Easter Everywhere

Easter Everywhere
Studio album by The 13th Floor Elevators
Released	November 1967
Recorded	September 1967 at Walt Andrus Studios
Genre	Psychedelic rock garage rock
Length	41:29
Label	International Artists
Producer	Lelan Rogers
The 13th Floor Elevators chronology
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966) Easter Everywhere (1967) Live (1968)

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

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.

Symbolism

The front cover, hand-drawn by the bands' informal manager George Banks, prominently features a primeval Eastern sun, intended to represent the open blazing third eye. 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. 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. 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.

Much of the album's original lyrical content is explained in the context of Alfred Korzybski's general semantics.

Title

While the use of the term Easter in the albums' 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. 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.

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Stylus Magazine	C+
The Lama Reviews	10/10 (stereo)

Release

The album features the band's distinctive sound on 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" ranks among the band's most iconic songs. As on the previous album, Tommy Hall's electric jug is prominent in the music.

International Artists reissued their entire LP catalog in 1979, using new stereo mixes for some albums, presumably due to damaged or missing master tapes. Easter Everywhere, however, was supposedly remastered from the original tapes. For a long time, the album was a hard-to-find collectors' item, until being reissued by Charly Records UK in 1988. Although various CD releases have claimed to contain the original 1967 mixes, all CD reissues of the album have been sourced from inferior vinyl-sourced tapes licensed to Charly Records. The master tapes are today considered missing (or presumed destroyed). In 2009, the original mono version (sourced from vinyl) and a new, alternate stereo version (sourced from out-of-phase tapes with extra reverb) were released as part of the Sign of the 3-Eyed Men box set. Both versions featured different bonus tracks, some that were previously unreleased. The mono version contains missing electric jug overdubs on some tracks that the stereo mix does not have. In 2010, Charly Records re-released this album in mono and stereo together in a limited edition CD set featuring "Fire in My Bones", previously released in 1985 on an unofficial outtakes album and in 1994 on the 1966–1967 Unreleased Masters Collection. The CD reissues have prominent use of noise reduction.

The liner notes for the 2009 Charly re-release state of the differences between the two mixes:

The mono edition of this album is ridiculously rare - surviving IA paperwork suggests only very few were pressed as white label promos for AM radio, and even fewer as mono stock copies (the paperwork suggests as few as 120 copies) that were probably only sold to order. The mono mix offers a more solid sound throughout, with a notably heavier bass mix compared to stereo. There are also some obvious differences: the jug on 'She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)' is far more prominent; 'Levitation' has a double tracked vocal; Roky's harmonica solo on 'I Had to Tell You' is far clearer.

Track listing

Side A

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Slip Inside This House"	Roky Erickson, Tommy Hall	8:03
2.	"Slide Machine"	Powell St. John	3:43
3.	"She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)"	Erickson, Hall	2:58
4.	"Nobody to Love"	Stacy Sutherland	3:00
5.	"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"	Bob Dylan	5:17

Side B

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Earthquake"	Erickson, Hall	4:51
2.	"Dust"	Erickson, Hall	4:02
3.	"I've Got Levitation"	Hall, Sutherland	2:41
4.	"I Had to Tell You"	Erickson, Clementine Hall	2:28
5.	"Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)"	Erickson, Hall	6:30

2003 Charly reissue bonus tracks

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
11.	"Splash 1" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)	Erickson, Hall	4:21
12.	"Kingdom of Heaven" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)	St. John	3:33
13.	"You're Gonna Miss Me" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)	Erickson	3:42
14.	"Reverberation (Doubt)" (recorded live in Texas, 1967)	Erickson, Hall, Sutherland	3:23
15.	"You Don't Know" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)	St. John	2:35
16.	"Fire Engine" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)	Erickson, Hall	3:00
17.	"Monkey Island" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)	St. John	2:42
18.	"Roller Coaster" (recorded live in San Francisco, 1966)	Erickson, Hall	5:41
19.	"Levitation"	Hall, Sutherland	4:11
20.	"I Don't Ever Want to Come Down"	Unidentified	2:41

Personnel

• Roky Erickson – lead vocal, rhythm guitar, harmonica
• Tommy Hall – electric jug
• Stacy Sutherland – lead guitar, lead vocal ("Nobody To Love")
• Dan Galindo – bass guitar
• Danny Thomas – drums
• John Ike Walton – drums ("She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)", "Levitation")
• Ronnie Leatherman – bass guitar ("She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)", "Levitation")
• Clementine Hall – backing vocals ("I Had to Tell You")

Technical

• Lelan Rogers – production
• Frank Davis – engineering
• Walt Andrus – engineering
• Guy Clark – sleeve photography
• Russell Wheelock – sleeve photography

Sources

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

External links

• Easter Everywhere at Discogs (list of releases)