Everybody's Here

The 13th Floor Elevators were the biggest thing on the Texas psychedelic scene in 1967, and far and away the most successful act on International Artists Records, so it's no great shock that Houston's Lost & Found, who were signed to IA in the wake of the Elevators' hit single "You're Gonna Miss Me," bore a certain resemblance to Roky Erickson's crew of inner space explorers. It didn't hurt that the Elevators befriended Lost & Found during their early days as the Misfits (thank the fates they changed their name, leaving the moniker open for Glenn Danzig a decade later), or that they were persuaded to cover the Elevators' "Don't Look Down" during the sessions for their first (and only) album, Everybody's Here. However, this album suggests the band was best served when they were trying to clear a musical trail of their own. Vocalist Peter Black was woefully incapable of replicating Erickson's feral howl no matter how hard he tried (and his attempt to mimic Bob Dylan on the title track was no better), but on poppier tunes like "I Realize" and "Forever Lasting Plastic Words," he summons up a fine folk-rock croon, and at its best, the guitar interplay between Black and Jimmy Frost suggests John Lennon and George Harrison as much as anyone in the psychedelic Southwest. The extended blues workout "Zig Zag Blues" takes six minutes to go nowhere in particular, and the trippy final cut, "Living Eye" (named for a hip Houston nightspot of the day), is only a bit more interesting, but there was a great folk-rock band lurking within Lost & Found that rises to the surface for a few pleasing moments on Everybody's Here -- too bad no one was around to encourage them in that direction back in the day, especially since the band called it quits by mid-1968, with Peter Black and bassist James Harrell going on to form another act beloved by fans of Texas psychedelia, Endle St. Cloud. ~ Mark Deming