"COLD SUN" left to right : "Billy Miller", "Hugh Patton", "Mike Ritchey", "Tom Mcgarrigle" live in the Palmer Auditorium, circa 1971
Austin band with an obvious "13th Floor Elevators" influence recorded this amazing Psychedelic demo LP in 1970.
Cold Sun had a lot of things going for them. They were from Austin, TX in the 1960s, and hung out with Roky Erickson and the Elevators. They had an electric autoharp, which sounds sort of like three 12-string Rickenbackers being played at once with a velvet pick. My first couple times through this album, I couldn’t figure out what the shit was making that noise.
Cold Sun clearly took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs, which went well with the fact that they had a real thing for reptiles. Whoever wrote the lyrics really liked snakes and lizards and other scaly things, and sang about them in songs.
It’s hard to describe the Cold Sun sound—maybe if you could imagine the 13th Floor Elevators, and then make that image very, very blurry, and at times aimless, and add a weird, dreamy autoharp . . . that’s sort of it. Or, maybe more accurately, it sounds like humanoid-reptilian beings living inside of a hollow earth picked up on radio transmissions from Texas in 1966, and attempted to pay tribute to them in their own band. As biology would have it, their reptilian ears and brains couldn’t quite process how rock and roll worked, so they came up with their best approximation of it via their evil reptile music. Also, they’ve never seen the sun. Or maybe the sun is cold in there.
"Roky Erickson"'s first backing band, Bleibalien, were essentially made up of members from "Cold Sun".
An interesting partial review from the Little Black Egg Blog Thanks
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