ralph took a set of trippy photos that captured both the energy of the Elevators on the tiny New Orleans Club stage and the equally energetic reaction of the youthful crowd in attendance.

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The New Orleans Club recordings

Ralph was also at the New Orleans Club in summer 1966 for an Elevators return engagement, following the psychedelic band’s successful set of gigs in the Dallas area. Thinking this might be the last time he would see the Elevators live, and sitting at the back of the New Orleans Club’s small dance floor, he held a portable audiocassette recorder up high and used a flashlight to monitor the recording level. Ralph told us he “sweats-out not getting caught” making the recordings.

Although the recordings are distorted and muddy, Ralph can’t be faulted: he was at the very back of the dance floor, the band and crowd were loud, the New Orleans Club’s PA system was primitive, and Ralph’s handheld audiocassette recorder wasn’t professional gear. Despite all that, Ralph succeeded in capturing the vital, raw sounds of the Elevators at one of the band’s favorite Austin venues, the New Orleans Club. Here are excerpts from that New Orleans Club performance.

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More treasures from Ralph’s Elevators Collection

When Ralph gifted his Elevators collection to Sonobeat Historical Archives, he included more than his candid photos and audio recordings of the band. He also included Elevators phonograph records, magazines featuring Elevators stories, and more that he had accumulated over the years.

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But wait! There’s more!

Sonobeat itself has a bit of history with the Elevators, starting with the fact that ’Vators front man Roky Erickson and Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Jr. were classmates at William B. Travis High School in Austin through the 1963-1964 school year. Then, as a deejay at Austin’s KAZZ-FM, Bill Jr., under his air name Rim Kelley, played singles by Roky’s first band, The Spades, and was probably the first in the world to broadcast the Elevators’ debut single, You’re Gonna Miss Me, released on Austin’s short-lived Contact label before the Elevators signed with Houston’s International Artists. The connection between the Elevators and Sonobeat is over here...