Bloody Hammer

A Visit With the 13th Floor Elevators' Roky Erickson

Roky's stare was unnerving, absurdly direct, as though he were trying to read small print off the backs of your eyeballs.  But it took him only a moment to recognize what we were.

"Come on in," he said.  "We haven't seen fans in a long time." 

He motioned us into the living room of his San Francisco apartment.  "Did you feel the quake tonight?" he asked as we settled on sofa and chairs.  No one had.  "I think it was the Machiners."

"Who are the Machiners?" I asked.

Roky drew down on me with The Stare.  "The people you're going to hate when you find out about them." His broad Texas accent wasn't addressed to us again that evening.  We chatted with his girl friend, Holly, also known as Polly, and sat around.  Roky Erickson, former singer/songwriter of the 13th Floor Elevators, object of our cross-country quest, was crouched in the corner talking to a spider.

The Elevators were the first band to bill themselves as psychedelic, leaders of an Austin scene boosters claim started the '60s counterculture when it was imported to San Francisco.  The band featured Roky's screamy urgent vocals over a garage rock sound augmented with electric jug, an unsettling lead/base instrument that sounds like an amphetamine addict fast-talking nonsense syllables.

Their legend includes Getting Busted--they kept their pot in the jug.  Roky pleaded "not guilty by reason of insanity."  Instead of prison, he did time in a maximum-security unit for the criminally insane at Rusk State Hospital in Rusk, Texas.  At the trial, doctors testified that he was "floridly psychotic," a condition that probably had something to do with the band's monumental intake of LSD.  He was given shock therapy while at Rusk, as well as Thorazine.  He was beaten by guards for minor infractions and forced to do hard labor on the prison farm.

The Elevators broke up after releasing their second album, "Easter Everywhere," on International Artists in 1967.  Their first album, "Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators," sold well for an independent release, but never made the top 150. Both are expensive collectors items today.

I met Roky on Easter Sunday, 1980.  At the time he was poised on the brink of a modest comeback, getting ready to release his first "Horror Rock" album, a hitherto tiny genre he was about to explode.  The songs have titles like "I Walked With a Zombie"—probably a reference to both the vintage movie as well as to himself and fellow Rusk patients medicated with Thorazine--and "Creature With the Atom Brain."

His output since has been voluminous and erratic.  "I'm expecting them to release Roky's laundry list soon," sighed a local record/CD store owner in the late '80s.  The music, while uneven, is occasionally stunning, at its best a mature version of the raw power Roky projected in the 1960s.  It is astonishing that anyone in such a tangled mental state can produce tight, punchy and coherent rock'n'roll.

The press looks in from time to time.  A June 23, 1991 Washington Post story opens by calling Roky "a rock'n'roll genius, a musician whose talents are ranked with legends such a Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin."

Cult status never translated into income.  The Post found Roky living on "a $200 monthly social security check and the kindness of friends."  Things got better in later years as friends and family stepped in and helped out.

I was in the briar patch personally and professionally in the spring of 1980.  I was bitter about graduate school, I had just broken up with my long-term, live-in girlfriend, and my grandfather had suffered a stroke from which he never would recover.  It was devastating to see him in a wheelchair, mind gone, his rich store of country metaphor reduced to a single word: "No!"

Graduate English at the University of Virginia was a joyless, cut throat affair, which is odd when you consider what we were competing for.  There were a few jobs around when I entered in the late '70s.  By the time I earned my Masters they had all disappeared.  I had spent two years in intellectual boot camp for nothing.

And the woman I broke up with had a child from a previous marriage to whom I was also deeply attached.

 My friend Brent and I played in the same bands and worked together at a car wash and other odd jobs until I went off to grad school.  Charlie, another musician from Richmond, Virginia, was establishing himself in Sacramento.  When he joined a band he needed his van and equipment.  Brent said he would bring it out if he could go through Texas to search for traces of the Elevators.  Charlie agreed.  I didn't hesitate when Brent asked me to share the driving.  I needed to get out of town.

We left Charlottesville at sunset and drove all night.  Birmingham smokestacks flamed like candles in the dawn.  Pit stop.  Tank full, headed toward the bathroom, we were brought up short by an angry German Shepherd straining his chain in our direction.

"How can we go to the bathroom if you've got that dog tied up in front of it?"

The fat attendant just stared.  We walked around to the other side of an alley wall.  Peaceful tableau of fraternal relief shattered when a furious jaw-snapping canine head burst through the hole left by a missing cinder block.  Damp hieroglyphics.  Retreat.

The incident was the perfect metaphor for my mental state--grief and anger transmogrified into a pervasive sense that evil was always lurking, ready to pop up like Nessie whenever the surface of my mind got calm.  It was augmented that day by sleeplessness--we had decided to drive straight through to Texas--and traveler's paranoia.  I had an Easy Rider view of the Deep South and kept remembering a story told by a professor who had gone to seek his fortune in the Texas oilfields during the Depression.  He got off the bus in Houston and went into a bar.  A man came in, sat down beside him, and said, "I'm going to shoot the next son-of-a-bitch that walks through that door."

Somebody walked in.  The man shot him.  The professor got back on the bus and came home to Virginia.

Off the beaten track in Houston looking for a cheap place to stay.  Guys hanging out on the corners drinking from bottles in paper bags, children riding tricycles even though it was after 1 a.m.  We passed a dozen No Vacancy motels, then went back to the main drag and a Day's Inn.  Slicked back dudes in the parking lot unnerving but the urge for sleep won out and we checked in.

The room seemed innocent enough with its cellophane wrapped plastic glasses and Gideon Bible.  Then Brent banged his dopp kit down on the sink counter and a syringe fell from behind the light.

I was carrying my suitcase from the van to our room when a man lurched out of the night.  Shirtless, paunched, long dirty hair:  "You got any spare change?"

I automatically dug in my pockets.  The man stumbled over to a parked car and used it to support himself while he vomited.  When he came back I handed him the money.  He swayed, staring down at the coins in his hand.  They evidently weren't enough because he threw them on the ground, cursing.

Suddenly ready for combat, I yelled curses back but he reeled off oblivious.

I saw another syringe on the ground on my way back to the room.  We slept uneasily that night in spite of the dresser in front of the door.

The morning was different.  We were rested and safe.  Miracle of miracles, the van was still intact with all the equipment inside.  Best of all was the prospect of hands-on detective work.  We hit the record stores right after breakfast.

"Roky's back in Rusk," said a potential informant.

"Roky's in England," said another.

"Austin."

"Try the Anderson Fair.  Somebody over there's bound to know."

Undiscouraged by our contradictory answers, we spent the day record hunting.  Record store clerks are notorious music snobs and I took a secret satisfaction from Brent's obviously superior knowledge.  He's memorized matrix numbers--until he pointed them out, I had never noticed the tiny letters and numerals between the label and the groove--and can tell from the weight of the vinyl whether a rare disc is authentic, a reissue, or a bootleg.  It's like going antiquing with someone from Sotheby's.

We located the Anderson Fair around sunset.  When we walked in, a blond woman wearing jeans and a leopard-skin leotard roller skated up to us and said, "Hi!  Where you boys from?" as though we were all characters in an old B-movie western.  I couldn't answer because I was mesmerized by the gold Texas star inlaid in her front tooth.

She laughed at me being tongue-tied and clapped me on the back:  "Well, have a good time!"

Brent worked the bar:  "Have you ever heard of Roky Erickson?  International Artists?  Frank Davis?"

"Frank Davis?"  Somebody finally connected with the name of the Elevator's engineer.  "She knows Frank Davis."

Sharon was sitting by herself drinking a glass of white wine.  She was suspicious, I think, until she realized Brent knew as much about Houston music as she did—and she had lived there all her life.  She took us to see Frank Davis, who was constructing a dirigible.  His house was full of occult books, odd musical instruments he had designed and built, and strange machines that did nothing.  Richard Mock, "the official artist of the winter Olympics," was visiting.  He gave me a button showing a huge cloven Devil hoof standing amid snowy peaks, a talisman of the evil presence I suddenly realized I had transcended. 

The final bursting of the Beelzebubble came when I walked out on the porch to be symbolically butted by Frank Davis' pet goat.  I took him firmly by the horns and delivered a stern lecture: "Don't ever butt me again, understand?  Especially not at night when I just came out to look at the stars."

Then back to the Anderson Fair, beer and record talk until midnight, when a man dressed as Darth Vader roller skated in.  Tiny red and green lights blinked inside his helmet.  He wore a cape and had a real flame pistol that worked almost all the time and only occasionally needed help from somebody's Bic.  He kept falling down.  I thought he couldn't skate until someone confided that there was a tube leading from his helmet down to a bottle concealed in his suit.

A video camera materialized and Darth and the star-tooth girl started a weird pas de deux: she writhing sybaritic on the floor while he thrust down at her with his flame gun/phallus.  Then the flame was on, raking her inner thighs.  Why wasn't she burned?  Then her leotard down, the flame licking her breasts, still unhurt.

Darth fell down for the last time.  They helped him off with his helmet, propped him in a chair like a wounded knight, then showed the video, which took hours and I was bored to Darth and fell asleep on a table.

When I woke up Brent was still talking music.  We went to Frank Davis' house, slept the morning, then got on the road with Sharon who had decided to go with us.  A friend of her's had given us Roky's address in San Francisco.

Texas went on forever.  In a motel room in Balmorhea, Brent and I gallantly volunteered to sleep on the floor and couch respectively, but Sharon said she'd take the box springs and give us the mattress.  When we pulled the mattress off we found a cache of spanking magazines and vibrators.

Next day in the desert, Sharon and I sang folk songs.  She knew Alan Lomax, the great folk song collector.  The desert was filled with small purple flowers.  The wind blew south through the van's open windows.  California came too soon.

Journal excerpts:

First morning in San Francisco--Writing lying on the floor of Roky Erickson's living room.  Got in last night.  Spider in Sharon's hair.  Roky said, "Don't kill it.  That's one of my little pet spiders."  He took it over to a corner:  "Come to Uncle Roky."

There had been an earth tremor we hadn't felt because we were driving.  "I'll tell you what the Martians say about it." Roky searched out a book:  "Atomic experiments upset the balance of nature and will not be tolerated."

Later--Roky's been pacing ever since he got up.  He walks gingerly, feet first, then toes.  Long toenails and fingernails.  Touches thumbs to fingers while he walks, as though counting.  Brent tries to joke with him.  Roky doesn't get it:  "I'm sorry?"

Insane cackle five minutes later.  Brent thinks his joke hit home, but Roky's laughing at something on his tape recorder.  We're listening to the soundtrack of the "Amityville Horror" recorded from the television.  It's our second soundtrack this morning.  Earlier we heard "Apocalypse Now." 

Roky stopped the tape in the middle of his third soundtrack, "The Creature with the Atom Brain."  Suddenly he was actually talking to us.  "You should have seen him.  He had stitches from here to here."  He drew his hand across his forehead where the Creature's had been opened.  "He would have scared you to death."

He started the tape again.  Sounds of breaking and entering.  Automaton voice of the Creature:  "I told you I'd come back.  Remember Buchannan?"

Terrified scientist:  "But you're not Buchannan!"

Creature:  "I don't look like him, but I am him.  Don't you recognize the voice, Jim?  I promised to see you die and I will!"

F/x of struggle.  Frantic helpers beat on the door.

Later that day we heard a live tape from a concert in Austin.  Roky had written a song called "Creature with the Atom Brain."

"I told you I'd come back!" says the Texas voice from beyond the grave.

He does both sides of the dialogue, which is, for some reason, really wonderful, and later in the song, a newscast:   "Today's big story centers around the murder of District Attorney McGraw whose body was found in his garage murdered.  Dr. Striker is under the impression that these murders are being perpetuated by dead men charged with atom rays which give them super human strength and make them impervious to bullets.  Well, if you want to believe that story, you can."

"That's really great!"  I told him.  "How did you get the idea to put that stuff in a song?  I've never heard anything like that in a song before."

"Beg pardon?"

"Why did you put that dialogue in the song?  Where did you get the idea?"

"I'm sorry?"

Suddenly everyone was shouting:  me repeating myself at top volume because maybe Roky's gone a little rock'n'roll deaf; and Sharon and Brent to keep me from disturbing the sanctity of Genius.

Roky spoke in the quiet after the storm:  "Horror movies are my religion, man."

"I was asking him all these music questions," said Brent.  It was later and we were by ourselves.  "It seemed we weren't quite...connecting.  So I decided to ask him something off the wall just to see what he'd do.  I said, `What do you think about Texas, Roky?' 

"All of a sudden he sat up straight like somebody had shocked him."  Brent did a wide-eyed imitation.  "Then he tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling."  Long pause.  "Then he looks over at me and says, `Well--I liked it some.'"

Overheard: Sharon:  It's so strange to be a visitor somewhere.

Roky:    Yes, it is.

Roky's music is filled with the revenge of the alien.  Creatures from the mind's deep trench stalk the countryside in search of their persecutors.  It's all healthy defiance:

"Don't shake me Lucifer, no suicide plot will work."

Sometimes there's no subtlety at all to the symbolism as the songs go directly back to Rusk.  The Creature with the Atom Brain had his head opened.  "I am the Doctor," sings Roky in "Bloody Hammer."  "I am the Psychiatrist, who makes sure they don't think when they hammer their minds out, I bet they have a bloody, I bet they have a bloody hammer."

"What was he like before he went inside?"  I asked Sharon.

"He was so nice," she smiled.  "He was like the original flower child."

"Children nailed to the cross," he sings in Two Headed Dog.

And he's still so nice.  And gentle.  I only wish he hadn't been driven so deep  within the borders of his internal Transylvania. 

That afternoon Sharon decided on a pilgrimage to Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito.  She knew the president, Chris Strachwitz.  We stopped halfway so she could phone up and tell them we were coming.

The call dragged on.  Roky got out to look for bugs in the parking lot:  "I get so bored just standing around."

"Look at that tree," said Holly.  They walked over and looked at the tree.  Then Roky went into a store, where Brent bought him a comic book.  Sharon came back with champagne--glasses and all.  Back on the road, Roky started reading: "But they were only pretending to be roaches.  When he stepped on them they would make little squishing noises with their mouths and run off laughing."

"That's a really fine story!"  Sharon interrupted at a stoplight.  The champagne was making her blur around the edges.  "You knew you would find something in there, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry?"

Arhoolie had every folk album imaginable, from the Georgia Sea Islanders to Robert Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders.  Sharon offered to buy Roky a tape.

"All right!"  Deafness gone, he sprang to the counter.  "Do you have any tapes of horror movies like `Creature from the Black Lagoon' or `The Hideous Sun Demon' or`The Day the World Ended'?"

The clerk, a bearded, graduate school type, looked deeply shocked.

"This is Roky Erickson," said Sharon by way of explanation.

"How do you do?"  Roky thought he was being introduced.  He extended his hand.

Filmmaker Les Blank had his studio on the upper floor of the warehouse, and was in residence the day we visited.  Sharon said he once made a film called "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe":  "It's about this director he knows eating his shoe."

"I'm sorry?"  Roky had me saying it.

"It was a desert boot."

"Oh."

We all got buttons advertising Blank's latest film, "Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers." He offered to screen his next-to-latest, "Always For Pleasure," a film about New Orleans.

We arranged ourselves on the stairs leading from the warehouse floor to the loft.  Blank started the projector.  The warehouse wall filled with shrimp boats.  Frankie Ford on the soundtrack:  "Won't you let me take you on a Sea Cruise?"

A cook dumped a big cardboard box of chili powder into a cauldron.  Roky started pacing.

People sewing costumes for Mardi Gras.  Roky found a side door and wandered off into the twilight zone of the warehouse.

Funeral parade.  Mourners dressed in black, slow stepping to the graveyard.  The camera zoomed in on the casket.  Right on cue, Roky emerged from a door beneath the film.  The funeral was projected on him as he resumed his pacing from the stairway to the wall.

The film segued to the Wild Tchoupitoulas: costumes that take all year to make, huge birds with pink and purple feathers, Indian Chiefs in red and orange, bounced and swirled across the screen.

Beneath the exploding Owsley of color Roky measured the bounds of his gray internal prison.  Back and forth.  All that beautiful folklife and he was so far away.

A few minutes later he walked over to Holly/Polly.  "Roky has to leave," she announced.  We hadn't been there an hour.

On the way back, we stopped for something to eat by the water.  Everyone piled out and wandered over to a fishing pier.  Roky and I were standing together when we heard a train.  We both ran toward it, excited like kids.  The boxcars rattled through:  Canadian Pacific, Ship It On the Frisco.  Roky with a flower Sharon had given him in a Dixie cup half full of water.  Then the caboose, red tail lights luminous in the sunset glow.

We watched it disappear.  Roky turned to me.  "It's gone man," he said.  "It'll never happen again."