| Eye
Mind
The Saga Of Roky Erickson And The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers
Of Psychedelic Sound
by Paul Drummond
Process ($22.95)
Review by Allan Vorda
The 13th Floor Elevators, a little known group that broke up forty
years ago, might seem ill-suited as the subject of a 400-page book,
yet the legendary psychedelic band from Austin, Texas is well worth
this exhaustive treatment. Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind,
the new, definitive biography of the Elevators, is just as mind-blowing
as the Elevators’ music — it’s a superlative account
about a band whose history is as tragic as any Shakespearean play.
Drummond begins by describing how the Elevators formed in 1965. Three
members came from a band called the Lingsmen consisting of Stacy Sutherland
(lead guitar), John Ike Walton (drums), and Benny Thurman (bass). Tommy
Hall, a brilliant engineering/psychology student at the University of
Texas who played jug, added a new dimension when he hooked up with the
Lingsmen trio. All they needed was a lead singer, and they found the
perfect match for their style in Roky Erickson (vocals, rhythm guitar).
The concept of the band was the vision of Tommy Hall. Drummond discusses
Tommy’s influences (Nietzsche, Korzybski, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky)
and notes that with “his background in academia, Tommy combined
science with spirituality — in short, he wanted to redefine God
through mathematics.”
When Tommy became one of the early practitioners of psychedelics —
LSD arrived in Austin during the summer of 1965 — he saw music
as the vehicle for proselytizing his message: “Before him lay
inner space, an infinite galaxy of new possibilities, communion with
the architecture of the universe.”
Fueled by Roky Erickson’s “eldritch scream” (as described
by Sam Andrew of Big Brother & the Holding Company) and Tommy’s
unique musical device — a microphone held next to a ceramic jug
that created a strange, reverberating sound — the 13th Floor Elevators
helped inaugurate psychedelic music. For approximately two years, however,
the band’s existence was like a roller coaster that was heading
toward a tragic ending. Benny Thurman was kicked out of the band for
shooting speed and replaced by Ronnie Leatherman. Tommy, Stacy, Roky
and Clementine (Tommy’s wife) were busted for marijuana at a time
when possession of one joint in Texas could mean twenty years in prison
(the case was dismissed on a technicality).
To escape the Texas heat, the Elevators relocated to California, where
they played numerous gigs. Most of the band, in line with Tommy’s
philosophy, continued to drop acid for every concert, but the constant
use of drugs began to have a detrimental effect on Roky, who started
blanking out on stage, unable to sing the lyrics. On top of this, Tommy
started giving Roky a psychoactive compound called Asthmador to help
him fail his draft induction. The combination of drugs and pressure
led to Roky gradually snapping. Fortunately, before things got any worse,
International Artists summoned the band during October 1966 to return
to Texas to record their first album.
The album was Tommy’s chance to deliver his message; as Drummond
puts it, “His overall concept was to apply a psychedelic mantra,
informed by his study of general semantics and semantic memory via Korzybski
to their songbook to try and arrange the songs into a playing order
that would best describe the psychedelic experience.” More simply,
Tommy’s lyrics were written around existential philosophy, religion,
love and death, which created a strange brew when combined with the
trippy music. The result was The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th
Floor Elevators, which featured such mind-altering songs as “Splash
1,” “Reverberation,” “You Don’t Know,”
and the single “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”
It was produced by Lelan Rogers (brother of Kenny Rogers), who decided
to emphasize Tommy’s electric jug: “IA ensured that the
jug, the Elevators’ trademark, was audible in the mix, sometimes
to the detriment of (Stacy’s) guitar and Roky’s lead vocal.
While the technical difficulties in production marred the perfect product,
the overall content within was clearly one of the most startling, original
and accomplished records of the era.”
The Elevators returned to California with a brief stop in Los Angeles
and an appearance on American Bandstand. Dick Clark asked,
“Who is the head man of the group here, gentlemen?” Tommy’s
classic response was, “Well, we’re all heads.”
Before long the band headed back to Texas where they started writing
songs for their second album; Easter Everywhere was “Tommy’s
attempt to incorporate his understanding of esoteric texts into his
own model of enlightenment, correlating Eastern mysticism and Western
science.” More precisely, Tommy was formulating his “interpretations
of the Hindu Vedas and Chinese Buddhist Tantras uniquely paralleled
by Western scientific study of quantum physics in an attempt to scientifically
decipher the components of the divine and eternal life.” For example,
Tommy wrote “Slip Inside This House,” a psychedelic poem
of exquisite beauty, after reading The Secret of the Golden Flower,
an ancient Taoist text on transcendence.
After the recording of Easter Everywhere, Tommy broke down
and quit the band in 1967. Roky Erickson was busted for marijuana and
was advised to plead insanity to avoid twenty years in jail. He would
instead spend over three years at Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally
Insane, where he was given Thorazine and probably electric shock treatments;
all of this, combined with over 300 acid trips, resulted in a deranged
mental state that was diagnosed as schizophrenia.
Stacy Sutherland submitted to his dark demons with excessive alcohol
and drug abuse; he was shot and killed by his wife in a domestic argument
in 1978. Tommy Hall, after taking LSD a total of 317 times between 1966
to 1970, dropped out in San Francisco, where he reportedly was writing
a book that would explain the meaning of existence — though as
Drummond states, “Whether we will ever see another word in print
from Tommy is doubtful.” On top of all the personal tragedy, there
was virtually no money paid to the band by their record label, and their
music lingered in obscurity for decades.
Nowadays, the cult of the 13th Floor Elevators continues to grow; this
remarkable band has influenced such groups and musicians as R.E.M.,
Echo and the Bunnymen, ZZ Top, Robert Plant and many others. For anyone
interested in the origins of psychedelic music, Eye Mind is
a must read and vividly brings to life the culture that espoused what
Humphrey Osmond stated when he coined the word “psychedelic”
in a letter to Aldous Huxley: “To fathom or soar angelic, just
take a pinch of psychedelic.”
As Drummond’s book proves, for a short while, the 13th Floor
Elevators soared angelic indeed.
Bowl
of Cherries
by Millard Kaufman
McSweeney’s ($22)
Review by Jay Gabler
If you know one thing about Bowl of Cherries, it’s likely
the fact that its author Millard Kaufman is a debut novelist at age
90. You may also be aware that Kaufman is an accomplished screenwriter
and the co-creator of the character Mr. Magoo.
In line with what those two facts might lead you to guess about the
book, Bowl of Cherries is nothing so much as gleefully cranky.
The novel’s 326 pages are thick with complaints about the folly
of man, the changeability of woman, the inscrutability of God and the
pig-headed selfishness of all of the above.
The bitterness of the book’s tone is accentuated by the fact
that its narrator, Judd Breslau, is a teenager, who by age fourteen
has already dropped out of graduate school at Yale. Cast adrift —
his father has disappeared and his mother has moved to a Colorado ranch
with an exploitative poetry editor — Breslau is enlisted by Phillips
Chatterton, an eccentric scientist who is “researching”
the validity of a cockamamie notion about the kinetic powers of music.
Driven jointly by the whims of fate and his obsessive infatuation with
Chatterton’s comely daughter Valerie, Breslau goes on to sojourn
first at the aforementioned ranch and subsequently in a posh New York
City apartment before being swept off to Assama, a remote province of
Iraq. Since the entire story is told in flashback from a detention cell
that is literally built of shit, we know from the novel’s outset
that Breslau will mortally offend Assama’s young ruler and be
sentenced to a grisly death.
Kaufman’s voice is bitingly comic — indeed, so biting that
every subject touched by the shambling narrative is thoroughly chewed,
digested and excreted. Science, represented by Chatterton’s quixotic
researches and Breslau’s hemorrhoid-plagued Yale advisor, is a
sham. Government, represented by a compromised American president and
the kangaroo cabinet ruling Assama, is debased. Business, represented
by the opportunistic entrepreneur who manipulates Breslau into joining
his Assaman venture, is extortionate. And love is capricious, fickle,
and largely driven by hormones. At the conclusion of the book, as one
character assents to follow another off into the sunset, she does so
with perfect resignation: “What the hell.”
What chiefly recommends this acid picaresque is the bitchy fun the
author seems to be having with it. Kaufman’s relationship with
the English language is as intimate as Breslau’s with a ranch
girl who tempts him to “acquiesce to her every delinquency”
— and he corrupts it just as enthusiastically.
Typical of Kaufman’s style is his evocation of Valerie on the
tennis court: “those plangent breasts. . . uncontaminated by a
bra, alive alive-o like two playful puppies under a thin blanket.”
Given his interest in the rawest varieties of lust, it’s not inappropriate
to draw an analogy between reading Bowl of Cherries and visiting
a whorehouse: you won’t find the experience very uplifting (at
least not morally or spiritually), but you certainly won’t be
bored.
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