“It was so funny”: how Roky Erickson lived out the plot of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
Amid the heady counterculture of 1966’s West Coast psychedelic scene, Texan garage rockers The 13th Floor Elevators stood as its leading innovators. Co-founded in Dallas by Roky Erickson, his reverb-drenched guitar barrage spinning with Tommy Hall’s flickering electric jug scored an unforgettable blast of proto-punk that was both raw and rootsy yet bubbled with palpably lysergic energy.
Their far-out acid rock was directly informed by their keen consumption of LSD, explicitly endorsed on the sleevenotes of their debut LP, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. Not endearing himself to the authorities, a single marijuana joint resulted in Erickson’s arrest atop Austin’s Mount Bonnell and a potential ten-year prison sentence.
As if lifted straight from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Erickson later confessed to feigning insanity to avoid the draconian incarceration route and instead spent three years at Cherokee County’s Rusk State Hospital.
“For three years…I was such a good actor. When you put your mind to it. You can really convince people, so you gotta be careful,” Erickson confessed to Not Fade Away zine in 1975. “‘Cause at the end of three years, I’m sitting there, and they said, ‘So you‘re still hearing voices?’ And I said, ‘No, man, I’m not hearing voices. I lied.’ And they said. ‘Yeah, sure you lied.'”
To what degree Erickson was playing a mad ruse is up for debate. While playing San Antonio’s 1968 HemisFair, Erickson began speaking gibberish on stage and was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and interned at Houston’s psychiatric hospital, which would see the beginning of his many bouts of electroconvulsive therapy.
Whatever the true state of his sanity, Rusk revealed itself to be an often oppressive institute. Cutting his long hair off and imposing the inmates’ drab khaki hospital wear, Erickson reported waking up every day at 6am to clean the facility. Battling the lethargic side effects of his antipsychotic Thorazine medication, he still managed to wield intense creative bursts, writing many of the horror-themed acid sci-fi which would feature on 1981’s The Evil One and numerous demos eventually collated on 1999’s Never Say Goodbye compilation. Resident psychologist Bob Priest would later recall Erickson furiously scribbling lyrical sketches on a yellow legal notepad supplied to him.
Erickson also managed to form a band with some of his fellow Rusk inmates, including two murderers and a rapist: “A couple of groovy guys managed to get me out to be in a rock and roll band with some of the patients, and we called it the Missing Links. We performed, you know, but I couldn’t perform,” he said. “I tried. It was so funny. I’d try to scream there, and I’d be under so much tension that I couldn’t scream while I was there. But I try to scream now, and I’ll be able to scream now as good as ever when I get on stage again.”
Unlike rock’s other casualties like Syd Barrett, Erickson never stayed ‘lost’, returning to music after his dismissal from Rusk and, albeit with intermittent care and oversight from his doting mother Evelyn, released several solo records and was lauded as an acid rock legend by artists from Primal Scream, Butthole Surfers, and Thurston Moore.
Sadly dying in 2019, Erickson and his 13th Floor Elevators left an indelible mark on 1960s lore and way beyond.
