RIP- Roky Erickson (1947-2019), A Guest Post By Bill Bentley

Mike Siegel, the progressive Democrat running for a congressional seat that spans Roky Erickson's old turf from Austin to Houston, is too young to have experienced the 13th Floor Elevators in person but when Roky passed away on Friday he told me that "Roky’s departure will be felt deeply here in Austin. My wife Hindatu, a veterinarian by trade, is in a local singing group [Panoramic Voices] that had the honor of performing with Roky just a couple months ago. He continued to share his vision and creativity with us until the end, and we are forever grateful." I hadn't spoken with an old friend, Bill Bentley, in quite some time but when I heard that Roky Erickson had died I thought that I should call Bill. He beat me to it and we spent a long time on the phone talking about a singer and songwriter we both admired. Bill had just spent some time with Roky the week before. He and I used to work together at Warner Bros and Bill had put together the incredible tribute to Roky Erickson that we released in 1990, Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye, 22 songs by artists whose music has been influenced by Erickson-- from ZZ Top, Doug Sahm and REM to Primal Scream, John Wesley Harding and the Jesus and Mary Chain. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill writes a book about Roky but he wrote this piece for DWT today. First... one of my own favorite songs from Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye:






May the Circle Remain Unbroken
-by Bill Bentley

Every 15-year-old needs a hero. It's a year when the world really stars turning at a faster rate: a lot of the old toys of childhood become meaningless and a new search for meaning begins in earnest. For me, that search led to a rock & roll club in Houston called La Maison, and a band called the 13th Floor Elevators. There was some kind of glow around the band's name, like it meant more than just a moniker. In 1966 Houston was about as uptight as a city could get, with police on the lookout for minorities and long-haired reprobates to harass as often as possible. Just going to La Maison could involved a law enforcement juggernaut, but it was worth. Once inside the club, waiting for the Elevators to start, an electrical force surged through the audience. You could almost see it. A counterculture was being born, and as powerful as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were then, it wasn't enough. In Texas, we needed our own musical gurus to follow. It wasn't good enough to always be looking to Great Britain for the next surge. It was time to born our own.




When the five Elevators took the stage that night in Houston, everything changed. Before there wasn't a light strong enough to pull the ravenous youth brigade together. Things were split up, with different factions pulling in different directions. With the oncoming wave of psychedelics, though, division wasn't an option. This mind expansion pursuit was serious business, and it would take devotion and leaders. Dr. Timothy Leary was too far away, plus he was from the East Coast. We didn't need anybody from that side of the country telling us how to become enlightened. Texans are a proud crowd, and we wanted our own shamans. Roky Erickson, Tommy Hall, Stacy Sutherland, John Ike Walton and Bennie Thurman were based in Austin, which was ideal to lead us into the new age. Austin had always been the most enlightened spot in the Lone Star state. It had the University of Texas, the hill country and an always inquisitive crowd seeking to push beyond conventional boundaries. Besides, the 13th Floor Elevators were openly promising a new way to perceive life, which is exactly what we were looking for. Their small record label, International Artists, was headquartered in Houston, created by rich oil men, a lawyer or two and a Svengali of a front man named Lelan Rogers, older brother of Kenny, who had been the bass player in the Bobby Doyle Trio but was not fronting a band called the First Edition. Lelan knew his way around the record business, and had picked the Elevators as his ticket to Valhalla. The band's first single, "You're Gonna Miss Me," was already roaring up the local radio charts, a little under three minutes of contained hysteria.




To say the audience that night at La Maison was ready was about as big an understatement as the state of Texas itself. So when Roky Erickson, all of 19 years old, walked onstage it seemed like he was floating. He had a cherubic countenance crossed with an other-worldly aura. Erickson's smile was almost as big as his face, and it looked like he knew he possessed a magic potion inside the band's music that was going to change everyone's lives forever in the matter of a few minutes. He plugged in his glowing red Gibson electric guitar, and looked around at his bandmates to see if they were ready to light the fuse. On the singer's left, Stacy Sutherland created a cocoon of darkness around him, like he held certain secrets within he wasn't quite ready to share. Drummer John Ike sat atop a mountain of drums and cymbals, tall and regal and ready to pound everything he got his hands on he could reach. Bassist Bennie Thurman was a flat-out pirate, wearing a big hoop earring on his left ear in a time when men simply did not wear earrings. He also had a somewhat crazed look of a man who had just been released from a cage of some kind. The last Elevator, on Erickson's far right, was the Lonesome End of the band. He stood solitary in his own world, holding a large clay jug that he would play with a microphone held near the opening at the top. Dressed in a pitch-black Navy P-coat and sporting the transcendent smile of an enlightened scientist, it was Hall who had first formed the 13th Floor Elevators. Convinced that through the use of psychedelic drugs mankind could find a way to evolve into higher beings, he decided a rock & roll band would be the perfect project to share his findings. So he formed the Elevators, wrote the lyrics to most of their songs and began the march to infamy and influence. The orders had been given, and the quintet began their mission.

Once the music started, it was Roky Erickson that split the atom and took the audience on a jet-propelled ride into the future with the Elevators providing the rocket-engine propulsion behind him. I've never seen anything like it, before or since. Songs would begin with a small sonic boom, and then gain in firepower exponentially with each verse. By the chorus, everyone in the audience was hanging on each syllable and chord, having entrusted their psyches to this brand new musical phenomenon called psychedelic rock. Outside the club was a booming city in the chaos of being on the edge of massive changes, but inside La Maison was the spiritual beginning of how music could build a world of its own, devoid of the eggshell existence of normal life. No other band had ever crossed that bridge, but tonight the Elevators were reaching out their hands through songs like "Reverberbation," "Fire Engine," "Rollercoaster" and "The Kingdom of Heaven (Is Within You)" and giving us all an invitation to go there with them. We would look at each other in the audience and seal the deal that this would be our lives, this would be the thing that let us live inside eternity and find salvation once and for all. Since its birth rock & roll had promised that it would save the day, and now--beyond Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, beyond them all--the prophets had arrived to deliver that momentous gift.

By the end of the evening in 1966 Roky Erickson was beatific. He stood onstage and didn't move. He just looked into the crowd with eyes that promised a new beginning. And that's the way he was for the next 53 years, until he passed away May 31, 2019. I would see him share his music hundreds of nights, sometimes in the roar and sometimes in the silence. In those years Erickson had lived a thousand lifetimes, often in the confusion of mental illness, and, blessedly, even in the euphoric nirvana of total bliss. I had loyally followed him all those years, no matter where the path took us, believing that in him I had found someone who would share with me an eternal light. And it was always there, even when very few could still see it. But I am a believer, and through him learned that the outside world should not lock us in. Rather, it's the inner world where time disappears and our spirit sets the clock. When I saw him performing all those 13th Floor Elevators songs in San Francisco a few weeks ago, his eyes still carried the magic, even if his body struggled being tied to this physical world. Now he has broken that earthly bond and moved into the cosmos his mind has lived in for so long. One day we will surely follow him there, hopefully to a place where we can share this life and all the others in store for us. And that circle will remain unbroken right past infinity.