Everyone has one. A live band that tore open the sky for them the first time, and delivered the kind of musical gift which can never be replaced. It usually happens in your teenage years, between childhood and adulthood, when everything in the world is up for grabs and so much of life seems uncertain. Music then is like a flashlight. It throws a beam on the darkness, and helps find the road forward. Not everyone hears it, but for those who see music as a saving grace the sound is there. Most of the friends you make then feel the same way, and barring death or deception they’ll remain your friends forever. It’s like you’ve found the same secret code for living, and it pulses inside the songs you hear and the musicians you see. Once those bonds are made between young people, nothing is strong enough to tear them apart. Decades may go by, but the feelings remain the same. It’s a club with no written rules, but rather ones that are transferred in silence through the years. Joy is the password, and freedom is the pursuit.
Walking into La Maison at the edge of downtown Houston in early 1966 felt like entering an induction to another world. The first images from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury were being seen in national magazines, and our young and repressed Texas lives were ready for a musical spaceship to land and take us to another place. The 13th Floor Elevators’ music felt like that spaceship. Their first single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” was a mind-bending scream for freedom, roaring through a few minutes of unhinged beauty driven by singer Roxy Erickson’s yearning words of desire and fueled by Tommy Hall’s totally mesmerizing electric jug. Nothing had ever sounded like them, before or since. That night in ’66 was like boarding a bus to join a cult. Once the Elevators came onstage and Erickson stomped his foot down to kick off the night, a bolt of lightning had been shot straight into our souls. There was no way this was just a rock & roll band. Rather, it looked and sounded like the five musicians were missionaries sent to Houston to enlist the audience in a pursuit of a different way of being. Drummer John Ike Walton was tall even sitting down, smashing his silver sparkle Rogers drum kit like a four-limbed octopus from the deep with impossibly long limbs, tattooing notes on a ride cymbal as big as a small car. Bennie Thurman stood still pounding his white Fender electric bass, until voices from beyond captured his mind and Thurman started yelping out wolf howls to punctuate the choruses. The man was possessed by all that is great and good about rock & roll, and clearly had no control over what he did. Stacy Sutherland, nicknamed “The Dark Angel” because, well, he emanated that aura, was lost in the chords and solos he caressed from his black Gibson 335 guitar. He seemed to be on another planet, communicating through telepathic sounds with the rest of the band. Erickson, slashing at his fire engine-red Gibson sang like he was trying to get outside his body. Only 18 years old, he exuded the essence of a young guru. The enigmatic Hall, wearing a dark Navy P-coat and blowing into a large kerosene jug with a microphone held at the opening near the top, was directing the music of the spheres the band was offering. He had merged with a private cosmos to shape a universe of his own making, and through the next three years would do everything he could to make that universe become real for the band’s followers. It took only one song that night 53 years ago to realize the mothership had landed, and this would be our journey to an exciting place of heavenly peace and inner harmony. As outlandish as this might sound now, it is exactly how I felt then, just 15-years-old. Now at 68, time has only deepened these beliefs grooved so deep on my spirit. I cannot imagine life without them. Through all these years with enough twists and turns to strangle a pretzel, the truest constant is what I learned listening to and seeing the little Texas band that could. For them, there were no impossibilities. That was the real lesson of the ’60s: everything was reachable with enough belief and spirit. The word “no” was being extinguished, while “yes” became a religion.
The 13th Floor Elevators came together at the very end of 1965. Austin wasn’t ready for them, but neither was anywhere else. University of Texas student Tommy Hall had been experimenting with hallucinogens in Austin beginning in ’63, and wanted to share his findings with others. Elaborate hypotheses appeared before him with messages from a hidden place locked deep inside. He flashed immediately that the highest form of communication among young people was being done by rock & roll. Whether it was The Beatles or Bob Dylan, they were creating the philosophical tenets for a new generation. After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, politicians had become meaningless. But with so much of the youth generation left stranded by Kennedy’s death, there was a tremendous need for a more potent language to offer what they were thinking and hoping. And almost at the same time, rock & roll was injected with an immediately overwhelming power through Dylan and The Beatles. It filled the air with the irresistible allure of change, one that centered on life opening up instead of shutting down. Hall recognized this, and determined that if he could find a rock band to spread into the world the lyrics he was writing to songs like “Rollercoaster,” “Reverberation” and “Fire Engine,” he could contribute to moving modern thought forward. A high concept, no doubt, but from peyote and LSD sessions the young man who was born and raised in Memphis conceived of a better morning. It was coming, and Hall wanted to be part of that future. Moving to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where he was studying philosophy and psychology, Hall now just had to find the rock & roll band to deliver his message. What he soon discovered was that he was going to have to assemble one himself.
Roky Erickson, still in high school, in 1964 was singing in an Austin band called The Spades. He was enthralled by the vocals of Little Richard, Buddy Holly and James Brown in his early teens, and saw a place for himself in rock & roll. Erickson soon began writing songs, and two of the first, “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “We Sell Soul” were recorded by The Spades for Zero Records and actually achieved some local airplay. When Tommy Hall saw Erickson onstage, he knew instantly that the person to help him make a stand had been sent to him. Once the two came together, they found a central Texas band dubbed the Lingsmen, and all five quickly formed the 13th Floor Elevators. Different reasons have been recalled where the aggregation’s name came from, whether it was because many buildings didn’t have a thirteenth floor and the Elevators wanted to take their listeners to somewhere they hadn’t been, or that the letter “M,” short for marijuana, was the thirteen letter of the alphabet. Either way, the realm of the human mind and spirit was the group’s target, and an immediate excitement was born as they explored ways to expand consciousness and try to influence how humans could evolve at a faster rate. With two guitars, bass, drums and jug, the 13th Floor Elevators quickly became an agent of change for those seeking a map to higher forms. It was an out-there concept, to be sure, but that’s how the culture progresses. Tommy Hall’s vision was being echoed in other outfits as well, whether it was the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane Buffalo Springfield or Love. These bands weren’t just playing songs; they were painting pictures with music. The ’60s were beginning to hit overdrive and there was no going back. Unfortunately for the Elevators, Texas authorities saw them as a personal attack on the lives of young people and began a concerted effort to destroy the quintet. It was an all-out war for the bodies and souls of Texas teenagers. Law enforcement then had no limits to what they could do to win that battle, and the Elevators each had a large target painted on their backs. Luckily, before the group was ripped apart they made their way to San Francisco and the burgeoning counterculture springing to life there.
The 13th Floor Elevators’ debut in San Francisco was in late August 1966 at the Fillmore Auditorium, where Grace Slick’s Great Society was opening for them. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” had received sporadic airplay up and down the Pacific coast, so the Texas band seemed to have a local hit single, enough to get them club bookings and an appearance on American Bandstand. For most, the Elevators sounded like an eccentric rock band. But for the impossibly-fast multiplying Bay Area population of those expanding their minds, they were sharing subliminal messages encouraging them to go further. And the Elevators dove deep into the psychedelic lifestyle swirling around them in San Francisco. Heady stuff for Austin musicians who had never left Texas before. The Elevators stayed there through the Fall, playing several times at the Avalon Ballroom and other places around the peninsula. They tasted a freedom they’d never found at home, and part of them knew they should stay. A whole gaggle of other Texans had made the move west and were flourishing, just like the Elevators, including Chet Helms, Janis Joplin, Travis Rivers and Gilbert Shelton.
It was also then that English band manager Michael Jeffery called the Elevators’ record label hoping to lure the band to join another of his clients, guitarist Jimmy James who had made the move to London to gain attention there. Tommy Hall wasn’t interested, and sent a message back to Jeffery that “we manage ourselves.” Of course, Jimmy James quickly changed his name to Jimi Hendrix in England and began his drive to world domination. The Elevators debut album has just been released in October 1966 on Houston’s small International Artists label. Fresh from Haight-Ashbury hallucinations during four months in San Francisco, the 13th Floor Elevators, and especially Tommy Hall, saw the future roll out before him in technicolor euphoria. This can happen, he thought. The time is now. Evolutions were occurring everywhere, and the Elevators could help them continue to grow.
The Texas Rangers didn’t agree, and when the Elevators returned home they started arresting band members whenever they could. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, it didn’t matter. Wherever the 13th Floor Elevators performed there would be police there to search them and make life difficult. The busts came and went, and the legal battles were on. Still, through strength of character and dedication to their goal the band persevered. They also began work on their grand opus, the album that would raise awareness to a new level, and provide clues to an understanding of the possibilities of expanded consciousness. Titled EASTER EVERYWHERE, it brought all the various beliefs and philosophies of the band together in such a grand manner, early listeners were thrilled for the future. This was a huge leap forward. After The Beatles released SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND in the summer of 1967, along with a long list of other influential rock albums, Tommy Hall felt like the coming Elevators’ album that Fall would answer all the questions he’d been grappling with for years about how humans could find higher ground through intellectual study and the use of psychedelics. Their defining song opened the album: “Slip Inside This House” would finally show rock audiences where the key was hidden that could open all the doors of perception. The first verse sounded the call: “Bedouin in tribes ascending from the egg into the flower / alpha information sending states within the heaven shower / from disciples the unending subtleties of river power / they slip inside this house as they pass by…” The code had been cracked open, and for seven minutes the 13th Floor Elevators unfurled their message of the future. It was a breathtaking examination of several strains of philosophy, guided by a Christ consciousness that the human form can be reborn over and over as it develops into higher levels, arriving in the end, as the Elevators sang on the album’s last song, “Postures,” with an answer to eternity. Of course, it was a minuscule number of listeners who grasped the enormity of what the 13th Floor Elevators were offering. By that time several members were being jailed, and singer Roky Erickson would eventually plead insanity to a marijuana possession charge and entered Texas’ Rusk Hospital for the Criminally Insane, languishing there for several years as the band faded into sad obscurity. In 1969 the 13th Floor Elevators had played their last shows, many without Erickson, and true psychedelic music had danced its last dance. At least for the time being.
When Woodstock occurred in August 1969, the 13th Floor Elevators were all but over. For the large majority of music fans, it was like they’d never even existed. The lesson learned, all these years later, is that it was okay. Many important originators start small and end small. It’s in the reverberations that their impact is eventually felt. Success, in rock & roll or anything else, is not measured in dollars made or albums sold. Rather importance can be better gauged in impact. This tiny but mighty Texas band continues to make waves through true believers who felt the urgency of their calling then. A light still shines from the waves of wisdom and beauty that always rolled off the bandstand whenever they performed. Younger bands continually take the power of the 13th Floor Elevators and use it for their own fuel to fire the imagination and funnel the music of the spheres back into our world. For that, there is no beginning and no end. The 13th Floor Elevators will always have the last word: “All your lightening waits inside you travel it along your spine / seven stars receive your visit seven seals remain divine / seven churches filled with spirit treasures from the angels’ mine / so slip inside this house as you pass by.” Don’t pass it by.
Bill Bentley