LimeWire Music Blog

For anyone in a particularly psychedelic if problematic mood this Friday, the Houston Press is there to assist you with a terrific feature about the 13th Floor Elevators and their other mystic-turned-casualty. One of the visionaries behind Texas’ proto-psyche band (who famously when asked about the head of the band replied, “We’re all heads…”), Tommy Hall leant the group their trademark background noise with his electric jug playing and determination to force bandmates into psychedelic experiences. When the police busted singer Roky Erickson, directly contributing to his subsequent mental breakdown and well documented struggle with mental illness, did they know they were hasseling the more benign of the group’s drug devotees? Erickson’s difficulties lead to fantastic and even superior catalog of solo work and an eventual partial recovery (see You’re Gonna Miss Me, one of the best rock docs of all time), but Hall never went to the big house, put out another record, nor gave up his much loved acid. Jennifer Maerz’s portrait of a present day Hall is a haunting reflection of a difficult personality who never gave up the ghost. The would-be acid guru comes off as a last bastion of Wild West psyche, complete with fragmented, half-baked theories about the universe, racist rants, and a Republican agenda. It’s a clear vision of a man as contradictory as his environement, Texas in the ’60s, which the article refers to as the ground zero of the psychedelic movement.