A legendary ‘60s band lives free and falls hard

Eye Mind

The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound

Paul Drummond

Process: 424 pp., $22.95 paper

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THE prism through which most of us view rock history oozes with Vaseline. It’s a rose-colored virtual reality full of summers of love, good vibrations and trippy revolutions in the head. It’s all so beautiful: Enlightened kids in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles strap on guitars, toke on joints and live the groovy life while “changing the world” in the process. Even the flameouts are spectacular -- Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison crash and burn and then rise up into suspended states of elegant wastedness, forever young.

The 21st century pop music machine perpetuates the fairy tale, because nostalgia sells outrageously priced tickets to fossilized bands playing 40-year-old hits at cavernous arenas and allows self-mythologizing texts like Rolling Stone to regurgitate the past with every new landmark anniversary.

Lost in the tie-dyed wash of the ‘60s is the story of the 13th Floor Elevators, a band of Texas psychedelic rock pioneers whose story is less the typical rock train wreck than an outsized Greek tragedy. Musicians praise them and psych-rock geeks own their albums, but there’s precious little historical record of the group, save some old clips on YouTube and tall tales about the band’s vocalist, Roky Erickson, one of rock’s great lunatics.

“[T]his history of the 13th Floor Elevators is nothing short of a holy text,” musician Julian Cope writes in the foreword to “Eye Mind,” Paul Drummond’s exhaustive, hide-your-eyes journey through the morass of their career. The manager of the Roky Erickson archive, Drummond tackles the story as if he were conducting an archaeological excavation, crawling through the ruins, piecing together the band’s story from their roots and early promise to the drugs, law enforcement and insanity that ultimately took them out. It’s a gut-wrenching glimpse into rock’s unadulterated dark side.

His characters are vividly drawn long before the real drama starts: Erickson, a born performer, was a coddled mama’s boy who rebelled when his mother turned her attention to his younger siblings. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was a troubled kid who admired the “look” of heroin-addicted jazz musicians. And lyricist-jug player Tommy Hall was the perfect villain. A conservative University of Texas student who dropped LSD and turned into a psychedelic Svengali, Hall found the perfect mouthpiece for his message in the malleable Erickson.

It was simpler in the beginning. In the early 1960s, the core members of the Elevators were small-town Texas kids who liked to play music and get high, just like millions of the era’s other bored teens. The band formed in late 1965 and quickly had a hit -- a proto-punk screamer called “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” notable for its manic energy and the charismatic, wild-man vocal of 18-year-old Erickson.

Yet the Elevators weren’t popular simply for their musical prowess; they were also helping shape the Texas counterculture. “[T]hey were openly proselytizing the use of LSD which, although it would remain legal in Texas for another few years, was a dangerous move given the prevailing conservative climate,” Drummond writes. They were bold, brave, brazen and ultimately incredibly foolish as they blazed their psychedelic trail in plain sight. This was the idea of the boorishly cosmic Hall. An unskilled musician, he played an amplified jug, which for better or worse became a hallmark of the band’s sound. The group became Hall’s science/psychology experiment; he admonished his bandmates to communally drop acid before gigs and “play the acid.”

There were misgivings within the band, but Hall had pocketed the high card -- vocalist Erickson. “[A]ll it took was three hits of acid and Roky was following Tommy around like a kid,” drummer John Ike Walton tells the author. “Tommy started giving him acid and he had control of his brain.” Before the Elevators could capitalize on their regional fame, they were busted for drugs in early 1966 and then signed a bad record deal that left them broke. Instead of developing their chops and building an audience, they were caught in the crossfire of the generational warfare in Texas. Hounded by the cops, they became transient outlaws, their paranoia exacerbated by prodigious consumption of narcotics.

When the summer of ’67 arrived, the Elevators were already an afterthought. Erickson’s mental state had deteriorated, guitarist Sutherland was arrested onstage, and original members Walton and Benny Thurman had quit. Yet Hall pushed forward on recording “Easter Everywhere,” which he intended as the vehicle for his pro-acid blathering. The album was well received and holds up as one of the great psychedelic documents of the era, but it wasn’t the same grimy rock band that tore through “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” Hall’s increasingly complex lyrics bummed everyone out. “Not only did Roky not understand what he was singing, but also the way in which he was required to sing it,” Drummond writes.

“Easter Everywhere” was the last gasp. Though the band performed sporadically throughout 1968, Erickson was frequently absent, increasingly unhinged at the prospect of going onstage. A year later, it had fully blown apart. Sutherland was hooked on smack, Hall was dealing drugs and Erickson, whose grip on reality had slipped, was persuaded by a public defender to plead insanity to avoid hard time for possession of a small amount of pot. He was charged with offending “the peace and dignity of the state,” diagnosed as schizophrenic by the court and spent nearly four years in a maximum-security asylum. As Drummond puts it: “[T]he vision of utopia that many tried to achieve by ‘turning on’ led to a massive toxic overload by the end of the decade.” By the end of the 1970s, Sutherland was dead and Erickson had legally declared himself a Martian.

Still struggling with mental illness, Erickson continues to perform, while rock brethren, from ZZ Top to R.E.M., sing the defunct band’s praises. Although the Elevators may be anathema to all that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame holds dear, “Eye Mind” may provoke reassessment. “You like to think back and think, ‘Gee, if they’d had the proper management and if they’d all behaved themselves they might have been as big as the Beatles some day,’ ” Sutherland’s brother, Beau, mused to Drummond. Let the revisionist history commence.

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Erik Himmelsbach is at work on a book about KROQ-FM and the alternative-culture revolution.