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.
(Page 3 of 5)
In August the Elevators went to San Francisco, where they found another fledgling counterculture. The Texans carried a mystique with them—they were loud, they’d been busted, and wildest of all, they played on LSD. Bands like the Grateful Dead (who formed shortly after the Elevators played their first San Francisco gig) took LSD, but they didn’t play on it. These hard-edged Texans blew into town and blew people’s minds. They were psychedelic. They were the first to use the term, and soon Bay Area bands were following their lead. When “You’re Gonna Miss Me” peaked at number 55 on the Billboard pop singles chart, IA called the band back to Texas to do an album, which they recorded in eight hours. The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators came out in November, with a bright psychedelic cover and Hall’s rambling acid manifesto on the back: “Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view… .”
The record was a hit, and the group began working on a follow-up, Easter Everywhere, a kind of LSD concept record. Roky conceptualized freely, ingesting whatever pills others offered him, sometimes without asking what they were. “He had to live up to his status as the weird psychedelic mutant,” remembers Kinney. Roky started getting more and more paranoid. At a November 1967 concert in Houston, he was afraid to walk onstage because he didn’t want people to see the third eye in the middle of his forehead. By then the band’s singular live show had degenerated into feedback and druggy jamming. When Bentley saw them in 1968, Roky stood with his back to the audience, singing a different song from what his bandmates were playing. “It was heartbreaking,” Bentley says. “I thought, ‘It’s over. How did that happen?’”
The Elevators scrambled to make a third album for IA, even though they had problems with the label and complained that they had never made any money beyond a weekly $50 salary. Roky was in and out of clarity. “He was a vegetable,” says bassist Ronnie Leatherman, who still plays music in Kerrville. Roky sang on only a handful of songs on the record, which was called Bull of the Woods. The band played a disastrous show at the just-opened HemisFair in San Antonio and Roky limped home. “He was all wired up and talking gibberish,” says Evelyn. “I had to worry about his effect on my other four kids.” She hired a psychiatrist, who put Roky on anti-psychotic drugs that left him in a stupor. She hired another doctor to take him off those drugs. Roky entered a private hospital in Houston, but two weeks later Hall helped him escape, and the two hitchhiked to California. Roky was free, but it was the end of the Elevators.
At a new year’s eve, 1968, show at the famous Winterland, Roky’s friend Terry Moore, who was in San Francisco to check out the legendary scene and score some good acid, saw Roky and George Kinney, who needed a ride back to Austin. It was hard to say no to Roky. “Everybody treated him like a god,” says Moore. “Nobody would say, ‘Roky, you need to straighten up.’” The three of them, plus three others, loaded into a VW Bug and headed home. Roky was in bad shape—unshaven, without shoes, and incoherent; apparently he’d been doing a lot of speed. In Arizona they broke out the LSD. Terry held out his hand and began passing it around. “I said, ‘Roky, want some?’ He grabbed a handful and put it in his mouth—took at least ten hits, and this was good acid.” Soon Roky was holding one arm and hitting himself with it, yelling, “Get out, bad spirit!” Roky’s friends dropped him off in El Paso, and he found his way back to Evelyn, freaked out and covered with sores.
In February 1969 Roky was busted for marijuana possession and eventually sent to the Austin State Hospital to be examined. He was diagnosed with “schizophrenia acute, undifferentiated” and put on the anti-psychotic drug Haldol. In May he escaped with the help of his girlfriend Dana Gaines. (She was not surprised to learn that a week before another girl had tried the same thing but she and Roky had been caught.) The police arrested Roky three months later. The best way out of a two-years-to-life sentence was to convince the judge that he was insane. Roky looked and acted crazy enough, and Dr. David Wade testified that Roky was hopeless—“a classic example of a schizophrenic reaction, a mental illness, mixed with drugs.” He was ruled insane and therefore innocent of possession. Six years later Roky would claim that he had faked the whole thing; he seemed to enjoy keeping people guessing.
Because Roky had a habit of escaping minimum-security joints, he was sent to Rusk State Hospital, a facility that housed the criminally insane in East Texas. After several years of gobbling massive amounts of LSD, speed, and any other drugs someone might offer, he was given shock treatment and massive amounts of Thorazine, a drug used to sedate psychotics. Roky later told drummer Freddie Krc how terribly he was treated: “I was in there with people who’d chopped up people with a butcher knife, and they treated me worse because I had long hair.”
The hair was cut. Evelyn visited, often bringing one of her other sons. She recorded Roky doing some of the songs he was writing—love songs and religious poems. Kinney began smuggling pages out, which he published as a book called Openers. Roky started a band, the Missing Links, with a couple of other inmates—a black guy who would perform with his face painted white and a redneck with long sideburns—and played at the hospital, rodeos, and a nearby college. Though he was doing well enough, his “open” sentence meant that unless someone proved he didn’t belong there, he could stay in Rusk for the rest of his life. In 1970 Roky’s brother Mike hired attorney Jim Simons to get him out, and Simons finally got Roky a trial in 1972. The Austin courtroom was packed. By now Roky was something of a cause célèbre, the closest thing Austin had to a rock star but also a symbol of the counterculture. The jury came back in less than fifteen minutes. Roky was not a danger to himself or others, they said, and he was discharged from Rusk, “sanity restored.”
But free Roky was confused Roky. “He didn’t know where to grasp onto life again,” says Kinney. “He depended on the largesse of friends.” Once, when Moore saw Roky walking and gave him a ride, his friend didn’t seem to recognize him and kept saying the CIA was watching him. Roky tried to get the band back together, and they even played a handful of shows. But things weren’t the same, says writer Joe Kahn, who was hanging out with the group at the time and who now writes for the Boston Globe: “There was a lot of simmering frustration and bitterness at how they’d been ripped off by International Artists.” (Roky, remembers Kahn, was oblivious to the problem.) Soon Roky and Dana Gaines got married. At first he was taking his meds and was happy. Soon, though, he went through a violent period. Dana recalls, “Out of the blue, he would go into rages. I was black and blue.” She says that he once attacked her in her sleep. Roky would also take out a copy of Openers and cross out “Jesus” in his religious poems and write in “Satan.” After nine months he stopped attacking his wife, and around then he had an affair with a woman named Renee Bayer that produced his first child, a girl named Spring, in 1974.
From 1973 to roughly 1982, Roky bounced back and forth between Austin and the Bay Area. He played with a band called the Aliens and recorded a couple of stunning new songs, “Starry Eyes” and “Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer),” with Doug Sahm. The songs would become two of his best known and would road-map the way he wrote for the next decade—a singular mixture of angelic love songs and demonic rock. “Starry Eyes” sounded like a Buddy Holly gem, while “Red Temple Prayer” was a ferocious slab of hard-edged guitar. Roky’s new kick was that he was an alien from Mars; he claimed he had the legal documents to prove it and that “You’re Gonna Miss Me” really meant “You are gonna miss a Martian E.” He was writing songs about ghosts, vampires, and beasts. Perhaps they were a reaction to the hell of Rusk State Hospital or perhaps he just wanted to shock people. Even though his new songs had titles like “I Walked With a Zombie,” his melodies were still gorgeous, sometimes with a fifties-era innocence. A friend of his once asked him where his melodies came from. He paused, then said, “The very best ones are sent from heaven by Buddy Holly. The rest take the better part of an afternoon to rip off.”
My Library
