The 13th Floor Elevators — The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators

2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Stereo, 180 GR, 2013

There’s a wibblewibblewibble on the first track of The 13th Floor Elevators’ debut album, The Psychadelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, that sounds something like the doppler effect of a spaceship sailing by. It’s on the second track, too. And the third. In fact, after listening through the entire record, it’s clearly on every song. It’s as reliable as the drums, or the sometimes psychotic screaming. Wibblewibblewibble. Wibblewibblewibble.

In fact, it’s not space-related at all. It’s a jug. An electric jug. Which is to say it’s a jug with a microphone in it, into which The 13th Floor Elevators’ electric jug player makes noises. The jug player’s name is Tommy Hall, and this electric jug is why he’s famous. He now lives in downtown San Francisco and probably is an investor in Medium.

The electric jug has just this one credit, apparently. It’s a divisive sound — in doing research on what the hell the noise was, I found that critical opinion is split between two camps:

• The “It’s what makes The 13th Floor Elevators unique!” camp
• The “Actually, it’s kind of a pile of shit.” camp.

I’m in the first. I like it. It’s weird and different and something, most importantly, you simply do not hear anymore. Sure, any number of modern bands have replicated the sound using whatever the Casio keyboard has become. But this was the first. And it was done using an actual jug.

Either way, it’s a modern twist on a traditional instrument — a way of bringing an old sound into a new and fresh genre. It was a twist, and the twist wasn’t always liked. But we’re still talking about The 13th Floor Elevators and that might be something. Wibblewibblewibble.