Johndavid Bartlett

A forgotten figure from the annals of Texas psychedelic sounds, Johndavid Bartlett sang and composed while moving among the same circles as the 13th Floor Elevators and the Red Krayola. Briefly contracted to the storied International Artists imprint, he watched the album he tracked for them go unreleased; disillusioned with the industry, he stepped away from performing for decades until resurfacing in the new millennium.

Born October 8, 1950, in Fort Worth, Texas, Bartlett was raised amid parental enthusiasms for jazz, blues, and folk. An old Martin acoustic once owned by his uncle sparked his first guitar lessons in his early teens. By fifteen he had advanced to a fresh Gibson J200 and cultivated parallel fascinations with music and theater. In 1966 the sixteen-year-old and his girlfriend Billie Heron were enlisted by local producer Major Bill Smith—who had already overseen hits by Paul & Paula—to cut a single as Two Different. Their lone effort, “Time Is Winding,” failed commercially yet opened doors in the Texas rock world; shortly afterward his high-school English teacher Hazel Thompson introduced him to her son Mayo Thompson, whose band pursued a far more radical direction.

Mayo’s Red Krayola delivered fractured psychedelic rock shaped by the Theater of the Absurd—one of Bartlett’s emerging interests—and by local standard-bearers the 13th Floor Elevators, whom Johndavid had already witnessed live. Bartlett soon joined the Familiar Ugly, the loose collective of noise-makers who augmented Red Krayola performances. After the group signed with International Artists—the same Houston label that had turned the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” into a national success—Bartlett participated in the chaotic “free-form freakout” passages that punctuated the band’s 1967 debut, The Parable of Arable Land. Having begun writing original material, he impressed Thompson enough that the label offered him his own session. A three-album deal was signed in early 1968, with Bartlett’s father co-signing because the artist was still seventeen.

Among his earliest assignments as an International Artists artist was chauffeuring blues icon Lightnin’ Hopkins during the latter’s album sessions for the label; he also lent percussion—using an ashtray—on the 13th Floor Elevators’ final studio date for the track “May the Circle Remain Unbroken.” Eventually Bartlett recorded at Gold Star Studio in Houston under producer Ray Rush and briefly formed a band called the Eagles alongside guitarist Stacy Sutherland and drummer Danny Thomas, both veterans of the unraveling 13th Floor Elevators. The Eagles never advanced beyond informal jams, and Bartlett’s own project stalled when International Artists encountered financial woes; frustrated, he abandoned the contract in 1969. The label itself shuttered two years later.

Still active on Houston and Fort Worth stages, Bartlett served as both performer and MC at a major 1969 Houston bill that included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Byrds. That same year he helped establish the Family Hand commune with fellow Texas counterculturists; the group relocated to New Mexico in 1970, where Bartlett launched another ensemble, the Living Room Cat. Lou Adler expressed interest in signing them to Ode Records, prompting a move to Los Angeles, yet the experience soured Bartlett on professional music and he returned to Texas in 1973. Subsequent years found him employed in the oil sector, working as a chef, assisting management at the Fort Worth arts venue Caravan of Dreams, and handling multimedia production, all while largely avoiding music as a livelihood—save for a claimed co-writing credit on “Too Young to Date,” a minor hit for Texas new-wave act D-Day.

The September 11 attacks of 2001 persuaded Bartlett that ignoring his creative impulses was unwise in an uncertain world, so he resumed performing and issued the archival compilation The Velvet Monkey Wrench on his own imprint. In 2012 the U.K. reissue specialist Charly Records released Falling Through the Universe, Bartlett’s first commercially available collection, comprising twenty tracks spanning 1969 to 2006.