Throbbing Heart, Go-Go Girls Featured at Living Eye Club

Throbbing Heart, Go-Go Girls Featured at Living Eye Club
by Jerri Largent, Post Youth Editor

Houston Post Youth Beat * 19 January 1967

As the heart beats and blood rushes through neon veins, teens of Spring Branch and other parts of Houston dance to the music of the Living Eye.

This new dance hall for teens, which was recently opened, was constructed in the shape of an android.

The roof supports are molded "ribs." A huge heart in the center of the ceiling throbs as its beats are heard in every part of the dance floor. Electrical "blood" flows through neon "veins" on each beat and theatrical fog spreads the bright red color through the air.

The teens come in every mode of dress from pants to skirts, some bell-bottom, some backless. Some come in western attire and some come in costumes. They come with and without shoes.

Three girls from the area work at the Living Eye as go-go dancers. Karen King and Sherry Martin, students at Spring Branch High, and Cindy Seixas, a student at South Texas Junior College, dance individually on a platform in front of the band. The girls are paid for dancing and have their parents' consent.

When asked why she worked as a go-go dancer, one of the girls commented, "'Cause I love to dance."

They have no set routines. Another of the girls commented, "You just dance what you feel."

The girls have little to fear from rowdy customers, for at all times there are two uniformed police officers, T.H. Graham and J.G. Brock, on duty. There is also a woman officer, Miss Pat Fawlkes, watching out for the good of the patrons.

The Living Eye also has its own "bouncer" who walks the floor with the adult supervisors. He is Thomas Carlson, a student at Sam Houston State College.

The age limit for the club is the same as for all teen dance halls in the city. The patrons must be over 15 and under 21. Each person entering the club must present proof of age before he is admitted to the club.

Every Friday and Saturday night, teens come with dates or stag to hear bands such as the Moving Sidewalks, the Deuces Wild, the Coastliners, Neal Ford and the Fanatics, or the Sixpence (sic).

Operator Bill Eisenhower extended an invitation for any parents to tour the club at any time to see where the teenagers like to spend their time. (end)

The Six Pents at the Living Eye (1966).

The Six Pents at the Living Eye (1966).




The Six Pents at the Living Eye (1966).




The 13th Floor Elevators at the Living Eye (1967).




The Lost and Found at the Living Eye (1966-67).




Newspaper ad for the opening of the Living Eye (November 11, 1966).

Inside the Living Eye.

Flyer for the opening of the Living Eye, November 11-12, 1966. 

Flyer for the "number one group in the world," ? and the Mysterians, appearing at the Living Eye, February 25, 1967.  

Fever Tree and crowd at the Living Eye (1967). 

Chaz and the Classics

Chaz (And The Classics) - "Girl of the 13th Hour"


One of the most unusual live gigs I ever attended was the Chaz Shinn/Coye Wilcox show at the Galena Park Recreation Center on Houston's East Side on October 12, 1992. There was nothing unusual about the performers or music. Chaz played country standards, Elvis's "That's All Right," and closed with "Jesus on the Mainline," to which the appreciative crowd clapped along with as if it were known by heart. (I'd never heard it before.) Coye Wilcox also played a solid set of C&W and bluegrass. What was unusual about it, then? When you only know performers by their old records, they fossilize in your mind -- I therefore was not surprised to hear Coye play country, because that's what his '50s records are, but I was taken aback by Chaz Shinn doing the same thing, since I only knew him from his late '60s garage-psych singles. To have them on the same bill therefore was a bit jarring at first glance, like advertising Sonny Burns and the Bubble Puppy together. Of course, I should've known better -- everybody in Texas eventually comes back to country music.

Chaz and the Classics are not one of the better remembered '60s rock bands from Houston. In fact, had it not been for this 2:31 whirlwind of mayhem from 1967, they probably would not be known at all. That's a shame. "Girl of the 13th Hour" somehow missed "canonical" '60s status among collectors by being excluded from the early Texas comps (Flashback Vol. 1-6, Acid Visions), only making it to a wider public in 1984 via Highs in the Mid-Sixties, Vol. 11. Original copies are rare and expensive today, but the song can now be accessed in a variety of formats including a YouTube video.



If you think that "Chaz and the Classics" has a flashy but unmistakably early '60s ring to it (like "Kenny and the Kasuals"), you would be correct. The Classics were formed in 1964 and, as their early business card shows, they played not only rock 'n' roll but western and hootenanny (folk). The band clearly tried to cover all the bases for the working-class East Side greasers who didn't think it the least bit odd to have George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" and the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" played back-to-back in the same set. They were simply popular songs and in East/South Houston at least "pop music" included country. These were, after all, the same teenagers who had turned Frankie Miller's "Blackland Farmer" into a dance craze via Garner State Park and The Larry Kane Show.

"When I was a kid, I would write songs and use a small broom as my guitar," Charles "Chaz" Shinn (b. 1946) explained to me in 1992. "I fell in love with the thought of being a guitar player. I guess you can stem it back to Buddy Holly, Elvis, Chuck Berry … one of my favorites was Little Richard. When I was coming up in Junior High School, rock and roll was just getting started."

The reigning bands on the East Side at the time were C.L. and the Pictures, the Jokers, and the Champagne Brothers. While these groups considered their music rock and roll (and even R&B), their records rely heavily on ballads, and even the uptempo sides were not very rocking. Fifties-style rock was passe, and the new models were Roy Orbison, Bobby Vee, Del Shannon, and the like. If they wanted to get really wild, they would throw in some current R&B from groups like the Olympics or the Miracles.

Like many teenagers as well as all adults, Chaz was bewildered by the British Invasion. Winning a songwriting contest earned him a free ticket to perform at the 1964 Teen Fair of Texas, a huge two-week event at the Joe Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio (June 5-14), now only remembered for being the Rolling Stones' second appearance in the US. (Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas were also at the fair, but no one seems to remember them.) So the parents would have something to do, the promoters booked George Jones on the same gig. A "teen rodeo" and as well as chimpanzees and the "Fire Twirling Lounsbury Sisters" also appeared. This is the kind of booking that made sense in Texas at the time, but would later serve as surreal comedy in both Bill Wyman's and Keith Richards' autobiographies. (They assumed that this was just how live music always was in Texas.) Chaz witnessed the whole debacle. "They had George Jones up there singing country music for the old folks, and then they said, 'We have this brand new British group that’s never played in Texas.' And out comes these guys with real greasy-looking hair and raggedy clothes – terrible, terrible rags – and they played Beatle music. George Jones looked at them like they were dirt! Everybody out in the audience were all country music lovers. I thought to myself, 'How could anybody get anywhere in music looking like they did and singing Beatle music?' They didn’t even have original stuff at the time." The audience was confused. They didn't want to be impolite, but they hated the Rolling Stones' music. Being typical white people, they had no clue that what the Stones played wasn't "Beatle music," but merely covers of songs made by "negroes" in the United States. So they booed.

Chaz's memory is telling. Photographs of the Rolling Stones exist from this date, and they are wearing vests and pressed slacks, not "terrible rags." He surely wasn't the only attendee who had projected his opinion of the Stones' music on their clothing as well.

Not surprisingly, the Classics' first single displays zero English influence, as the titles give away immediately: "You Are the Answer to a Dream" and "Dreamboat Overseas." We would call these "teeners" in collector's parlance -- safe, light songs a la Bobby Vee or somebody like that. Fitting for 1962, they were way out of date when they were recorded at ACA-Gold Star in July, 1965, and released on their own BCS label. (BCS = Boyd C. Shinn, Chaz's dad.)

This was followed in late '66 by "Cindy (I’m A Soldier Now)" on Picture. This is another awkwardly outdated single, perhaps inspired by Sgt. Barry Sadler or similar major label pop muzak. The East Side greasers appreciated stuff like this, but increasingly fewer Houston teenagers did. Chaz blamed it on corrupt DJs. "This was at the time of payola," he said. "We were trying to keep it clean. We were doing it Presley style, where you’d just go into a radio station and say, 'Would you please play my record?' 'Cindy' was played for two weeks."

Picture Records was a label that totally glommed onto the East Side aesthetic, releasing belated rockabilly by Sleepy LaBeef and blue-eyed soul from Gene Thomas and Richard Moreland. Chaz fit in perfectly. There were over 20 singles, but no hits, from Picture in the '60s and '70s. It was ran by a man named Marlon Machart.

"Marlon Machart heard us recording at Gold Star," Chaz said. "He was a store manager at Grant’s 5 and 10 (department store). And he aspired to have a rock and roll group, but he didn’t want to be involved with the drugs. If he could come up with $500, he was going to cut a record. He was a gambler, musically. The Picture label was owned by a number of people. There was an Italian guy who had a lot of influence on Picture. Some people in the recording studio had an influence on Picture." But mostly it was Machart's baby.



Chaz in the Houston Chronicle, late 1966. Click to enlarge. Courtesy Glenn Pitts collection.

Chaz was on the verge of becoming a casualty of the greaser resistance to the British Invasion when somebody gave him an album that forcefully yanked him into the present: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. He was floored. Suddenly, he was trying to write lyrics like Tommy Hall and sing like Roky. Over time, he befriended Stacy Sutherland.

"With Roky, you could know him, but he wouldn’t recognize you the next day," he remembered. "Roky didn’t want to talk a lot, but Stacy Sutherland did. We were friends. A friend of mine, John Guess, kind of milled around with all of the bands that were going into the IA Studio. He brought Stacy over and we talked at length one time. Man, I loved Tommy Hall’s lyrics."

Thus, Chaz largely skipped the British Invasion but went directly into psychedelia, and "Girl of the 13th Hour" was born. Time was booked at Jones Sound Studio on January 6, 1967. This was around the same time that Neal Ford and the Fanatics did "Gonna Be My Girl" and the Outcasts laid down "1523 Blair" in the same room. The time was right: "I called up Marlon and said, 'I got a song that sounds like the13th Floor Elevators.'"

Many garage and soul bands were attracted to Jones Sound in the late sixties, perhaps because of Jones himself. "Doyle Jones was a real honest engineer," Chaz said. "If you talked to him and said, 'Doyle, what do you think of this song?,' he’d rate it right on the spot. 'A' or 'B' or 'It’s not going to fly.' He’d tell you, even after you’d spent all of your money on it, and you were so happy about it, he’d just look at you and go, 'Chaz, you know, it ain’t gonna go.'"

The weird noise overdubbed on the record? "I was trying to get a sound that had that same kind of electric jug. The jug that Tommy used sounded almost human. I wanted a 'human' sound that wasn’t his sound (i.e., a special effect on the record that wasn’t obviously electronic), but just as weird. And this guy who played organ with us for a short period got this comb and put a piece of tissue paper over it, and when he blew into the comb, it’d make this noise. He said, 'If I laid down and I started making this sound, and you started pounding me in the stomach real hard, how would that sound?' So we did it, and I said, 'That’s the sound I’m looking for.'" The X factor was this instrument, which Chaz jokingly dubbed the “psychecomb.” Tommy Hall would have appreciated it, I'm sure. The crashing sound at the beginning is the reverb unit of a Farfisa organ.

"Doyle Jones just broke down laughing. I said, 'Doyle, how do you rate this song?' He said, 'Chaz, I don’t even know what I’d rate it. It leaves me completely dumbfounded. It might fly, and it might not.' And it didn’t fly." Though it received little or no airplay on KILT and KNUZ, "Girl of the 13th Hour" rates alongside similar efforts like the Heard's "Exit 9" and the Iguanas' "I Can Only Give You Everything" in the mini-genre of Elevators-inspired singles.

Hey you! Girl of the 13th hour
Once you reigned in vain
Mention of your name
In wealth and power

Hey you! Girl of the 13th hour
You kept on the run
You kept having fun
With the bad things you have done
You've earned the name of the 13th hour

Hey you! Girl of the 13th hour
No longer lives in vain
Only lives in shame
And answers to the name:
"The naughty girl of the 13th hour"

Not exactly "Slip Inside This House," but fun nonetheless.

Chaz still did not want to completely alienate his parents and the greasers, so the flipside "Stardust and You" is pure Bobby Vee. This time, a string section, rather than the psychecomb, was overdubbed. Just as the Rolling Stones/George Jones gig had made sense in the context of its time and place, so did pairing the 13th Floor Elevators with Bobby Vee here.

So, too, did it seem perfectly normal to acquire a Catholic priest, Father Coffey, as a manager. The Classics were made up of kids who had attended Mount Carmel Catholic High (Chaz himself had gone to Lutheran High), and Mount Carmel's gymnasium had been a major spot for weekend teen dances for local bands since the '50s. Fever Tree recorded a live album there.

Pie in the sky idealism wasn't the sole purview of hippies in the late sixties; religious authorities were also dreaming big. "Father Coffey's idea was for us to play at the Vatican," Chaz said, shaking his head at this memory. "To play rock and roll music at the Vatican. He was sending letters out to all these priests. He got to messing around with all these bands and everything, and he was a heavy drinker – he had strong religious convictions, but at the same time he was liberated. He was always being ostracized by the Catholics because of his association with psychedelic rock musicians. He was trying to get these religious leaders to accept this, and they wouldn’t accept it. Eventually, the man lost his mind. He was put into a mental hospital."

By this time, Chaz and the Classics had succumbed to hipness and changed their name, first to the Syndromes, then to the Captr (combining the first letters of their names). As the Syndromes, they re-recorded "Girl of the 13th Hour" at Gold Star, something I only discovered 10 years after my interview with Chaz. It is a strong version, sans the psychecomb, and may be reissued one of these days.



Chaz and the Classics as the Ballistics, Pasadena, Tx., c. 1968. Chaz standing in middle.


One of the bands Father Coffey managed was the Ballistics. They had recorded a single but broke up before it came out. Chaz and the boys then became the Ballistics for awhile, not letting on that they weren't the group who made the record. (This was presumably "Please Come Home" on Jamie, the only single I can find credited to a group by that name. "Please Come Home" is the Sixpentz song.) It isn't known how long they maintained this ruse.

The group had graduated to better gigs by 1968, though they were still remote from mainstream rock clubs like the Catacombs, and most Houston rock fans probably never saw them play. They played strange events like the "Youth For Decency" Rally at the Coliseum, and sometimes appeared with the Buddy Brock Orchestra. "We were playing places like the River Oaks Country Club," said Chaz. "Buddy and his orchestra would play, and while they took a break, Buddy would put us on. The first set would be mediocre stuff like the Turtles, slow stuff, but as it gradually went on it would get wilder and wilder. Towards the end of the night, we were doing full-fledged rock and roll, and there would be gray-haired people out there kicking ass (dancing)."

Once again ... it made sense within the time and place. You just have to keep saying this when writing about Texas in the sixties.

As the Captr, the band made two more singles, "Gentle Thursday" (not the Music Emporium song), a good garage/Farfisa mover, and "Forthcoming," a hard rock effort recorded at Jones Sound in late 1969. This was their final effort on vinyl I think, though there was one more session in 1971. By that time, the teen garage band era was most definitely dead and buried forever.

I was sorry to learn recently that Chaz had died at age 60 on March 24, 2007. I regret not keeping in touch with him in his later years. He was an interesting guy. He apparently spent the intervening decades as a political cartoonist for the Pasadena newspaper, and playing the odd gig like the one I witnessed at the Galena Park Recreation Center. He had an Elvis-like persona. When I met him on a warm Sunday afternoon for our interview, he was wearing a leather jacket. I think he remained a serious Elvis fan not only through the late sixties, but well into the '80s and '90s. The East Side aesthetic had never left him, even right up to the end.

Below: The Captr at the "Youth For Decency Rally," front page of the Houston Chronicle, April 28, 1969. Click to enlarge.



Chaz and the Classics discography
July, 1965. ACA-Gold Star Studio.Dreamboat Overseas/You Are the Answer to a Dream (BCS AG 6002/6003)
(as The Classics – Vocal Solo: Chas.)

October 15, 1966. Jones Sound Studio. Cindy (I’m A Soldier Now)/Dream Boat Overseas (Picture 6995) 1966
(as Chaz)

January 6, 1967. Jones Sound Studio.Girl Of The 13[th] Hour/Stardust And You (Picture 6999) released April, 1967
(as Chaz and the Classics)

1967. Gold Star Studio.
Girl of the 13th Hour/Gentle Thursday (unissued).

April 21, 1968. Jones Sound Studio. Alice (In Wonderland) /Gentle Thursday (Picture 6981)
(as Chaz – Music by: Captr)

November 18, 1969. Jones Sound Studio.
Forthcoming/Little Girl (Zac 1001)
(as Chaz and the Captr)

Mr. Rogers' Cabinet of Curiosities: Dissecting "Epitaph For A Legend"

Various Artists - Epitaph For A Legend 2CD digipack with 40 page booklet (Charly/International Artists Snax 620)

Official webpage.

The 1980 IA retrospective, Epitaph For A Legend, is now on its third or fourth go-round in the digital era. This 2010 iteration from Charly is, by all appearances, the 'definitive' version, if such a term can accurately be ascribed to an album that's mostly famous among record collectors for being so remarkably un-definitive.

A large part of the problem with Epitaph is its maddening lack of self-definition. Is it a greatest hits package? No. IA only had two of those, and neither are here. Is it a rarities package? No, because several of the rarest singles are excluded. Is it a smorgasbord of previously unissued goodies, carefully selected for quality? No, nearly one-third of the 27 cuts had been released. Epitaph, then, is 'none of the above,' a jumbled potpurri of sounds, presided over by their original producer and Svengali, Lelan Rogers. Epitaph less resembles a dignified 'epitaph' than it does a hastily-organized rummage sale held by distant relatives after the death of an eccentric but somewhat appreciated uncle. Some jewels are to be discovered, to be sure, but one has to dig through piles of rubbish to find them. For example, Bubble Puppy, IA’s biggest group, are nowhere to be found on Epitaph -- the first clue to the buyer that things here are quite amiss. (Years would pass before we realized why: the Puppy had been produced by Ray Rush, not Rogers, and Lelan was only-too-happy to keep the focus on two bands he produced, the Elevators and the Red Crayola. Despite its Top 20 status, 'Hot Smoke & Sassafrass' passes unmentioned in Jon Savage's interview with Rogers, enclosed within both the original double LP and this CD.)

And it wouldn’t be an IA album without a garish, hand-drawn cover too amateurish-looking even for a tax write-off or vanity labels. Each of the original 12 LPs are given their own tombstone (the singles apparently weren’t given a proper burial -- an unintentionally ironic statement on the album’s contents). Anyone expecting, say, a photograph or two of the bands has clearly set their expectations way too high. In the packaging department, Epitaph for a Legend fully complements the DIY non-aesthetic of contemporaneous early garage-psych bootlegs like Boulders and Texas Flashbacks. 

Retrospectives of this sort almost always include some information on the artists. Even the most oblivious, only-in-it-for-the-money discount label knows this. But clearly this, also, is expecting too much of Lelan Rogers, who instead of providing information on the bands or recordings, merely inserted his 1978 Jon Savage interview into the original package, as if it constituted the final word of IA. Actually, the interview raises more questions that it answers (not the least for its omission of Bubble Puppy), and much of what Rogers says is of questionable accuracy. It is not wholly without value, but I believe much of what he said has since been supplanted by better research. This is not to denigrate the man too much. We should not forget that Lelan's job at all times was to sell records, not write history books, and at least he was making an effort to do something, within his limitations.


Lelan Rogers, amidst his paisley curtains, working the phones in an attempt to create a hit, 1960s.

Mistaking the enthusiasm of a few LA, Texas, and UK record collectors for a larger, general interest, Rogers pressed several thousand copies of Epitaph, but his naïve optimism for the revived IA label was soon met with cold reality: only a few hundred copies actually sold at the time of release, and Lelan was forced to wholesale the rest at cost to Midnight Records in New York (where it was a list staple now for decades). It probably never occurred to him that sales might have been stronger had the album been responsibly packaged and logically laid out. Lelan’s timing was off, too – interest in obscure sixties labels and music was only then getting off the ground (Pebbles Volume 1 had just appeared), and years passed before a real market developed for this kind of thing. If he had waited until 1986, and had spent a little more thought on packaging and track selection, Lelan might well have had an underground 'hit' with Epitaph.



Billboard 13 October 1979


Charly has seen fit to finally give the album the proper liner notes it should have had back in '80. Mole from the Higher State has sorted out what was originally released and what wasn't, helpfully filling in whatever info has come to light over the last three decades. Jon Savage’s interview with Rogers is presented here yet again, with a thoughtful new introduction for context. Remarkably, Jon reveals that his introduction to IA came in 1971, when he discovered a copy of Easter Everywhere at Doug Dobell's 77 Charing Cross record store. He was thus as prepared as anyone to chat with Lelan, whom he recalls 'had exactly the right amount of passion mixed with just that hint of carnival chicanery' -- one of the 'old school' of record business operators who could work the phones and BS with enough DJs enough to help create a national hit, even for a local two-bit operation like IA.

Disc 1

The Chayns - Night Time (Is The Right Time)
Epitaph begins with a bit of a let-down: a San Antonio garage band’s inept and redundant version of the Strangeloves. This was released on the strictly-local 'Alamo Audio' label first, and, after apparently becoming a minor hit, was licensed by IA for some hoped-for larger distribution that never happened. (This 'buy-in' was unusual; most of what IA released was recorded by them.) One wonders if Lelan was even aware of the Strangeloves’ vastly superior version, which hit #30 in the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1965.



The Patterns - In My Own Time
This is more like it: an unknown group tackling a little-known Bee Gees album cut. Would have made a respectable single at the time.

The Chaparrels - I Tried So Hard

Another unknown group, but presumably the same Houston bunch who put out 'Roxanne' on the Notsuoh label when IA passed on them (comped on the Houston Hallucinations LP). One of the few real surprises of Epitaph, 'I Tried So Hard' is an energetically fuzz-driven, harder-rocking cop of 'Along Comes Mary' that practically screams 'hit.' Though Lelan presumably produced the original session, no explanation is given as to why it was left unreleased.

Thursday's Children - A Part Of You
One of Houston’s better rock bands of the era, Thursday’s Children had two highly regarded singles for IA. They didn’t sell, and were rare and unheard at the time of Epitaph. Surely that meant their inclusion was warranted here, yes? Er, no. Instead we’re treated to 'A Part of You,' which is decent, but sounds demo-y, and not nearly as good as any of the four single sides.

The Rubayyat - If I Were A Carpenter
Strangely credited to Electric Rubayyat on the original Epitaph LP, we now know that this was Danny Galindo’s post-Elevators group, comprised of Austin and San Antonio players (including Bill Hallmark from the Golden Dawn). This was released as a single in early 1968, and is a pleasant though pedestrian cover of the Tim Hardin/Bobby Darin hit from two years prior. The American Blues released a stronger version at approximately the same time.

Sonny Hall - Poor Planet Earth
Forgettable novelty nonsense from a washed-up lounge/country singer, completely out-of-place here. This didn’t deserve its’ original 45 release, much less a reappearance on what was supposed to be a rock/psych-oriented retrospective.

Inner Scene - Communication Breakdown
Led Zeppelin goes to the garage. A fun, originally unissued version, though, like the Rubayyat’s 'If I Were a Carpenter,' redundant, and hardly worth dredging up when far superior material was left waiting in the wings.

The Red Crayola - Hurricane Fighter Plane
Mono version of the master take of this psych goodie, the closest any Texas band got to sounding like early Pink Floyd; presented here sans the extraneous 'freakout' noise (and lousy fidelity) of the familiar fake-stereo version heard on Parable for Arable Land.

The Red Crayola - Pink Stainless Tail (Demo) / Nickle Niceness (Demo) / Vile, Vile Grass (Demo) / Transparent Radiation (Demo)
Rough drafts for songs that were re-recorded for Parable. Lelan obviously had a soft spot for this group, whom he thought were 'gimmicky' enough to hit as a novelty act, a la the Mothers of Invention or Tiny Tim. One demo would have been appropriate here; four is excessive overkill.

The Emperors - I Want My Woman
Los Angeles-area group who recorded this for Lelan’s Sabra label in 1965. Nothing to do with IA, therefore perfectly appropriate for inclusion on Epitaph.

Lost And Found - 25 M.P.H.
Basic demo of a dull, unissued song from this underachieving Houston group. Their IA album Everybody’s Here captures a third-rate Elevators copy band that never really outgrew their roots as surf instrumentalists; however they rallied to create a fabulous single-only release, 'When Will You Come Through' in ’68. That would have been the logical choice for Epitaph, but any listener still expecting logic at this point in the programme is an exceptionally slow learner.

CD 1 thus concludes with just 14 tracks, at least six of which are redundant and/or mediocre, and less than 40 minutes of music.


Disc 2

Big Walter - Breakfast In Bed
Besides Lightnin’ Hopkins, pianist Big Walter Price was the only African-American artist to record for otherwise lily-white IA. Walter had recorded some R&B for Peacock in the fifties, and 'Breakfast in Bed' is basically ossified early fifties R&B dusted off and given a contemporary rock gloss. Like the 'The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions' LP, it’s 'blues rock' not likely to please either blues or rock audiences. Certainly not bad, though for curiosity value only.

Dave Allen - C. C. Rider / Saturday A.M. Blues
Dave Allen was a white bluesman who had some singles for Jin and a worthwhile 1969 album for IA, Color Blind. It's apparent from listening to these two that they are from the same session that produced Big Walter's 'Breakfast in Bed.' Neither are as good as anything on Color Blind. 'C.C. Rider' is a generic version of the done-to-death standard, and 'Saturday A.M. Blues' is a forgettable Lightnin' Hopkins imitation.

Lightnin' Hopkins - Conversation With Lightnin' Hopkins
This could have been entitled, 'Conversation With Two Incoherent Drunkards' and no one would have known the difference. This is apparently Lelan attempting to 'interview' Hopkins, an excerpt of a three-hour tete-a-tete recorded during the Free Form Patterns sessions.

Lightnin' Hopkins - Black Ghost Blues
A good outtake from the otherwise forgettable Free Form Patterns LP. Typical Hopkins.

Roky Erickson - Interview with Roky (KSAN 4/1/78)
A complete waste of space. 'Roky, what do you think of the Sex Pistols?'

The Spades - You're Gonna Miss Me / We Sell Soul
The first LP appearance of Roky’s pre-Elevators garage band, originally released on the Zero label in Austin. That might raise some eyebrows: 'What are they doing on an IA comp, then?,' you might ask. Dunno, though it must have been exciting to obtain these two rare, practically unknown tracks at the time. Though far superior vinyl rips could be (and have been) made from the 45 using today’s technology, that would be expecting too much, and Charly has opted instead to use the dreadful needle-drops done in the ‘70s for the original LP.

Roky Erickson & Clementine Hall - Splash 1 / Right Track Now
Two 'unplugged' Elevators songs, exposing their folk music roots and sympathies. Mysteries when they appeared on Epitaph, years of archaeological research has established that these are Easter Everywhere outtakes.

The 13th Floor Elevators - Wait For My Love
By far the most significant track on Epitaph when it appeared was this previously-unknown Bull of the Woods-era pop-rocker from Stacy Sutherland. Recorded after Lelan left IA, it is the most commercial song in the Elevators’ entire canon (after 'You’re Gonna Miss Me') -- and yet, astonishingly, was rejected both as a single and an LP track. The band achieves a tightness largely absent from the ’68 sessions, and 'Wait For My Love' compares favourably to Moby Grape’s first LP – not a sound one would readily expect from the Elevators. An inferior rewrite, entitled "Til Then," did finally make it on Bull of the Woods.

Aurally, this sounds like a second-generation tape dub, and since the exact same version appears on the 2009 box set, we must assume that it’s all that survived. A newly-remixed version was released as a new IA single this month (April, 2011).

The 13th Floor Elevators - 60-Second Radio Spot for 'Bull Of The Woods'
Interesting radio commercial from 1969, aimed at a San Francisco audience, where it was presumed they still had a following (though we now know that they hadn't appeared there since '66).

The 13th Floor Elevators - Fire Engine
Mono single mix. Mildly different from the stereo version, but something like the mono single version of 'Levitation' would have been a far better choice. But that would have actually required some thought and deliberation.

CD 2 finishes the programme at a mere 13 tracks: four pedestrian blues numbers, two 'spoken-word' pieces, two Spades tracks unrelated to IA, two acoustic Elevators demos, and one great track, 'Wait For My Love.' An exceptionally poor showing.

And there you have it. Twenty-seven tracks on two CDs, well over half of which would have been rejected for Pebbles Volume 89; nothing at all by two of IA's greatest bands, Bubble Puppy and the Golden Dawn (and no explanation for their exclusion); four tracks that have nil to do with IA; a clutch of unremarkable demos; a couple of rambling spoken-word pieces; and – almost by accident! – a few great tracks that almost justify the hype. All in all, Epitaph was/is a textbook example of why label owners should leave this sort of thing to the fans. It could have been great. But the same could be said of IA as a whole, couldn't it?