A Long, Strange Trip
Drug abuse, schizophrenia, family and friends who meant well but did harm, and through it all, undeniable genius. For Roky Erickson, life as one of the most influential Texas rock and rollers of all time has been a long, strange trip and fortunately, it isn't over yet.
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In 1983 Evelyn shot a home video of her son playing songs. It opened with Roky singing, “For you, I’d do anything for you …” while the video camera focused on a portrait of Evelyn as a young woman. She had black hair, red lips, and fair skin and looked like Elizabeth Taylor. The camera stayed on the painting, then panned to Roky, who stopped halfway through the first chorus. “Like it?” he asked the camera in a high drawl. Evelyn’s voice told him that what he had sung was just a test run. Now they’d do the real one. Then she said, “You want to comb your hair real quick?” Roky had flowing locks, a mustache, long sideburns, and eyebrows that almost met over kind, sad eyes. His bright red-orange shirt and orange pants looked like they came from Goodwill. He did the song again (this time the camera stayed on him the whole time) and then sang nine more. Several times the camera came back to the portrait. After each song he asked some variation of “How about that one?” And Evelyn said some variation of “Good.”
Evelyn has been Roky’s director for most of his life, his first influence and the one who made him the great and fragile artist he is. She’s artistic, iconoclastic, and self-absorbed. She’s also the one who is most to blame for Roky’s current condition, say several people close to him, who half-jokingly call her Develyn. Evelyn didn’t set out to be a Svengali. She was a high school cheerleader in Dallas who married her high school sweetheart, Roger Erickson, in 1944. Their first son, Roger Kynard Erickson, Jr., was born July 15, 1947. He was called Roky because of the first two letters of his first two names. Soon the Ericksons moved to Austin, where Roger, a civil engineer and an architect, designed and built their home on Arthur Lane in South Austin. Evelyn put Roky in piano lessons at age four. A few years later, she was taking guitar lessons and then running home to teach him. Evelyn had a strong voice and sang with the University of Texas Opera Workshop. She won an Arthur Godfrey talent contest in 1957, singing the aria of La Traviata. The next year she even released a single of “O Holy Night” on a local label. Around that time Roky, with younger brothers Mikel and Don, made his public debut, singing “Mother Dear” to Evelyn on a local TV show called Woman’s World. She sang in an Episcopal church choir, and Roky and his brothers (Ben was born in 1959 and Sumner in 1962) sang in a Baptist one. The Ericksons were devout believers, and Evelyn says that when Roky had a broken leg, her prayer group healed him.
They weren’t your typical fifties American family. When I told Evelyn that they seemed quite eccentric, she replied whimsically, “I’d prefer to call us ‘eclectic.’” Now in her seventies, Evelyn has bright eyes and a pixielike smile. “I just thought we were being creative,” she said with a laugh. George Kinney, a boyhood friend of Roky’s and now an Austin musician, remembers how the neighborhood kids loved to go to the Ericksons’, where the rules weren’t as strict as those at other homes. Another friend remembers no rules at all: “The Erickson house was often a mess—clothes everywhere, kids running amok, and Evelyn would be painting a mural across the living room wall.” Dad was a brilliant architect but a workaholic and a hard drinker who was rarely home. “Roky feared his father,” says Kinney. “We all feared his father. He was real sarcastic. Very disapproving of Evelyn’s liberal way of raising the kids.” Kinney remembers Roger coming home in the wee hours one night when he and Roky, who were growing their hair long because of the Beatles, were awake and reading comic books. Roky’s father called his son out and cut his hair.
Comics were a big part of Roky’s life—superheroes like the Fantastic Four and horror comics—as were scary movies. “He was a weirdo,” says Kinney, “but a gentle one. Real funny, popular with girls, good-looking. Not part of the crowd.” Roky loved rock and roll. His favorite was Buddy Holly, but he liked the way Little Richard and James Brown screamed, and he’d play Brown’s records and wail along. Then he heard Bob Dylan, and by 1965 Roky and George were playing guitars down on the Drag, the section of Guadalupe Street that borders UT, a tip jar at their feet. They started hanging out with college kids and early hippies. They discovered marijuana. “He started getting his confidence,” recalls Kinney. “We were all stumbling around, trying to find what we wanted to do. He found his spot.” Roky wanted to play music. He left high school three weeks shy of his 1965 graduation—whether he dropped out or was kicked out is unclear, though Evelyn says he was booted for having long hair. Soon he joined the Spades, a local group. They recorded and released one of his songs, “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” In retrospect, that wild, muffled 45 was one of the first punk-rock singles.
Roky now found himself part of the budding counterculture and music scene at UT. Rock bands and folkies were writing songs, smoking marijuana (which was illegal—possession was a felony and a joint could get you twenty years), and taking psychedelics like LSD and peyote, which were still legal. Roky fell in with a pushy intellectual named Tommy Hall who loved LSD and saw it as the foundation of a new philosophy. Hall couldn’t play an instrument, but he picked up the jug, a staple of many folk bands of the day, and recruited a band, stealing Roky from the Spades with the promise of a supergroup with a super philosophy: truer living through chemicals. They called themselves the 13th Floor Elevators. “If you want to get to the thirteenth floor,” Roky once explained, “ride our elevator.”
Roky wrote most of the music, but Tommy, five years older, wrote the words and set the group’s tone. Hall saw the Elevators as missionaries, and he insisted they take acid—only the best—before every show, although sometimes they played on other hallucinogens such as DMT or mescaline. “Tommy manipulated the band, and especially Roky, with LSD,” says musician Tary Owens. Hall was the teacher and Roky the child, and the Elevators quickly became the most popular band in Austin, drawing hundreds of people to clubs like the Jade Room. Nobody had ever seen a group like this. They proselytized about freeing your mind while other bands sang about cars and girls; they wrote their own songs when others were playing “Louie, Louie”; they made a weird ticka-ticka-ticka sound (it was the jug); and they were fronted by a white teenager who screamed like James Brown. “He was the most electric performer I’ve ever seen, and that includes Hendrix,” says Bill Bentley, then a Houston high school kid who would see the band at clubs like La Maison. “He was possessed, so vivid and mesmerizing. His voice was so sharp and cutting—sometimes he’d get lost in his screams.” Roky would cock his head to the right and shake it as he screamed. In early 1966 the group recorded a new version of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” for Contact, a small Houston label. Contact then sold it to International Artists (IA), another small Houston label, which released it that spring. The song became a regional hit.
It was hard to be a hippie in Texas in 1966, especially a popular one. The police were not happy about this gang of longhaired rock stars and began shadowing the group after members were busted for pot. “The police declared war on the Elevators in Texas,” IA’s Lelan Rogers (country star Kenny Rogers’ brother) once told rock writer Jon Savage. Cops would search the band’s equipment before and after shows. In Baytown the police dismantled the group’s gear in the parking lot looking for drugs, and local kids had to lend the musicians their amps. “The police thought people like Roky were out to take over the government and corrupt their children,” says Roky’s high school friend Terry Moore, now a Lake Tahoe real estate broker. The Elevators eventually lucked out on the pot arrest. They could have gone to prison, but because of a judge’s error, all went free or were put on probation.
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