The 13th Floor Elevators – You're Gonna Miss Me
1966
8.7K Likes
Best comments
1.“A group that should have gone somewhere. Maybe the problem was the elevator. Maybe there wasn't a 13th floor – I've seen that in buildings.”
More comments
- 2.“They played the San Bruno National Guard Armory in '66 or so. Nice folks. Burned one down with them in their van at halftime.”
- 3.“Once at the Living Eye in Houston, Stacy got lost after a break. I helped look for him. The hash was stronger than expected.”
The story
Austin, Texas, December 1965. Roky Erickson leaves his old band the Spades and joins Stacy Sutherland, Benny Thurman and John Ike Walton, with Tommy Hall signing on to write lyrics and play electric jug – which meant singing into a clay whiskey jug for a warbling, echoing sound nobody else had. A month later the band's business card described their music as psychedelic, the first band known to use the word.
Erickson wrote You're Gonna Miss Me at fifteen and first cut it with the Spades. The Elevators' version came out in January 1966, went to number two in Austin and number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100, their only national chart single. That got them on national TV twice, on Where the Action Is and on American Bandstand with Dick Clark. This upload is a fan's rework of 1966 performance footage, with extra visuals added and the audio remastered for more punch.
Then the story turns dark. Erickson was arrested on a marijuana charge in 1969, pleaded insanity and was committed to a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. Sutherland was shot and killed by his wife in 1978. The song outlived all of it. It landed on the Nuggets compilation and still gets named among the great garage rock records. Somebody give that jug a plaque.
