Easter Everywhere

Easter Everywhere is the second studio album by the American psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators. It was released on 25 October 1967, through record label International Artists. It is regarded by many critics to be one of the finest psychedelic albums ever released.[1]

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[2]
Stylus MagazineC+[3]
The Lama Reviews10/10 (stereo)[4]

Easter Everywhere
Studio album by
The 13th Floor Elevators
ReleasedOctober 25, 1967
RecordedSeptember 1967
StudioWalt Andrus Studios
Genre
Length41:29
LabelInternational Artists
ProducerLelan Rogers
The 13th Floor Elevators chronology
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators
(1966)		 Easter Everywhere
(1967)		 Live
(1968)

Background

Easter Everywhere was packaged with lyrics printed on the inner sleeve, gold ink on the cover (which flaked off), and full color pictures on the reverse. The packaging was quite expensive at the time of release.[5]: 281 

Symbolism

The front cover, hand-drawn by George Banks, prominently features a primeval Eastern sun, intended to represent the open blazing third eye.[5]: 281  Above this is the seventh chakra, the ultimate realm of Nirvana. The gold color on which this is printed was chosen as a symbolic color for the divine.[5]: 281  Below the sun is the band's name, colored red and formatted to look like the eyebrows of Buddha. This image concept was selected by lyricist and jug player Tommy Hall, along with the rear cover image of a meditating yogi, which is from a photograph of an eighteenth-century painting hanging in the National Museum of Indian Art in New Delhi.[5]: 280  Hall selected these images from a Tantric art book, intending to communicate that evolution is obtainable through alignment of the chakras and opening of the third eye (corresponding to the pineal gland); thus a soul coalesces with the collective primeval life force and retains a latent knowledge of its previous existence, therefore consciously achieving immortality.

Title

While the use of the term Easter in the album's title is often misconstrued as implying the album to be of primarily Christian merit, the album's composition melds the beliefs of multiple religions, combining Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic scriptures into a single unifying spiritual concept evaluated from a Western, Christian perspective.[5]: 280  In the band's first and only interview, given to Houston fanzine Mother on November 20, 1967, Tommy Hall explained the correct interpretation of the title:

Well, [the title] comes from the idea of Christ Consciousness. And realizing that you can be born again; that you can constantly change and be reformed into a better and better person. It's like a progressive perfection, and Easter Everywhere is sort of the combination or culmination of this idea as echoed in the public. It's like everyone is snapping to this; that there is a middle ground between the Eastern trip and the Western trip, and that is by learning to use your emotion and realizing what emotion is and why it is there and how to control it from a pleasure point of view so that you don't get hung up in a down place. It's just the idea of rising from the dead all over, everywhere.[5]: 280 

Release

The album features songs ranging from their own psychedelic "Slip Inside this House" to a psychedelic cover version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". "Levitation," which was also released as a single, ranks among the band's well-known songs. As on the previous album, Tommy Hall's electric jug is prominent in the music. The album was met with lukewarm reviews upon initial release, with a review in Billboard Magazine writing "call it intellectual-rock or call it musical flights of fancy, except for tunes that sound almost like each other, this group is inventive over-all".[6]

The original 1967 stereo mix of Easter Everywhere has never been officially reissued, despite claims by various record labels since its original issue. The master tapes are considered missing (or presumed destroyed). The International Artists label was revived by Lelan Rogers in the late 1970s, who reissued Easter Everywhere along with the label's entire LP catalog in 1979, debuting reprocessed stereo mixes with added phasing effects. The album was again reissued on vinyl in 1988 and for the first time on CD in 1991 by Charly Records UK under the Decal imprint, using similarly phased stereo mixes.

Following a lawsuit filed by the family of Roky Erickson against Lelan Rogers in 1993 for unpaid royalties, Charly Records purchased the licensing to the full International Artists catalog from Rogers in 1995, which included Easter Everywhere.[7] The surviving analog tapes were delivered to Charly Records, but they did not include any original 1967 mixes of Easter Everywhere. In 2009, the original mono version (sourced from vinyl) and an alternate stereo version were released as part of the Sign Of The 3-Eyed Men box set. This compilation included several bonus tracks, many of which were controversially sourced from circulating fan releases[8] without giving credit. In 2010, Charly Records re-released the album in a limited edition CD set featuring "Fire In My Bones", originally released in 1985 on an outtakes album of the same name. The album was again released on vinyl in 2012 as part of the Music Of The Spheres box set, which Charly Records advertised as "mastered from the original tape source",[9] despite the same 1970s phased stereo mixes being used.

Track listing
Side A
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."Slip Inside This House"Roky Erickson, Tommy Hall8:03
2."Slide Machine"Powell St. John3:43
3."She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)"Erickson, Hall2:58
4."Nobody to Love"Stacy Sutherland3:00
5."It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"Bob Dylan5:17
Side B
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."Earthquake"Erickson, Hall4:51
2."Dust"Erickson, Hall4:02
3."I've Got Levitation"Hall, Sutherland2:41
4."I Had to Tell You"Erickson, Clementine Hall2:28
5."Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)"Erickson, Hall6:30
2003 Charly reissue bonus tracks
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
11."Splash 1" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)Erickson, Hall4:21
12."Kingdom of Heaven" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)St. John3:33
13."You're Gonna Miss Me" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)Erickson3:42
14."Reverberation (Doubt)" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)Erickson, Hall, Sutherland3:23
15."You Don't Know" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)St. John2:35
16."Fire Engine" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)Erickson, Hall3:00
17."Monkey Island" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)St. John2:42
18."Roller Coaster" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)Erickson, Hall5:41
19."Levitation"Hall, Sutherland4:11
20."I Don't Ever Want to Come Down"Unidentified2:41

Personnel

References
  1. Lundborg, Patrick (2010). The Acid Archives: A Guide To Underground Sounds, 1965-1982. Lysergia. ISBN 978-1520636160.
  2. Deming, Mark. "Easter Everywhere – The 13th Floor Elevators : Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards : AllMusic". AllMusic. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  3. Parrish, Peter (March 9, 2004). "The 13th Floor Elevators – Easter Everywhere". Stylus Magazine. Archived from the original on September 14, 2006. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
  4. Lundborg, Patrick. "The Lama Reviews: A Fairly Reliable Guide To The World Of Psychedelic Music". Retrieved March 5, 2019.
  5. Drummond, Paul; Cope, Julian (2007). Eye Mind: The Saga Of Roky Erickson And The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers Of Psychedelic Sound. Process. ISBN 978-0976082262.
  6. "Billboard 1967-12-02" (PDF). World Radio History. December 2, 1967.
  7. "Charly Publishing Limited and Charly Acquisitions Limited v. Evelyn Kynard Erickson in her Capacities as Attorney-in-Fact for Roky Erickson and as Trustee of the Roky Erickson Trust--Appeal from 250th District Court of Travis County". Justia US Law. 2000.
  8. "13th Floor Elevators - Paradise Found (CD) - Discogs". 2005.
  9. Charly Records (March 12, 2012). "13th Floor Elevators - unboxing the vinyl boxset".

Sources
  • Drummond, Paul (2009). Line notes to The 13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere, Charly Records.
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