Dear Roky,

This is a letter I’ve been wanting to write for over 50 years. It is one that is born out of the absolute love I have for your band, the 13th Floor Elevators, and how they gave me a life. That is not an exaggeration. When I saw the Elevators for the first time in early 1966, something happened inside me that had never happened before. I felt my heart open up in a way that completely astounded me, and my head followed right behind. The exciting questions of consciousness--what it really is and how it can be changed--became real in a way I had never experienced. I exploded inside and knew I had to follow the path your band had opened up for me no matter where it led. There was no choice.

La Maison, a small club on the outskirts of downtown Houston, did not seem like a shrine of any kind when I entered to see the 13th Floor Elevators the first time. The Elevators’song “You’re Gonna Miss Me” had been playing on Houston radio now and then, released on the tiny Contact Records label. I could hear the calling in the song that a new world was right around the corner. I was just 15 years old but longed to be older. I wanted to be able to ride into the glowing sun of the counterculture, take LSD, find God, and discover the divine realm of eternal life. These were no delusions. In 1966, that was the currency of the realm for young Americans. Dr. Timothy Leary was preaching “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!” for whoever would listen, and while it seemed admirable, there were no markers to really find out how to accomplish those heady words. But the 13th Floor Elevators made the possibility seem real. The velocity of the guitars, the intrigue of the electric jug, but, most of all, the incendiary power of your voice blew down the door of normalcy. Rock & roll, in the less than three minutes of “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” became a living promise of possibility. This was no Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry nor was it The Beatles or the Rolling Stones. There was the next step out into another realm. There had to be more to life, and it felt like the Elevators had the answer. There was no doubt: a new future had arrived.

As 1966 continued to unfold, the Elevators became a huge part of life in Houston. I knew the band was based in Austin, but you played so much in our city that we adopted you as our own. To identify with the 13th Floor Elevators was a true badge of honor for the growing cult of believers who rallied around the band. You, Tommy Hall, Stacy Sutherland, John Ike Walton, and Benny Thurman (to be replaced shortly by Ronnie Leatherman) appeared to be a small army of psychedelic warriors on the home front. The city’s police department continued a 24-hour- a-day crackdown on anyone resembling the obvious appearances of the counterculture--long hair, hippie beads, bell-bottom jeans, granny glasses, or anything else of the sort--but it was all worth it when we’d gather as one in front of the bandstand when the Elevators were playing.

There was such an element of everythingness while the Elevators performed. Nights could start with a choice cover song, like the Rolling Stones’ “Empty Heart”or Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” and then instantly roar into band originals like “Roller Coaster”or “Monkey Island,”sounding like a bomb had been set off in the club. Really. The utter intensity of watching the Elevators in 1966 has never been equaled in my mind. So much of it was the way you approached a song like it was a spaceship to another world. Roky, you became your songs. I’ve heard many other artists over the years allude to that desire, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually go there with any regularity like you do. Every single time you played during that year, it was clear the level of possession the music held for you was off any perceivable scale. It just happened, over and over and time after time, until we came to expect that a night with the 13th Floor Elevators would be one of transcendental deliverance. It was a psychedelic experience without the psychedelics. No other band in rock & roll had such a life-changing force.

At the end of the summer in 1966, we found out the Elevators were going to the West Coast, and our devoted crowd wanted to go, too. The idea of living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, going to the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom to see the band spread their hallucinatory wonder among those altered audiences, was beyond dreamland. The word back from the Bay Area was that the Elevators were headlining all their shows with San Francisco stalwarts like Moby Grape, the Great Society (with Grace Slick), Quicksilver Messenger Service, Buffalo Springfield, Big Brother & the Holding Company and even Texas’own Sir Douglas Quintet. It felt like the outside world beyond the Lone Star state had anointed greatness on the Elevators, which made us feel like visionaries in screaming your virtues. Pride can be a beautiful thing in the world of rock & roll.

But it was also then that we heard about the prodigious amounts of LSD you were taking as ’66 rolled to an end, and there were even reports of less-than-stellar performances because the band’s grasp on reality was becoming more tenuous. Still, psychedelic drugs were new in the world, and no one really knew where they would lead. For now, the so-called doors of perception felt like they needed breaking open, and whatever it took to make that happen was part of the bargain. Helping envision a new way to live is no weekend task, and the Elevators’ psychedelic life as seekers took on cautionary elements while it also painted reality in bold new colors. It felt to those looking in from the outside that the past was being left behind, and those wanting to join your journey were being welcomed with open arms even if the lifestyle’s choice came with jagged edges and legal peril.

In November 1966, though, a momentous milestone was reached: Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators was released on International Artists Records. The Houston-based label was a new start-up, but that didn’t really matter, at least not the day the album came out. The cover’s colorful swirl of forms and letters looked like a clarion call for all who believed so fervently in the band’s mission. And while the sonics of the album left a little to be desired, the expansive songs and the instrumental audacity of the music left nothing to the imagination. This was a sound meant to invoke the world of psychedelic consciousness. No other band, not by a long shot, had tapped into the source of inspiration that LSD offered to create their sound and lyrical instruction. “Reverberation (Doubt),” “Fire Engine,” “Don’t Fall Down,” “Tried to Hide,”songwriter Powell St. John’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” and “Monkey Island”were just some of the majestic efforts laced through that debut album. When we first heard the album, Roky, we all knew the cracks in consciousness that the band’s first year promised were fast becoming a reality. What we didn’t really know was the psychic price the band was paying. Things were beginning to break.

1967 started with a mighty roar as the 13th Floor Elevators continued playing constantly in Houston and Austin, and Tommy Hall’s prophetic lyrical evolution would soon manifest itself in songs like “Slip Inside This House,” “(I’ve Got) Levitation,” “Earthquake” and “Postures (Leave Your Body Behind).” When the band’s new rhythm section, drummer Danny Thomas and bassist Dan Galindo, entered the lineup, the music felt different, but it fit with the essence of the new songs. You were still singing at full force, and through the year, the musical impact and reputation of the Elevators rose right up through the roof with the release of the sophomore album, Easter Everywhere, in late October.

There was one particular show in 1967 that, looking back, feels now like the apex of the 13th Floor Elevators’ history in Houston. It was in the gymnasium of St. Luke’s Methodist Church, directly across Westheimer Road from the ultra-toney River Oaks neighborhood. It was a large gym, and while the band didn’t have a stage to set up on, it almost felt like they were levitating a few feet above the floor. It was right before Thomas and Galindo joined the group, and my friend and I went early to watch the Elevators set up. Tour manager Sandy Lockett walked into the gym smoking a joint, oblivious to the Houston police handling security. I recall when one of the officers told Lockett there was no smoking in the gym, the long-haired Austinite simply put the joint out with his fingers and put it back in his small matchbox. Fortunately, the policeman didn’t realize it was marijuana and left Lockett alone. I recall thinking then, “Boy, these Elevators guys really are in a world of their own.” I was in awe of their bravery.

When the band started playing that evening, there was a physical aura encircling the five members. John Ike Walton’s silver sparkle Rogers drum kit had a luminous shine to it, like something from another world, and electric jug player Tommy Hall’s eyes were the size of quarters. Roky, you looked like you were protected by an electrical force field around your body as if nothing could get inside it to harm you. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland, often called “the Dark Angel” for his black hair and beard and the seriousness of his gaze along with his dark Gibson guitar, was off at the far end of the band’s set-up and, from the first song, was playing with a total cosmic fullness in both his chords and lead lines. Bassist Ronnie Leatherman, in a stately black top hat and total inner cool, laid down the perfect bottom, while drummer Walton over six feet tall with long arms that encircled his kit and the biggest ride cymbal known to man, played like he had attached extra appendages to his body, always in motion with a pure regal ability. Near the end of the night, the Elevators started an instrumental that Tommy Hall announced as “Egyptian Eyes” and, for the next ten minutes, painted a distant world of unique chord progressions and sustained musical bliss like nothing I’ve heard before or since. Hall ended up sitting on the floor with his legs crossed in a yoga position like he was in the process of leaving his body while the band improvised their way to the heavens. I remember asking you about the song years later, Roky, and you said you had no recollection of ever playing anything called that and then kindly answered you would someday try to write it. Of course you would.

It was a night for the ages and, looking back, was when the band was at their absolute peak. The latter part of 1967 and through much of 1968, when the Houston club Love Street Light Circus and Feelgood Machine--where the audience would lay on the floor with large pillows--became your home spot in Houston, now feels like a long slide down a frustrating and often frightening road. The band members were being followed by law enforcement officers, regularly harassed and often arrested. It was obvious the 13th Floor Elevators were seen by these police forces as the leaders of the counterculture legions threatening American middle-class values. The band members had targets on their backs and were being picked off one by one. The record label did the best they could to keep them from being imprisoned, but the longer 1968 went on, the more it looked like the 13th Floor Elevators’ days were numbered.

I recall one night in ’68, Roky, when the Elevators were performing at Love Street at Allen’s Landing at the end of Main Street, and when you came out onstage, you started singing with your back to the audience. Sometimes you would start one song while the band was playing another. Other times, guitarist Stacy Sutherland would walk offstage. It was absolutely heartbreaking to those of us who had started our own worship society of the band two short years before. It felt like the end was near and signalled to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Elevators’ illustrious history that a fantastical era in musical achievement was coming to a close. It was no real surprise, though it was monumentally heartbreaking, when we learned of your legal troubles that were to end with you becoming an inmate of the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The dream was over for us, and we really didn’t know where to turn. Richard Nixon’s America had taken over, the Vietnam War was raging, and civil unrest was the new reality for far too many Americans. The 13th Floor Elevators’message would live forever, but the band was gone. For us true acolytes, the world felt lonelier. What we had learned from the band and their songs would live inside us forever, to be sure, but the messengers who had brought us that prophetic message had disappeared. And we worried constantly about you, Roky, and your well-being. It was like you’d disappeared into the soul-crushing machine of the Texas legal system. But there was nothing we could do. When we heard you had been put in the Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Rusk, Texas, our hearts were crushed.

You lived again in Austin when you were finally released from the hospital as the first few years of the 1970s cameandwent. Elevators fans everywhere would ask about your condition, where you were, and when you might perform again. We really didn’t know what to think or who to ask. Then one day in 1974, I saw you walking down South Congress Avenue by yourself. It almost seemed like a vision then, like could it possibly be true? But there you were, and you were smiling. The world suddenly felt brighter, like a big mystery had been solved. We stopped and talked for a few moments, and you told me you were now Reverend Roger Kynard Erickson and had a book of poetry called Openers. Hooray for that, I recall thinking and soon began seeing club listings for 13th Floor Elevators reunion shows. For some reason, I didn’t go to any. I wasn’t sure who would be in the band, and it was like I was fearful of tampering with all my pristine memories of the moments when the Elevators roared through our teenaged consciousness with promises of infinite visions and perpetual salvation. I felt like there was no going back but simultaneously hoped the very best for you and all the other Elevators.

By 1974, a semi-crazed band of cultural brothers and sisters had started the Austin Sun alternative newspaper, and for one of my first interviews, I decided to go see Doug Sahm, stalwart leader of the Sir Douglas Quintet in the 1960s and now the chief kahuna of the burgeoning Austin live music scene. Sahm was living on a hill above Soap Creek Saloon outside Austin and had agreed to an interview for the Sun. When I met him at his house that sunny afternoon with his loyal road manager, Jim Groenewegen, he was already talking a hundred miles an hour. Doug was on a psychic roll with all kinds of new ideas for what he wanted to do in Austin, one of which was to start his new label, Mars Records. I immediately thought: Perfect name for a cosmic warrior like Doug Sahm. Mars’ first (and last, as it turned out) release was a 45 single by none other than Roky Erickson. Of course, my mind was blown open by that wonderful coincidence. Your two new songs, “Starry Eyes” and “Red Temple Prayer (Two- Headed Dog),”were rip-roarers, and Doug was utterly thrilled like only he could get to be at the helm of such an incandescent enterprise, as compact as it was. So after three hours of being interviewed, he suggested a friend go bring you to join the interview.

When you walked into Sahm’s house a half-hour later, Roky, you were beaming like an endlessly bright sun in the sky. The bouncing energy in the house became like a force to be reckoned with by itself, and after everyone was properly herbalized, it seemed like we all were on a voyage to another land. Watching you and Doug go back and forth with memories and dreams of the future is unlike anything I’ve seen, and when the sun started disappearing and it was time to go, I asked you how you felt about rock & roll now after all your experiences and challenges. You smiled, looked at me deeply, and said, “Well, the way I see it is that the music is as commercial as ants and can be whatever you want it to be.” Yes! That’s about as good a definition as I’ve ever heard and have never found a reason to seek another.

The second half of the 1970s became something of a Roky Erickson renaissance in several ways with a single on Los Angeles’ Rhino Records followed by an album for San Francisco’s 415 Records in 1980, various live shows in scattered cities, and a new reawakening about your musical past, present, and hopeful future. Every time things would slow down, another new song or story would appear, and it gave us all such hope.

One night in 1978, our Austin band, the Bizarros, was playing at a club behind the Greyhound bus station downtown, and at the time, former Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison was in the group. You showed up and sang the Velvets’ “Heroin”with such overwhelming gravitational force that Sterling, not a man prone to praise, shook his head and said, “I thought Lou (Reed) had the power, but that was insane.” Then you asked us to back you on your original, “I Am Her Hero, She Is My Heroin,” and after the cataclysmic ending, Sterling just looked at me with this speechless awe that said it all. There were no words to capture what had just happened. Those were heart-shuddering times that made it seem like the world could open up to you again even though it was obvious your mental state was precarious. That always seemed like the true challenge of psychological problems: how to keep the spirit strong so that the future would stay stable enough for good things to happen. Roky, we all wished so much for you because without your early inspiration to Texans in the 1960s, it felt like we were living in a bit of a rock & roll desert. Not much escaped from the Lone Star reserve to the national stage.

As the 1980s began, your new album, The Evil One, came out on San Francisco’s 415 Records, produced by former Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and you seemed to spend a lot of time in the Bay Area. When I’d visit Austin from my new home in Los Angeles, sometimes you would be full of verve and sometimes not. Speedy Sparks’ Dynamic Records put out a blistering single that featured “Starry Eyes” again, and there were some live shows where the fire reignited--and then some where it didn’t. Other odd singles and the New Rose Records release, Click Your Fingers Applauding The Play, would appear and then disappear. Austin had a definite slowdown during that time; there were abandoned building cranes everywhere reminding all that the construction binge was stalling, and the city wasn’t “The Live Music Capital” it would someday become. Social services began to pull back, and the streets started to fill with refugees from the state hospitals around town, and, while I had moved to Los Angeles in 1980, during my many trips home, it distinctly felt like something was missing in Austin. Then, in 1988, I heard that you were in a federal mental institution in Springfield, Missouri after a rather confounding misunderstanding with the U.S. Postal Service. You had collected your neighbor’s mail at the government-funded apartment building in Del Valle just outside Austin and then taped it to your inside walls. Someone told me you enjoyed getting mail, and this was one of your ways to do it. Clearly, something had gone awry, and you needed help. People continued asking about you and kept listening to your music, but, Roky, you were MIA. This was not good.

Your longtime Austin friend, Tary Owens, and I were talking about your present state at the very first SXSW conference in 1987, and Tary brought up the idea of trying to raise funds to help you get good legal representation. The idea of a tribute album came up, and I immediately thought it was the best possible idea to assist you. I could hear it in my head. So many amazing artists had become fans of your music over the past 20 years, and surely enough would record one of your songs for a fundraising release. I was working at Warner Bros. Records then, and one of the label’s subsidiaries, Sire Records, luckily was run by the one-time head of your former label, 415 Records. I knew Howie Klein was a permanent fan, and it only took me asking once for him to sign on all the way to fund the tribute album for Sire. It felt like, once again, your magic had rubbed off on us and opened a door with a single knock, which is completely unusual for the record business. Often, begging and pleading for funding can take months and just as often go unheard. But immediately, we got the greenlight from Howie and his boss, Seymour Stein, and what would become the Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye tribute album in 1990 was born.

There was a cavalcade of artists who wanted to record one of your songs. It wasn’t hard to figure out why: all the years of writing let you explore the most personal details of love--both for another person as well as for the universe. At the same time, the openness of your life left you vulnerable to whatever the world wanted to send your way. From “You’re Gonna Miss Me” to “I Walked with a Zombie” is a long road, but you always made it seem so obvious. Not many other artists ever had the ability to anchor a song with the chorus: “I’ve been working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog,” but for you, Roky, that fell right in with so many of your other post-Elevators’ originals. When Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye was released in October 1990, the world was ready for you again. And, fortunately, you were ready to step back up to the microphone, too.

The 1990s were a steady comeback that began after you were released from the Springfield mental institution. Your family stood by your side while other rock & rollers stepped up and helped you make new recordings. There were definitely landmines along the way, but there was no question that you had the desire to continue your creative run. I remember coming to visit you in Del Valle in the mid-90s when you were recording with the Butthole Surfers’ King Coffey. The day I came to visit, we first had to go the Post Office building near you to pick up several large duffel bags of mail. You had figured out a way to get things sent directly to you, and when we walked into the lobby, all the clerks behind the counter smiled and said hello. For a moment, I thought they were going to give you a standing ovation. And even if you kept several radios and televisions in your home playing different channels at the same time at high volume, when you said it was to “keep out the voices,” it didn’t seem that strange a remedy. You had figured out a way to live and were set on getting there.

As the years continued, you became a part of Austin life, playing shows, signing autographs, and even getting an Amy’s Ice Cream flavor named after you: Roky Road. The city’s music scene was exploding, becoming the most vital part of Austin’s persona around the world. Still, for many, it was Roky Erickson who defined the innermost soul of Austin. People wanted to look out for you, Roky, and become personally close to the soulful vibrations you had birthed there in the 1960s. It didn’t matter that your records didn’t sell in vast quantities once they were released worldwide; what mattered was that you mattered. You may have been the most eccentric rock & roller in history, but for those who really listened to your songs, you were also the best. There was no one like you. In fact, there was no one even close.

In 1995, when the All That May Do My Rhyme album was released, it became official: Roky Erickson was back. King Coffey had made sure the production values lived up to your needs, and it felt like the music made the kind of impact you’d been hinting at for years. The national press paid attention to the songs as well as the legend, and it was a joyous time in Rokyville for all of us who’d been living several decades for just this day. And while you still struggled with the mental challenges you endured, it also seemed realistic that your music mattered as much as that legend. When you received new therapies that brought life more into the present, the upcoming new century of the 2000s held out its hand.

In 2010, twenty years after the release of Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye, so much had happened for you, Roky. You had established a whole new career with world tours, major album releases, and a place of dignity and honor in Austin, the city that once locked you in a jail cell and sent you to a hospital for the criminally insane. You had worked hard and made a new life for yourself. To me, it felt like a new world had discovered you, and maybe it was the right time to explain to all these new fans and followers what you had accomplished. I started thinking about a new tribute album, full of artists who were of a new era from those who’d participated on the first one in 1990. I looked around and realized I was still a little ahead of the curve. There wasn’t a record label that stepped up to be a partner, and one thing I have learned after 50 years in the music business is that no matter how righteous an idea might be, what’s absolutely necessary is a partner to share that vision, someone with the backup to make it a reality. It wasn’t the right time yet.

In 2019, when I heard you were playing The Chapel in San Francisco and performing the entire 13th Floor Elevators’ album Easter Everywhere, I knew in a heartbeat I needed to be there. It was going to be on April 20th--4/20--and there was no way not to go. That 1967 album remains my favorite single recording of all time, and never in a million years did I ever think I’d get to see you sing those ten songs again all in one place. I listen to Easter Everywhere a dozen times a year and always on its release date of October 25, and I still have my original vinyl copy I bought at the Record Shack in Houston, which was only about a mile from the International Artists office. It’s the first album pressing, the one with the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve. My paper sleeve is now almost yellow and crumbles a bit whenever I take it out of the jacket, but I have to: I still need to study the song lyrics and remember everything I’ve learned from them. So going to San Francisco and seeing you play Easter Everywhere was a given.

When I got there that night with my son Brogan, I soon met up with your son Jegar and had to smile at the cosmic connection of you and me being there with our sons. Life has a way of becoming circular with almost no effort. It’s like there is a plan to which we are not privy; that we really have no say in how it is started and then shaped, which is probably why it works out like it does. There is no chance of our toying with fate. And there we were, both in The Chapel’s dressing room before the show, talking about so many years of traveling on similar roads around Texas and California. We looked at one another while the other was talking like remembering the decades of experience behind us and maybe some still in front. We were seeing the contours of each other over what felt like a long pane of beautiful glass. When it was time for you to go onstage, we said goodbye, and you looked at my son and kindly said, “Nice to see you again.” Never mind that you’d never met, and in that instant, one of your most prescient song titles came rushing back to me: “I Have Always Been Here Before.” That was it exactly, Roky. Exactly. Of course we have always been here, now and before, and surely we will be here again.

When Brogan and I went downstairs to watch you sing “Slip Inside This House,” “I Had to Tell You,” “Slide Machine,” “(I’ve Got) Levitation,” “Postures” and even Stacy Sutherland’s sole vocal on the original album, “Nobody to Love,” I was given the entire weight of my life in a most goodly and profound way since I first heard the 13th Floor Elevators play these songs in 1967. It felt like freedom was being handed to me tied in beautiful colored bows, deserved only by the chance that I never quit believing in this music and faithfully lived with it right next to my heart for all these years. It was your gift to me and then mine to myself. In the visions I received that night, one was that you were ready to move on. I could see it in your form sitting on a stool onstage, sometimes straining to breathe between songs. I could literally feel your spirit starting to leave your body behind. But I wasn’t sad, for it is eventually each of our destinies to move on when it is our time. The 13th Floor Elevators taught me that when I was a young confused teenager in Houston, and the band gave me my very own North Star to show the way forward. It has been the gift of a lifetime.

A little over a month after that night at The Chapel, I found out that you were gone, Roky. I felt a strong wind blow through me right then as if you were passing in and out of my body, and I smiled because I knew it was you reminding me not to be sad. And to keep believing that eternity is just that: forever. Nothing ends unless we allow it to. And there is no need to do that, not with all I’ve learned from you and your enlightened musical travelers. The last song I heard the 13th Floor Elevators play live in 1968 was one you’d written alone all those years ago, and as I now smiled at the sky and thought of you that night way back when, the song played to me, except I heard it inside my heart instead of my head for the very first time. It only has one line, but like all truly great things, that is exactly enough: “May the circle remain unbroken.” Yes, Roky, yes.

By Bill Bentley