***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On September 18, 1940, psychedelic rock pioneer Powell St. John was born in Houston, and he grew up along the border in Laredo.
In the late 1950s, St. John enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. He embraced and was embraced by the campus folk revival there as the best harmonica player in town. At Kenneth Threadgill’s bar on North Lamar, he played as part of the Waller Creek Boys trio with friends Lanny Wiggins and Janis Joplin. When Janis left for San Francisco, St. John filed the info away, and Joplin remembered Powell when she got her big break. It was his song “Bye, Bye, Baby” that led off Big Brother and the Holding Company’s 1967 debut album.
Powell St. John, like Joplin, evolved from folk to psych and blues, joining the first lineup of the band the Conqueroo and writing songs for the iconic 13th Floor Elevators. His Elevators tracks include “Monkey Island,” “Slide Machine,” and “The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You.”
In 1966, St. John followed the hippie Texan migration to San Francisco and joined the band Mother Earth with singer Tracy Nelson and, over time, fellow Texans Toad Andrews, George Rains, Bob Arthur, and Boz Scaggs. Among other things, Mother Earth deserve more credit for the late 60s style of country-rock. Bob Dylan had been experimenting in Nashville since Blonde on Blonde, and the Byrds delivered the country-rock manifesto Sweetheart of the Rodeo in summer 1968. That same year also saw the release of Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth’s Living with the Animals, a classic back-to-the-land album for which the band moved to a communal farm outside Nashville. It launches with St. John’s superhero anthem “Marvel Group” and closes with Powell reclaiming his Elevators track “The Kingdom of Heaven.”
Powell St. John had a long, successful career as a musical and visual artist in California, with a string of thoughtful solo albums into the twenty-first century. Powell St. John passed in 2021, a bright light and multi-faceted artist who brought his Texas roots to a global countercultural audience.
Mother Earth, “The Kingdom of Heaven”
Sources:
Bill Bentley, “the Kingdom of Heaven: It’s About Time You Knew Powell St. John,” Austin Chronicle, December 22, 2006.
Klemen Breznikar, “Powell St. John Interview,” It’s Psychedelic Baby, July 22, 2011.
Kevin Curtin, “Powell St. John Brought Us the Message, 1940-2021,” Austin Chronicle, August 23, 2021.
Paul Drummond. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound. Los Angeles: Process Media, 2007.
Alice Echols. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.
Ben Graham. A Gathering of Promises: The Battle for Texas’s Psychedelic Music, From the 13th Floor Elevators to the Black Angels and Beyond. Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2015.
