It was almost certainly reading Julian Cope's Head On/Repossesed
This boxed set came out in spring or summer 2002, I think. It comes from Charly, who seem to be another of these English cottage industry independents that do a great job of curating and re-issuing the world's (or at least the US's and UK's) music — see also Proper Records.
In the right conditions, I'm a big fan of music 'packages' like boxed sets. I was very new to the 13th Floor Elevators when I got this. Nowadays I could have just done a bit of research to find their most popular songs, then downloaded You're Gonna Miss Me and a few others, then made a judgement from there about whether I wanted any more. But that would be a bit like going to Paris and visiting the Eiffel tower and the Champs Elysées before deciding whether to stay and visit other parts of the city. When I first visited Paris in 1989, I went to the Bois de Boulogne on the first day. I felt somehow that the way a city designs its anti-city areas, its parks, would tell me something about the kind of city it thought it was. And I think the bootleg-quality live cover versions of You Really Got Me and Roll Over Beethoven on this boxed set tell you something about what the 13th Floor Elevators were about in a way that the 'hits' alone cannot. (They also do an unusual interpretation of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, by the way.)
Also, at the time, I think a single Elevators album was about two-thirds as expensive as this complete-works collection, which made the latter better value for money.
Finally, the boxed set includes an informative booklet, which, among other things, makes the case that the Rolling Stones song Monkey Man was a take on the Elevators' Monkey Island; that Pink Floyd nicked the melody from Roller Coaster; and that the Elevators used the term 'psychedelic' before the Grateful Dead did. You see, I wouldn't have known that otherwise.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1disc 2 disc 3 |
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