Trips of a genius: how Roky Erickson imitated LSD in music
In 1969, at the World’s Fair in San Antonio, Texas, Roky Erickson began speaking gibberish to a sea of confused faces. There’s no footage of the incident, nor any documented evidence other than the recollections of those in attendance, but it sparked a turning point in the singer’s reputation, with many suddenly increasingly wary of a genius mind turned troubled.
When looking at the life and career of Erickson, it’s difficult not to consider the longstanding belief that tragedy breeds great art. Many of our greatest thinkers, innovators, creatives, and artists all experienced their share of challenges, many of which became intrinsic to their expressionist appeal. With Erickson, however, this very line of thinking feels particularly archetypal, especially as someone whose art wasn’t so much influenced by his mental anguish as defined by it.
Erickson’s stint in Texas led him to become institutionalised for paranoid schizophrenia, before a mix-up with drugs placed him in psychiatric hospitals for the following years. The entire time, he wrote music. His darkness infiltrated his art like lifeblood, his experience with mental health the only thing he knew to be real and true, no matter how unreliable and alienated, much of which appeared as a swirling concoction of a distorted reality—the music likened to what most would regard as “psychedelic”.
This is exactly the grounds from which the 13th Floor Elevators emerged. Branded today as “acid rock”, they were perhaps one of the earliest pioneers of psychedelic music as a concept in itself, with a sound that sought to imitate the effects of psychedelic drugs. However, this wasn’t just something they sought to achieve on the surface level. Rather, they adopted the varying states of its usage and shaped song structures to replicate the effect, attempting to incite a distorted, hallucinatory state on music alone.
In practice, much of this relied on sound dynamics, with the band creating seemingly incompatible traits to create the space and time illusions, like music feeling like it’s adopting a certain pace, or perhaps seeming like it appears closer than it actually is. Acid permits a similar mental state, fraying the edges of time and the self in simultaneously real and artificial ways. Much of the definitions surrounding psychedelia now relate to intricacy and complex interplays with arrangements, but with the Elevators, it was about the legitimate practice of shifting and moulding reality.
Beyond the band, Erickson continued this in much of his solo material. Whether a result of his inception, mental mindset, or both, Erickson embodied psychedelia in varying ways, extending beyond the visceral feel of the arrangements and in themes and lyrics, too. ‘If You Have Ghosts’, for instance, is perhaps his most telling composition, despite its overlooked nature, spotlighting his schizophrenia in a starkly confrontational light with musings like, “If you have ghosts then you have everything” and “In the night I am real”.
This might have been a mere extension of Erickson’s word salad at the World’s Fair, his art defined by everything his mind troubled with and less a manifestation of the previously aforementioned acid trip inducements, but it also gave insight into the ways tragedy and challenge might not always be felt or seen by those in its grip, defined only by external forces whose only appropriate vernacular includes words like “outsider”.
Acid might have infiltrated the corners of their initial appeal, but Erickson’s journey became about something far deeper than that—a rapture of a fractured mind destined for genius, despite the tragedy that made all of it entirely possible. Perhaps it wasn’t something anyone could define, more a figment of an existence beyond comprehension. As producer Bill Bentley once said, “Roky was from another world.”
