Postby WildcatOne » Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:27 pm
My pick for Racer of the Week is Jeremy Youngblood, from Traer, Iowa. Jeremy was recommended to me by his fiance, Ashley Ann Draper. Thanks, Ashley! Jeremy has raced for many years just like his Dad Lou Rausch, who is also a former Racer of the Week. He has raced a beautiful 750 HP 1968 Chevelle, a 1990 454 SS and now an extended cab 1985 Chevy S10. He has won many races and is highly ranked in the Quad Cities area for his many victories. Ashley told me "Our daughter has grown up at the track and will be racing a Jr. Dragster next year because "She wants to race like Dad".
Jeremy was a 5 time race winner in 2015. Cordova International Raceway has a program that any racer who has a perfect reaction time or runs dead gets a diamond point. If you get all 5 diamond points you win a diamond ring from Don's jewelry In Clinton iowa. Jeremy won that and game it to Ashley! He also started his own business called Youngblood's All Metal Finishing.Ashley strongly recommended Jeremy because of his sportsmanship, always willing to help other sportsman racers, and he shares the amount of information he has and knows about racing! He is an amazing racer and has such a passion for it that it has spilled over to our daughter. Jeremy blew his motor at the end of last season. He has since put in a bigger motor and will be running in Pro ET now, Moving up from Super ET.
Jeremy, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future!
Over the last few months, Danny White and I have been discussing music, football and drag racing. The music part of our dialogues has gravitated to the late 60s, particularly the phenomenon known as psychedelia. This amazing kind of music served to join the world together under a multicolored rainbow of peace and love, and as with the Pink Floyd story, there was a group from Texas that scaled unimaginable heights of sonic ecstasy. The band was called the 13th Floor Elevators, from Austin. This band redefined preconceptions of musical form, substance, performance and aesthetics. I saw the Elevators play live 3 times in 1966 and 1967. They were by far the best rock n' roll band I ever saw. To say they were unique would be a gross understatement. They were completely different than anything else going on at that time. This turned out to be the feature of the band that ultimately spelled doom not only for the band, but for the principal players who I plan to give an outline of.
The story of the 13th Floor Elevators is definitely not for the feint-of-heart, or for the narrow-minded. It is a fantastic tale of rock n' roll superstardom that somehow turned into an unthinkable nightmare and ended in tragedy for some. Thankfully, there are survivors, but the possibility of the band ever reuniting, performing and recording again is not going to happen. What I will deliver here is the history of the band. I have more information about the Elevators than just the general populace, and with Danny's input and advice, I'll start at the beginning. Again, I advise folks to strap in and hang on tight, because it's a rollercoaster ride to the end of the universe and back and it takes some unexpected turns down some very dark sideroads.
In 1965 in Austin, the psychology graduate of the University of Texas, Tommy Hall was developing a new concept that he received in a moment of enlightenment while experimenting with LSD in his chemical engineering studies. He had it all figured out, and what he wanted to do was to get his message of perfect mental and spiritual alignment across to the world. He convinced members of two bands, the Spades and the Lingsmen, to join him in his quest to change the world by turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Stacey Sutherland from the Lingsmen was a world-class lead guitar player who had an endless supply of incredible blues-based riffs, and the chosen one to lead the band was the young singer/guitarist/songwriter from the Spades, Roky Erickson.
Roger Kynard Erickson was almost 18 when he became the voice of the most controversial band ever to emerge on the American music scene in the 1960s. Tommy wrote the lyrics, Stacey led the band, and Roky, who was gifted with the voice of an angel, sang the lead vocals. For a short time, the band had Janis Joplin adding vocals to Roky's parts, but she was soon lured to California by Chet Helms, who would start the Family Dog and open the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. In the Elevators, Tommy played the electric jug, creating an intergalactic pulse which vibrated cerebral landscapes and gave the band its distinctively unique sound. With Bennie Thurman and later Ronnie Leatherman on bass and John Ike Walton on drums, and songwriting input from their friend, the great poet John St. Powell, who soon was to change his name to Powell St. John, this was without question a Super-Band. They were the world's first psychedelic band, and they were in the middle of Texas in early 1966.
A band that powerful just wasn't happening in that day and age in Texas, but the Elevators came out with both guns blazing, and they left their audiences agape with what they did live. They came to my high school and played for one of our Friday night dances, and the packed gymnasium was absolutely transfixed by their performance. Siren-like vocals, the constant blip of the electric jug, the screaming, soulful guitar playing and the most kick-ass rhythym section we'd ever heard went on for 4 solid hours, and everything they played, they wrote. Except for the dark and mysterious Stacey Sutherland, they were smiling and connecting with the audience. It was amazing, and it influenced me as a musician later on. What I thought was interesting was that they had a police escort, and uniformed cops were stationed nearby, keeping an eye on them the whole time. What I found out later was that they were on probation at that time from having been busted for posession of pot a few months earlier.
The Elevators were living on the edge. Their songs openly espoused a lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock n' roll in the heart of the Bible Belt in the mid-60s, and law enforcement was very much aware of their threat to the youth of middle America. The band didn't care. I'd never seen any band play with such fury, passion, conviction and reckless abandon, but they were dead-letter perfect. Their hit, "You're Gonna Miss Me" was being played every day, several times a day on the regional radio stations, and by the time they played at my high school they were famous and on their way to the top. But..not without the constant intimidation tactics of the authorities. They were the most notorious of rock stars in that era, and although Roky didn't write the provocative lyrics behind their music, he was the guy who was singing them and he was without question the star-power that the group had up front. He became the target of police harassment, and it was a battle that he was destined to lose.
In August of 1966, the Elevators went to Dallas and recorded their first album, titled The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. The album was written by Tommy, Stacey and Roky with contributions from Powell St. John. It was produced by Lelan Rogers, Kenny's older brother and the president of the International Artists label. The songs and the music on that album was a compelte re-write of the rock n' roll vernacular and it was tripped-out music with a great beat. The painting on the album cover has yet to be outdone in terms of shocking you out of your socks when you first see it, but it was the lyrics and Tommy Hall's proselytizing on the album sleeve that really got the law stirred up.
I'm gonna read what he said on there:
"Since Aritstotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate and unrelated groups ---Science, Religion, Sex, Relaxation, Work, etc. The main emphasis in his language, his system of storing knowledge, has been on the identification of objects rather than on the relationships between objects. He is now forced to use his tools of reasoning separately and for one situation at a time. Had man been able to see past this hypnotic way of thinking, to distrust it (as did Einstein) and to resystematize his knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally, he would now enjoy the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with his life in its entirety.
Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view (that is, his own basic relation with the ouside world which determines how he stores his information). He then can restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approchaing them more sanely. From this process, the new man views the old man the same way that the old man views the ape. It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album."
Then it goes on to describe each of the 11 songs that blasted off of the vinyl with unbridled full-throttle rock n' roll, with each song being interwoven into the overall concept of Tommy Hall's vision of the world living in perfect sanity. The words are next to the graphic of the pyramid on a dollar bill with the all-seeing eye glowing at the top.
They were asking for trouble, and they got plenty of it. This was beyond anything anybody had ever dreamed of in that day and age, and it would prove to be the eventual undoing of the band in a few years. But for now, the 13th Floor Elevators were on their way to the top of the psychedelic rock mountain, and they were making music with a sound that nobody else was doing. It was definitely time to take this show on the road. California beckoned from afar, and in 1967 they made the trip to the coast, where they aimed to hit the high spots.
I'll go over what happened for the band in 1967 in the next installment of the history of the band. Thanks to Danny White for his input and advice in putting this story together.
Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion for Racing Through History. It's Thee Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss! Thanks, I'll see y'all next week.
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