links for 2010-09-11

Roky and the 13th Floor Elevators cast a huge shadow over the TX music scene, all over Texas but especially in Austin. In their music and their personalities, they really captured something very specifically Austin, this sort of combination of the redneck rebel thing from rural Texas, the esoteric intellectual element from the crackpot fringe around the University of Texas, and that sort of drug-culture philosophy that Austin has picked up from being a town that a lot of contraband was smuggled through. In a lot of ways, I think those three elements have always defined Austin counterculture, and the Elevators are kind of the apotheosis of that. Over the course of his career, Roky dabbled in – and influenced – psych and garage rock, metal, blues-rock, the Texas songwriter movement of people like Townes Van Zandt (who was briefly his roommate), and "outsider music"