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Tag: Roky Erickson

  • Roky Erickson’s Later Career and Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye

    Most casual listeners meet Roky Erickson at the beginning: the 13th Floor Elevators, the electric jug, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” the Texas arrests. The second half of his life is harder and, in its way, more astonishing. It includes years inside Rusk State Hospital, horror-themed solo rock in the late 1970s and 1980s, near-total withdrawal, a 1990 all-star tribute that raised money when he desperately needed it, a tentative 1990s return, a full touring comeback in the 2000s, and a final studio statement with Okkervil River in 2010. He died in Austin on May 31, 2019, at seventy-one.

    For the Elevators years and the documentary that brought his family story to theaters, see Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators and You’re Gonna Miss Me.

    Roky Erickson performing at Bumbershoot 2007
    Photo: Joe Mabel. Roky Erickson at Bumbershoot 2007 — CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

    After Rusk: aliens, explosives, and haunted rock

    Erickson’s 1969 marijuana case ended the Elevators as a working band when he opted for commitment at Rusk rather than a long prison term. After release he struggled with untreated schizophrenia, attempted incomplete reunions, and eventually rebuilt a solo identity that traded psychedelic philosophy for haunted rock and roll — songs about zombies, two-headed dogs, and cold nights for alligators. He worked with groups including Bleib Alien, the Aliens, the Explosives, and the Resurrectionists. Former Creedence Clearwater Revival bassist Stu Cook produced some of the better-known solo sessions. The music found a cult audience even while Erickson’s day-to-day life remained fragile.

    By around 1990 the situation was dire. Reports from friends and later profiles describe poverty (including a period living on a small Social Security stipend), legal trouble involving mail theft charges that were later dropped, and reinstitutionalization. The songwriter who had helped invent an American psychedelic vocabulary needed money, medical advocacy, and a reminder to the wider world that his catalog still mattered.

    Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye (1990)

    Warner Bros. executive and longtime Elevators admirer Bill Bentley organized the answer: Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson, released by Sire Records on October 31, 1990. The title is often cited as Erickson’s own definition of psychedelic music. Bentley assembled Austin peers, Erickson associates, and major-label artists for a set of covers meant both to raise funds and to widen the audience.

    The track list reads like a bridge between underground Texas and alternative rock’s early-1990s mainstream: ZZ Top open with “Reverberation (Doubt)”; R.E.M. contribute “I Walked with a Zombie” and, under the alias Vibrating Egg with manager Jefferson Holt on vocals, “Bermuda”; Primal Scream tackle “Slip Inside This House”; the Butthole Surfers detonate “Earthquake”; Doug Sahm & Sons reclaim “You’re Gonna Miss Me”; Julian Cope, John Wesley Harding, Richard Lloyd, T-Bone Burnett, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and others fill out the map. Cassette and later vinyl editions restored songs trimmed from the original CD for length, including tracks by the Mighty Lemon Drops, Lyres, and Angry Samoans.

    Critics noticed. AllMusic’s Mark Deming praised the Texas-rooted contributions; Texas Monthly’s Joe Nick Patoski called it some of the most passionate rock he had heard in years; the Rolling Stone Album Guide later called the set an eloquent tribute to Erickson’s songwriting. More important than reviews, the album helped stabilize Erickson’s finances and reputation at a moment when both were nearly gone. Bentley returned decades later with a second tribute, May the Circle Remain Unbroken (Light in the Attic / Record Store Day), after Erickson’s death — proof that the 1990 project had permanently rewritten the artist’s public story.

    All That May Do My Rhyme and the long climb back

    Erickson performed at the 1993 Austin Music Awards — a public reappearance that stunned locals who had written him off. Studio work with Charlie Sexton and Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary led to All That May Do My Rhyme (1995), released on King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label. Marketed as his first new album in a decade, it combined fresh, comparatively gentle songs with material from the 1985 EP Clear Night for Love. Coffey later said Erickson told him he was the first person to hand him a royalty check for his music. Trance also issued Never Say Goodbye (1999), a collection of private and unreleased recordings.

    The decisive personal turn came in the 2000s, when brother Sumner Erickson gained legal custody and helped secure medical care and medication management. Keven McAlester’s documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me (SXSW 2005; wider release 2007) made the family conflict and recovery process visible worldwide. Erickson returned to full concerts — including Austin City Limits Festival appearances and international dates — often with the Explosives. Shout! Factory’s double-CD anthology I Have Always Been Here Before (2005) and the live archival set Halloween (2008) gave new listeners a map.

    Roky Erickson in Austin, March 1995
    Photo: Steve Terrell. Roky Erickson, Austin, March 1995 — CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

    True Love Cast Out All Evil (2010)

    Erickson’s final studio album arrived via Anti- Records with Austin band Okkervil River as backing group and Will Sheff producing. True Love Cast Out All Evil drew on a deep vault of unreleased songs — many written during or after the Rusk years — and folded in found-sound textures from that institutional past. The Guardian noted in January 2010 that it was his first album of original material in fourteen years. Critics heard a frayed, vulnerable voice singing about God, freedom, and loss: not a nostalgia cash-in, but a late-career statement that expanded the legacy rather than freezing it. Erickson continued touring afterward, including a May 2015 Elevators-related reunion at Levitation in Austin with Tommy Hall, John Ike Walton, Ronnie Leatherman, and others.

    The arc from Rusk to True Love is not a tidy redemption movie. Schizophrenia did not vanish; legal and medical support had to be rebuilt; the tribute album was charity and advocacy as much as art. But the public record is clear: Erickson wrote songs that outlived every institution that tried to contain him, and a network of musicians — from ZZ Top to R.E.M. to Okkervil River — insisted the world keep listening.

    Related: Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators · You’re Gonna Miss Me · Old Links & Press

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  • The 13th Floor Elevators and the Electric Jug

    Before “psychedelic rock” was a bin card in record stores, it was a word Tommy Hall borrowed from Timothy Leary’s writings and applied to a brand-new Austin band. The 13th Floor Elevators formed in 1965 around Hall’s lyrics and electric jug, Stacy Sutherland’s lead guitar, a rhythm section drawn from the coastal Texas group the Lingsmen, and Roger Kynard “Roky” Erickson — still a teenager — who left the Spades to sing and play rhythm guitar. Within a year they had a national single, a provocatively titled debut album, and the attention of both San Francisco ballroom bookers and Texas law enforcement.

    What made them unmistakable was not only Erickson’s shredded, gospel-fierce voice. It was the jug: a clay whiskey vessel that Hall treated as an amplifier for the human voice rather than as a folk bass substitute. For a deeper portrait of Erickson after the Elevators, see Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators and the documentary guide You’re Gonna Miss Me.

    The 13th Floor Elevators in the 1960s
    The 13th Floor Elevators, 1960s. Published in Not Fade Away (Fall 1975). Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

    Naming a sound — and a band

    Hall was a University of Texas student working through philosophy, psychology, and chemical engineering when he began assembling the group. Clementine Hall reportedly suggested the name 13th Floor Elevators: American high-rises often skip a labeled thirteenth floor, so the phrase implied travel to another level of consciousness. Others have linked the “thirteenth” to the letter M and marijuana. In November 1965 Hall began describing the band’s sound as psychedelic — garage rock braided with folk, R&B, and lyrics shaped by hallucinogenic experience — and Erickson’s screaming lead vocals finished the argument.

    Why the jug sounded like nothing else

    Traditional jug-band players blow across the opening to produce a low, tuba-like thump. Hall did something else. He vocalized melodic runs into the mouth of the jug, using the clay chamber for resonance, echo, and distortion. Live, he held a microphone to the jug’s opening; when recording Easter Everywhere, engineers reportedly placed a microphone inside the jug to exaggerate the effect. The result sat somewhere between a cuíca, an early synthesizer, and a human voice trapped in pottery — a signature that no cover band could fake with a guitar pedal alone.

    Hall was frank, in later interviews, about why he invented it. He did not consider himself a conventional musician. He wanted a place onstage so he could deliver lyrics shaped by study and LSD experience. The jug was a tool of presence as much as of timbre: a way for the band’s resident theorist to stand inside the music instead of only writing it.

    From Contact Records to International Artists

    Erickson’s earlier band, the Spades, had already cut “You’re Gonna Miss Me” for Austin’s Zero Records. The Elevators re-recorded it harder, closer to the Kinks and Stones energy they admired, and issued it with “Tried to Hide” on the small Contact label. Regional television followed — including Dallas’s Sump’n Else and Houston’s Larry Kane Show. Houston’s International Artists soon signed the group, hired Lelan Rogers (brother of Kenny Rogers) for promotion and production, and re-released the single nationally in mid-1966. It became the band’s biggest commercial moment, reaching the mid-50s on the Billboard charts (Handbook of Texas cites number 56).

    The debut LP, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (November 1966), announced the aesthetic in its title. The follow-up, Easter Everywhere (1967), is often cited by fans and historians as a high-water mark of American psychedelia — denser, more exploratory, still anchored by Erickson’s voice and Hall’s jug. A 1968 “live” album padded with studio outtakes and dubbed applause disappointed commercially. Bull of the Woods (January 1969) leaned on Sutherland’s writing and was finished without Erickson’s full participation as the singer’s legal and medical crises consumed the band.

    West Coast heat, Texas heat

    Success pulled the Elevators to San Francisco ballrooms — the Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom — and onto national television (American Bandstand, Where the Action Is). They shared bills with acts such as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Bassist Benny Thurman stayed in Texas; Ronnie Leatherman stepped in. Back home, open drug advocacy and marijuana arrests brought Texas Rangers and radio bans. In one 1966 case, charges against Walton and Erickson were dropped on a technicality while Sutherland and Hall received suspended sentences. Public pressure later eased some radio blacklists, but the pattern was set: the band’s philosophy made them a law-enforcement target in a state that did not romanticize the counterculture.

    Lineup churn followed. In summer 1967 Walton and Leatherman left; Danny Thomas (drums/piano) and Dan Galindo (bass) arrived. Touring contracted toward Texas as legal and personal problems mounted. Erickson’s 1969 marijuana arrest — not his first — led him to choose commitment at Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane over a long prison term. The Elevators effectively ended there. Hall eventually returned to San Francisco; most other members stayed in Texas. Sutherland was fatally shot by his wife in 1978. Surviving members reconvened in fragments over the decades, including a May 10, 2015 Levitation (Austin Psych Fest) anniversary set with Erickson, Hall, Walton, and Leatherman.

    What the Elevators left behind

    Influence lists are easy to inflate, but the Elevators’ documented admirers and legatees are real: Texas punk and neo-psych scenes, artists who covered Erickson on the 1990 Sire tribute Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye, and later musicians from Robert Plant to the White Stripes who publicly acknowledged the debt. International Artists’ 2009 box set Sign of the 3 Eyed Men and Paul Drummond’s biography Eye Mind gave historians a denser archive. The electric jug remains the easiest shorthand for their difference — a reminder that psychedelia was not only fuzz pedals and sitars. Sometimes it was a philosophy student singing into a jug so the words would leave the room changed.

    Related: Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators · You’re Gonna Miss Me

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