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Music in Time: Lucky 13 Pledge Drive - 13th Floor Elevators (Audio)

Feb 27, 2024
Hosted by Evan McCormick.

In honor of WGXC’s 13th birthday and the ongoing “Lucky 13” pledge drive, on this episode of Music In Time host Evan McCormick takes listeners back to the 13th Floor Elevators and their 1967 psychedelic masterpiece Easter Everywhere. The episode features an interview with Paul Drummond, an antiquarian bookseller and author whose decades-long work on the band includes two books: Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound (2007) and 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History (2020). With Drummond as guide, the episode explores the deep spiritual and musical worlds created by the Elevators on Easter Everywhere, and the cult appeal garnered by the album over time–despite being released into relative obscurity at the tail end of the Summer of Love. From the band’s hallucinogenic experimentation to the plasticity of pop, Eastern & Western symbologies to Texas law enforcement, inner and outer worlds come together on this episode of Music In Time. Tune in--or, better yet, 'slip inside this house as you pass by...'

Playlist:
1. Slip Inside This House - 13th Floor Elevators
2. Postures (Leave Your Body Behind) - 13th Floor Elevators
3. (It's All Over Now) Baby Blue - 13th Floor Elevators
4. Slip Inside This House - Primal Scream

Music does not just exist. It exists in specific times and places, and in the sonic world of each individual listener who engages with it. That’s the basic idea behind "Music in Time," which explores the social and political context in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years. Each broadcast will focus on a single album, detailing the social and political circumstances surrounding its release and moments in time that made certain music resonate anew. How is music shaped by these historical moments, and, in turn, how does it shape the histories that we remember?

By day, Evan McCormick is a historian at Columbia University, where he is part of the Obama Presidency Oral History project, interviewing a range of people — from cabinet members to ordinary folks — about their memories of the Obama years. By night McCormick is a music lover and singer-songwriter, recording under the stage name Egan Caufield. For most of his life these two worlds remained separate, but after relocating to Catskill, in 2020, he chose to bring history and music together over the airwaves, and Music in Time was born.