Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Paul Drummond
Process
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
At the three-quarter mark of Paul Drummond’s exhaustive (and exhaustingly detailed) band bio, Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound, the avatars of acid rock stumble into Houston around 1968 in physical and emotional shambles. Lyricist and jug player Tommy Hall is demanding permission to deliver Lord-inspired but LSD-fueled sermons before each show. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland’s dalliance with speed has evolved into a nasty heroin habit. And lead singer Roky Erickson, paranoid and reluctant to play, has adopted a trademark Band-Aid on his forehead to cover his third eye.
It’s a sad coda to the band’s brief but promising career. Just two years earlier, the Elevators rode their regional hit single—the manic fuzz-rocker “You’re Gonna Miss Me”—from Austin to San Francisco, where they headlined a summer of shows and caught the ear of such future Bay Area royals as Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. Their groundbreaking first album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, predated the Dead’s by four months; it captured, as would Easter Everywhere (1967) and Bull of the Woods (1968), the shimmery rock wail that helped define psychedelia. Given band policy to drop acid for every gig and recording session, it’s amazing the group lasted at all. With Roky’s 1969 pot bust and subsequent commitment to a hospital for the criminally insane, the Elevators would officially implode.
Drummond, a British set-designer-cum-journalist, began his Elevators fieldwork in 1999 as a personal quest to separate truth from myth. When he discovered that band members and associates (some of whom had maintained thirty-plus years of silence) were as willing to talk as he was to listen, his research stretched into eight years. He reveals himself to be an unabashed fan, but this zealotry has its rewards. The book, awash in meticulous anecdotes and personal snapshots, is a Day-Glo parable of the times: The 13th Floor Elevators were impossibly young (Roky was fifteen when he wrote “You’re Gonna Miss Me”), burdened by high expectations, stoned to the teeth—and an indisputable influence on popular music.
Drummond’s inexperience as a first-time author shows in the lack of self-editing—the book could easily lose fifty pages—and numerous factual errors, some silly (the “Burny Castle Gibson” guitar is really a Barney Kessel Gibson) and some bizarre (the Sex Pistols playing a Kerrville gig in 1978? Never happened). Nonetheless, Eye Mind is a revelation and, flaws and all, a must-have for the serious music geek. Process, $22.95
Edwin “Bud” Shrake
John M. Hardy
(Read an excerpt)
Buy it at Amazon.com
Edwin “Bud” Shrake’s picaresque Custer’s Brother’s Horse makes fine fodder of the bad blood in Texas following the Civil War, circa 1865. Federal troops visit indignities on the defeated communities they occupy; neighbors who fought on separate sides find no peace in the surrender. The horse in question, Union lieutenant Tom Custer’s Athena, has been stolen by Edmund Varney, a British adventure writer who might as well have “rogue” tattooed on his brow. His offense lands him in an Austin stockade, where Varney allies himself with arrested rebel officer Jerod Robin; together they’ll escape to the coast in the company of two colorful ladies: sixteen-year-old fortune-teller Flora Bowprie and Isabella Bushkin, a senator’s estranged wife. Shrake’s plotting and dialogue are as low-key as they are pitch-perfect. He masterfully spins a historical footnote into a telling lesson about the spoils of war—fully relevant nearly two centuries on.John M. Hardy, $24.95
Bill Cunningham
Inspired by the popularity of a panel on Texas crime literature hosted by the Southwestern Writers Collection in 2004, editors Bill Cunningham, Steven L. Davis, and Rollo K. Newsom have compiled Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction, with thirty excerpts from the likes of Rick Riordan, David Lindsey, Mary Willis Walker, and Joe R. Lansdale.
How did the editors define “Texas” or “Texan”?
We wanted to primarily include writers who were Texans or spent significant time here and who could give the reader an awareness of the state’s enormous geographic and cultural diversity.
Is it all blood and mayhem?
No. In addition to the cops and private eyes, there’s room for amateur sleuths such as Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles—a Hill Country herb shop owner and part-time detective—as well as stories with chefs, librarians, and bird-watchers as protagonists.
Was there anyone you couldn’t include?
Making the selections was tough, because there were so many deserving writers. The introduction will include the Web address for a bibliography of Texas crime writing prepared by Steve and Rollo. Had we been able to feature every writer, the book would likely have been three times as long.
Does that mean we should look for volume two in the future?
I’m game if Steve and Rollo are. University of Texas Press, $24.95 (Read the full interview.)
Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction: Bill Cunningham, published by University of Texas Press.
