Born out of a union of club bands on the burgeoning Austin bohemian
scene and a pronounced taste for hallucinogens, the 13th Floor Elevators
were formed in late 1965 when lyricist Tommy Hall asked a local singer
named Roky Erickson to join up with his new rock outfit. Four years,
three official albums, and countless acid trips later, it was over: the
Elevators' pioneering first run ended in a dizzying jumble of
professional mismanagement, internal arguments, drug busts, and forced
psychiatric imprisonments. In their short existence, however, the group
succeeded in blowing the lid off the budding musical underground,
logging early salvos in the countercultural struggle against state
authorities, and turning their deeply hallucinatory take on jug-band
garage rock into a new American institution called psychedelic music.
Writer Paul Drummond has gathered an unprecedented catalog of primary
materials--including scores of previously-unseen band photographs, rare
and iconic artwork of the era, items from family scrapbooks and personal
diaries, new and archival interviews, dozens of contemporaneous press
accounts, and no shortage of Austin Police Department records--to tell
the complete and unvarnished story of a band which, until now, has been
tragically underdocumented. Before the hippies, before the punks, there
were the 13th Floor Elevators: an unlikely crew of outcast weirdo
geniuses who changed culture.
