Ivan Koop Kuper : Stacy and Bunni: A Montrose Love Story

Stacy Sutherland tombstone, Center Point, Texas. Image from Mindspring.com.
Stacy and Bunni:
A Montrose love story

If Stacy Sutherland of the 13th Floor Elevators were alive he'd be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

HOUSTON -- On the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in the east Montrose section of Houston is a vacant lot with an untended vegetable garden. The lot was the previous site of a Craftsman-era bungalow that was recently demolished due to neglect. In this house lived Stacy Sutherland, lead guitarist of Texas’ legendary psychedelic music pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators, and if Sutherland were alive, he would be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Known as the soft-spoken member of the band, when the introspective Sutherland did choose to express himself, he did so not only with his thick central Texas drawl, but also with his reverb-drenched leads that cut through the band’s wall of sound, and whose sustained notes seemed like they would never end.

His signature guitar style appeared on four 13th Floor Elevator albums and countless live performances from Austin to San Francisco. But Sutherland had another side of his personality he kept hidden deep inside and that was known only to those close to him.

Stacy Sutherland. Image from Emerald Wood Archives / Flickr.

Montrose is a neighborhood still in transition whose early 20th century architecture has all but vanished. Once considered a “hippie neighborhood,” by the late 1970s this inner city community was approaching the eve of gentrification, with each neglected bungalow soon to be torn down and replaced with several modern townhouses per city lot with no particular continuity regarding their style or design.

Long time Montrose resident and small business owner Robert Novotney recalls a Montrose in the 1970s when rents were “cheap” and a party atmosphere prevailed in the neighborhood seven days a week. He also recalls a “repressive” police force that was always on the lookout for “longhairs” to harass and search, as well as a neighborhood where home invasion by the criminal element was a common occurrence.

“I was broken into once and I had friends that were always getting broken into because they had these nice stereos that you could hear from the street because nobody had air-conditioning back then and they always kept their windows open and it invited burglaries,” Novotney said.


Stacy Sutherland’s all too short life journey can be traced back to his early days in central Texas, when he used to skip high school and practice guitar all day on the banks of the Guadalupe River that flowed through his family’s ranch in Kerr County. Sutherland also spent a brief period in Port Aransas one summer performing with the Lingsmen, a band that included future Elevator drummer John Ike Walton, as well as future bassist, Benny Lynn Thurman.

When Sutherland joined the 13th Floor Elevators, his personal journey took him from the live music clubs of Austin in the 1960s, to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium of San Francisco and eventually to Houston, where he found himself out of money, out of luck, and on the skids.

The 13th Floor Elevators performed together from 1965 to 1969. The band’s core membership and songwriting collaboration always included Sutherland on lead guitar; Roky Erickson, vocalist and rhythm guitar; and Tommy Hall, electric jug, lyricist, and spiritual advisor.

They were just your average Texas rock band that openly proselytized the use of the psychotropic drug LSD as a vehicle to higher consciousness, and who spread their message through their music and lifestyle. They were also one of the first bands of their era to use the term “psychedelic,” and when the 13th Floor Elevators were guests on “American Bandstand” in 1966 promoting their breakout single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” a naive Dick Clark asked Tommy Hall, “Who is the head man here?” Hall then smugly replied, “We’re all heads.”


Sutherland was a survivor. He survived the turmoil of being in a band signed to a record label whose owners engaged in questionable business practices, numerous arrests for drug possession, an addiction to heroin, and seven months of incarceration in the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections near Huntsville. In exile from his central Texas home of Kerrville, in 1975 Sutherland decided to find refuge and a change of scenery in Houston.

Houston was very familiar turf to Sutherland. The 13th Floor Elevators recorded in Houston studios, as well as performed countless concerts in Houston nightclubs. The band also lived communally for a time in an old mansion located on Old Galveston Road owned by their record label and known as “Funky Mansions.” However, what really drew Sutherland to Houston after the demise of the Elevators was the fact that it was home to Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell.

Ann Elizabeth "Bunni" Bunnell. Photo courtesy of Jim Hord.
“She was brilliant and a member of MENSA,” said longtime friend and former Montrose neighbor, Jim Hord, “but she couldn’t handle the everyday little things in life. Bunni displayed bad judgment in men and had a lot of slimeball friends.”

Bunnell was a New Jersey transplant to Texas whom Sutherland initially met in the late 1960s during the time he lived in Funky Mansions. She was an “exotic dancer” who took the name “Bunni” when she danced at the “Boobie Rock” on Houston’s lower Westheimer Road. Bunnell was now working as a typist supporting herself and her two children from a previous marriage, and studying to be a court reporter at night.

Sutherland and Bunnell rekindled their relationship in the summer of 1976, and settled into east Montrose where rents were affordable, drugs were plentiful, and crime was rampant. The next year, on Sutherland’s 31st birthday, May 28, the couple married, traveled to central Texas to visit family and friends, and then returned to Houston to resume their domestic routine of volatility and substance abuse.

“Stacy had a very bad temper and the alcohol brought out the worst in him,” said Hord who now resides in Waco, “but Stacy and Bunni brought out the worst in each other. The house was always dirty, and it was infested with roaches. Bunni wasn’t the best housekeeper. Every time I went over to visit, the condition of the house used to really bug me. Bunni had some really bad times in her life, but the time spent with Stacy was the worst.”

516 Pacific Street, The Montrose, Houston. Photo courtesy of Paul Drummond.
Hord remembers Sutherland as someone always toying with the idea of putting another band together, but who went to extreme measures to forgo actually playing music during this unproductive time period. As a frustrated Sutherland sat on his front porch, neighbors were known to come up to him and ask for an autograph, which served as a reminder of by-gone days in the spotlight.

“I don’t remember ever hearing Stacy play guitar when I went over to visit. He used to talk about drugs a lot. He had a fascination with drugs, and he would do anything that came his way. Bunni once told me that when she and Stacy used to go out bar hopping in the neighborhood, Stacy would bandage his hand before leaving the house, and when people would buy him drinks and ask him to play guitar with the band, he would have an excuse not to play and sit in with them, choosing to drink all night instead,” Hord said.

By 1978, the Sutherlands were at an all-time low in their on again, off again relationship, and in the early morning hours of August 24, after a full day of drinking and arguing, Bunnell shot Sutherland in the kitchen of their east Montrose bungalow. The bullet severed a major artery causing massive internal bleeding. Later that day, the Houston Chronicle included the following story:

A Montrose resident was shot to death today in his residence at 516 Pacific Street. Police identified the victim as Stacy Keith Sutherland, 33. Shot once in the stomach with a .22 caliber rifle, at 3:30 a.m., Sutherland died at 5:07 a.m. in Ben Taub Hospital.

Officers arrested a 34-year-old woman at the scene. No charges have been filed.

Hord believes that Bunnell’s actions were taken as a measure of defense to protect her teenaged son who was staying with them at the time from an irrational acting and inebriated Sutherland.

“Stacy was making threatening remarks and acting belligerent towards Bunni’s 15-year-old son,” recounts Hord, “and when Stacy lunged at Bunni in an attempt to enter her son’s bedroom, she pulled the trigger to the .22 rife that the couple kept in the house for protection against burglars.”

On April 10, 1981, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from council, the Honorable Judge Frank Price of the 209th District Court of Harris County issued a motion for dismissal to Ann Elizabeth Sutherland for the murder of Stacy Sutherland.

More than two years had passed from the time Bunnell was indicted for the felony offense by a Houston grand jury, and according to Bunnell’s attorney, Audley H. Heath, “because more than 120 days had passed since the commencement of the action, the defendant was entitled to a dismissal of the indictment filed in the cause in accordance with the ‘Speedy Trial Act of 1974’ of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.” This statute was later repealed by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2005.


Sutherland died before experiencing the worldwide recognition and the accolades now paid to him and the 13th Floor Elevators from adoring fans, musicians, and the music press. Their music has found a new audience from an entirely new generation, that discovered the band and the body of work they recorded, from that brief moment in time they performed together.

Sutherland is buried at Center Point Cemetery near his family’s ranch in Kerr County, not far from where he used to practice his guitar on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Bunnell eventually became a court reporter, remarried and continued to live in the house at the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in east Montrose where she died of cancer in 1987 at age 43.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

• Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008
• Roky Erickson to Houston: Return of 'Two-Headed Dog' by Andrew Dansby / Houston Chronicle / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009
• Long Strange Trip: Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009
• Austin Rock Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2008

The 13th Floor Elevators -- Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy -- at the New Orleans Club in Austin, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland, and John Ike Walton perform at La Maison in Houston in May or June, 1966. Image from last.fm.
The Rag Blog

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Roky Erickson to Houston : Return of 'Two-Headed Dog'

Roky Erickson. Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski / The Rag Blog / Shout! Factory Records
Roky Erickson -- nee of the 13th Floor Elevators -- returns to Houston after 25 years

Erickson... is enjoying a fruitful second act that is creatively satisfying rather than a sentimental journey.

By Andrew Dansby

Among significant musicians who have endured monumental breakdowns and/or mental illness, few are more sweet and charming in conversation than Roky Erickson. The Austin-based psychedelic rock legend has had as bumpy a ride as any. He’s been drugged (voluntarily), arrested, incarcerated, institutionalized, shocked, drugged (involuntarily) and abandoned over a duration of time (more than two decades) that should’ve left him dead. But on the other end of a phone these days he’s unfailingly courteous.

Talking to some of rock’s eccentrics and near casualties is usually an exercise in futility. Brian Wilson was friendly enough the first and only time I spoke to him, though his shouty voice and naturally clipped answers gave a gruff impression beyond his control. “Thank you,” he shouted before hanging up. “That was a good interview.” (It wasn’t.) Waller native Daniel Johnston was once a chatterbox during an interview; another time he stared at a kitchen table and smoked cigarettes shaking like an old washing machine.

Interviewing such artists can sometimes feel like a self-serving pursuit. The purpose is the same as talking to non-eccentrics: an attempt to glean some sort of interesting information about their art from which to spin a minor profile. With Erickson, for instance, I learned last week that Little Willie John was a influence on his landmark 13th Floor Elevators song You’re Gonna Miss Me. (In a previous chat, James Brown had been mentioned.)

“I just heard one song of his on the radio,” Erickson said. “‘Better leave my kittie alone.’ We had this one real, tiny radio, and I heard Little Willie John sing that. Then I think I heard James Brown’s Night Train. I listened to mostly rock ’n’ roll … though I liked the blues a lot.”

Certain this personal revelation was hardly a national one, I opted not to Google Erickson and Little Willie. But as one prone to obsessing about music I thought it was plenty logical.

Erickson’s life and times following Miss Me were equally foggy, though they’ve been well documented since. The Elevators were short-lived. He spent years in the Rusk State Hospital to avoid jail time for marijuana possession, and came out damaged. He recorded sporadically through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, some of it listenable, much of it not. Broke and on the skids, he was rescued in the ’90s by a younger brother, who fixed his teeth and his finances and his living situation, and facilitated a remarkable comeback. These days Erickson is giving full performances (last year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival appearance was joyous and rocking). He’s also recorded with Austin’s Okkervil River, though there are no release details yet.

Erickson’s recall is sometimes keen, other times not so much. Many of his answers begin with a “let me see …” or “let me think …” Some details from 1966 are clear as a bell, others from years later are not. The Elevators were signed to the Houston-based International Artists label, which purchased Miss Me from the Contact label. He recalls the touchstone names in the region (Huey Meaux, Gold Star studio), but stops short of elaboration. Erickson also doesn’t recall the last time he played Houston, though his manager informs me that it was Aug. 11, 1984, at the Consolidated Arts Warehouse. So nearly a quarter century will have passed when he takes the stage at the Continental Club on Wednesday.

If Erickson’s ACL appearance is any indication, he’ll run through Miss Me along with other favorites like Creature With the Atom Brain and Two-Headed Dog.

Much psychedelic rock hasn’t aged very well over the years. It’s shackled to its era and infused with an earnest pursuit of hippie idealism less widely lovable than, say, jive swing, another bygone genre that fused an antiquated style to its substance.

But Miss Me has proven monumentally resilient, an urgently iconic nugget from 1966 that doesn’t attempt to lure you with slurry guitars and chanting about kaleidoscopic kittens. The soul and blues that Erickson cites infused the song with an urgency not found in the psych rock rooted in the folky jug-band tradition. That rawness gave Miss Me legs beyond some other music of its era.

Its opening guitar riff is a strangler, a war cry for 40-plus years of garage rock. And even something as blatantly hippie-esque as playing a jug is defiantly manipulated as to suggest some sort of wild-eyed mutation of something innocent. In the pointless music journalistic pursuit of the punk rock genesis (Iggy! Velvet Underground! New York Dolls! Elvis! Hank Williams!), the Elevators warrant mention if for nothing other than Erickson’s banshee singing, the result, at least in part, of his mother’s affinity for opera.

Musician Shandon Sahm, son of late Texas music legend Doug (a friend, admirer and collaborator with Erickson), says the production reminded him of Sahm’s landmark She’s About a Mover. “The jug is cool, the screaming rocks,” he says. “It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes it awesome, but as Doug used to say about Mover can apply to Miss Me, it just flat out had a groove to it.”

Erickson’s description of writing the song is somewhat cryptic.

“I was just at my house, and I thought I might write a song,” he says. “Then I found myself at this very strange place, some kind of a poetry place or something. All it had was one room and bar. And that was it.”

Erickson says he spends his days “reading a lot,” watching beloved horror movies that seem to inspire his music (see song titles in previous paragraph), and plinking on a pump organ in his home (“It’s missing a key”) and a new Yamaha keyboard, which has pre-programmed songs that he tweaks, other times he works up original compositions, which he figures number in the hundreds.

In the late-’90s Erickson was well-represented in record store bins, though the rash of new releases all featured old material that had been dredged up. But with the tantalizing tease of new music (his first in more than a decade) and his urgently loud performances, Erickson, like Wilson and Johnston, is enjoying a fruitful second act that is creatively satisfying rather than a sentimental journey.

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Source / chron.com / Posted June 19, 2009

Roky Erickson in performance
Continental Club, 3700 Main, Houston
Wednesday, June 24, 2009, 10 p.m.
Tickets : $25, continentalclub.com

Also see:

• Long Strange Trip : Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall / stories by Thorne Dreyer and Jennifer Maerz / The Rag Blog / Feb. 18, 2009
• Austin Rock Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 / stories by Thorne Dreyer and Margaret Moser / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2008
• Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties: Austin Music: 1965-1969 by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

Thanks to Connie Clark / The Rag Blog

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Long Strange Trip : Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall

Tommy Hall in his Tenderloin apartment in San Francisco. Photo by Jamie Soja.

The story of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators – Austin’s favorite psychedelic sons – is rich, rowdy and textured. They sparked a counterculture, birthed a sound and inspired a generation of musicians. In fact, their work and their legend continue to serve as inspiration to new artists and to a legion of cult followers.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009

See 'A Long, Strange Trip: An originator of acid rock in the '60s, Tommy Hall used LSD to expand his consciousness. He’s still psychedelic,' by Jennifer Maerz, Below.

The story of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators – Austin’s favorite psychedelic sons – is rich, rowdy and textured. They sparked a counterculture, birthed a sound and inspired a generation of musicians. In fact, their work and their legend continue to serve as inspiration to new artists and to a legion of cult followers.

The Elevators joined a gang of Austin carpetbaggers – including promoter Chet Helms, musicians Janis Joplin and Powell St. John and the rowdies from Rip Off Press – who played a formative role in the Sixties San Francisco music and counterculture scene. The Elevators headlined the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms, the palaces of Sixties rock.

I first saw the Thirteenth Floor Elevators at Jubilee Hall in Houston in the mid Sixties. It was an extraordinary and totally consuming experience. Their live performances are truly a thing of legend.

The Rag Blog reported last year on the death of original Elevators bass player Benny Thurman. And of course the tall but so very true tale of Elevators front man Roky Erickson -- his vision, his unforgettable voice and the well-documented battles with his demons -- has been told far and wide. (The other prime mover, guitar player Stacy Sutherland, contributed -- in the words of S F Weekly’s Jennifer Maerz -- the band’s “acid-drenched garage-blues style.”)

Less known is the story of stoned poet Tommy Hall from Houston who introduced acid to the band and the electric jug to the world. The Rag Blog’s Gerry Storm wrote of Tommy Hall: “He was called 'Turn On Tommy.' He was a fast talker, a hustler, a jive artist, a rapper, a believer, a fanatic, a salesman, and sometimes a bore.”

The following is a fascinating feature on Tommy Hall, from the Feb. 17, 2009. S F Weekly. Hall now lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district where he is still stoned and still creating.

Tommy Hall in the early days. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
A Long, Strange Trip
An originator of acid rock in the '60s, Tommy Hall used LSD to expand his consciousness. He’s still psychedelic.

By Jennifer Maerz / February 18, 2009

Tommy Hall is nursing a Coke at a corner table at the Hemlock Tavern, a Polk Street music dive. The guru of '60s psychedelic rock doesn't drink alcohol. Booze brings you down, and Hall believes you should always be working on a high.

The jukebox is playing "You're Gonna Miss Me," the biggest hit by Hall's band, the 13th Floor Elevators. The 1966 single made it onto the soundtrack of the film High Fidelity and the prized garage-rock box set Nuggets, helping the group gain massive cred with young garage-rock fiends.

The Elevators' jug player, philosopher, and lifetime LSD devotee either pretends not to notice his song or genuinely can't hear it over the din of early arrivers for the club's headliners, Mammatus. The metal band is one of many local artists whose stoned sound has ancestral ties to Hall's sonic ideology.

For many of his 66 years, Hall has been pursuing intellectual enlightenment through acid. He began that quest in the mid-'60s with the 13th Floor Elevators. Music scholars now note that the Elevators pushed an aggressive psychedelia that stood out against the feel-good artists of the time, pre-dating both punk and new wave. The band combined lingering, futuristic garage-rock jams with propulsive rock 'n' roll rhythms, grooving well with the counterculture's burgeoning drug experimentation.

Three elements made the Elevators truly transcendent: singer Roky Erickson's manic, mercurial vocals; Hall's invention of the electric jug — which made inexplicably cool sound effects based on the reverberations of his voice; and Hall's beautiful, image-rich lyricism promoting the spirituality of getting high. Of the last, he says now that he was combating the teenybopper attitude prevalent during the British Invasion. "We were trying to get into the results of acid," he says, "to get into the results of the universe."

Four decades after the Elevators collapsed, experimental garage rock and metal have enjoyed a huge resurgence in the Bay Area, and many of the leading acts have been influenced by Hall's band: droning rockers Wooden Shjips, garage punks Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall, and pop songwriter Kelley Stoltz, to name a few. The Elevators' cult following is far from regional: Danger Mouse, the producer behind Gnarls Barkley and Beck, told The New York Times that he greatly admired the Elevators' mix of common melodies and left-field sonic adventures.

When he was playing with the Elevators, Hall made it a rule to drop acid every time someone picked up an instrument. From all reports, he didn't stop dosing regularly until very recently, when he lost his LSD connection and had to stick with pot. Hall says he's holding a bag of mushrooms at his apartment, a one-room efficiency in a sketchy Tenderloin residential hotel. He's saving that stash for the final breakthrough on his current project, a book revealing divine patterns in the solar system he's been working out in his head for years.

Hall still has very clear ideas about what makes a band psychedelic. That's why he's at the Hemlock to see Mammatus, an underground band he first heard at Amoeba Music, and one he believes is carrying on the tradition of trip music. These musicians "flash" to a higher consciousness, he says, darting a chalky hand across his scraggly Merlin beard. "It's real music," he adds. "The rest is just a bunch of noise."

Hall's offbeat observations about music make him an engrossing conversationalist. He intellectualizes songwriting to levels far beyond the average musician, and gives almost holy meaning to his favorite artists. But he also unleashes a torrent of information independent of whoever is on the listening end, the result of years of sustained drug use. Talking with him is like flipping on multiple public affairs programs midway through the discussion. It's challenging to comprehend everything he's saying. Pay attention, though, and you can sort salient points and philosophical nuggets from the sometimes intolerant — and occasionally racist — ramblings.

With a ravenous appetite for higher learning, Hall could have been a flawed yet significant cultural signpost, a rock 'n' roll Timothy Leary. Instead his lifestyle teeters closer to another visionary rock 'n' roll drug casualty, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett.

Despite his struggles, however, Hall is still a fascinating figure in musical history. It's not often that you encounter someone who so fiercely believes rock 'n' roll is a voyage to the beyond. But it's been a difficult journey, one that isn't without its casualties.

"Most bands are just in it for entertainment," music industry vet and Elevators fan Bill Bentley says, "but the Elevators gambled on it with their lives and they got squashed.

If the Great American Music Hall has the equivalent of a VIP section, Tommy Hall is perched in it, a plaid flannel shirt hanging on his hunched frame. It's the day after Halloween, and Roky Erickson is the headliner.

Erickson's career as a solo artist was given new life with the 2005 documentary You're Gonna Miss Me, which propelled the Elevators back into public discourse while showing the damage caused by methodical drug use. Erickson was the group's most serious victim, and his communication skills are delicate these days. Nonetheless, he's a cause célèbre in certain rock circles and has sold out the Great American tonight — in part because this performance promises to be a historic one. Erickson's set list will include 13th Floor Elevators songs, which he hasn't played live since the late '60s, when he started forgetting his lyrics onstage and wearing a Band-Aid over the "third eye" on his forehead.

Upstairs, Hall sits incognito near the soundman, flanked by his closest friends, husband and wife George Ripley and Priscilla Lee, who are wearing their 13th Floor Elevators shirts for the occasion.

Ripley warned earlier that Hall had refused to perform tonight. The Elevators' wordsmith, who invented the electric jug's spectra effects, is strangely dismissive these days about his role in the group. Hall says it was his limited abilities on a musical instrument that forced him to put everything into the Elevators' lyrics and ideology. "I was mainly trying to advance a philosophy so I could take over the whole acid thing," he says. "The jug occupied a position."

A young Austin band called the Black Angels opens the show with Velvet Underground–aping rock. This same group will double as Erickson's backing band; singer Alex Maas has learned the electric jug in preparation. After hearing them perform, Hall believes the Black Angels aren't playing with enough "higher structures." He'll later tell the group that there are other psych bands ahead of them, recommending Mammatus, "so they'll learn."

When the Texans come onstage for the second time, Erickson is at the mike. The portly singer opens with his ghoul oeuvre — goofy songs about vampires and zombies — before turning toward the Elevators with "You're Gonna Miss Me." When he howls, "How could you say you missed my lovin', when you never needed it?" he sounds equally maniacal and naked. His voice remains a powerful weapon.

Erickson had already written "You're Gonna Miss Me" when Hall discovered him in 1965, sparking the idea for the first — and only — band Hall put together. The pair quickly formed a bond and traveled into deep hallucinatory space, setting Hall up as a psychotropic prophet on a vision quest from which he has never returned.

Thirteenth Floor Elevaters poster: at Fillmore in SF for a show with Grace Slick’s band, the Great Society.
The need to understand humans was coded into Tommy Hall's DNA. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a nurse named Margaret "Perky" Perkins and a doctor named Thomas James Hall. But music was also in his blood. He spent his formative years in jug-band country with an ear to the progressive jazz station and a record-collecting habit.

In 1961, Hall enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied philosophy and psychology, fascinated with how the mind works. At night, he continued his musical education, hitting blues bars with songwriter — and future Elevators contributor — Powell St. John.

Austin introduced Hall to two future loves: an English major named Clementine Tausch and the drug lysergic acid diethylamide. For years they were a tightly knit trio, but it wasn't love at first sight. Hall's slicked-back hair and long beard were a turnoff for Tausch, added to what she calls terrific arrogance: "He was pretentious and always making pronunciamentos," she says. A shave, a new suit, and Hall's genuine affection helped change her mind; they married in 1964.

It's impossible to pinpoint Hall's first LSD trip; he estimated to Elevators biographer Paul Drummond that he'd dosed 317 times between 1966 and 1970. One of Hall's initial experiences was profoundly negative. He was given the drug as part of a study at the UT lab, where he freaked out about all the scientists testing his paranoia levels. Hall realized then that chemicals have a valuable effect on the brain, but he was determined to explore LSD in more welcoming environments. This involved turning on the people closest to him, including his mother. (Perky was apparently ecstatic on acid, playing a Mozart record and repeating that she'd never realized the music had "all those things going on in it.")

Hall was into deep thinkers, including G.I. Gurdjieff, whose philosophical writings had also influenced Bob Dylan. Gurdjieff believed there were four pathways to enlightenment, one of which was interpreted to be paved with drugs. Hall carried the 19th-century writer's books everywhere, eager to spread Gurdjieff's gospel. But by the mid-'60s, rock 'n' roll was doing the heavy proselytizing to the kids — Hall wanted this access to the masses.

Hall found the vessel for his lysergic prophecies when a friend invited him to a concert by the Spades, featuring 18-year-old frontman Roky Erickson. He heard the future in Erickson's ravaged, bluesy screams — his singular voice is said to have influenced Texas pal Janis Joplin — and Erickson easily fell under Hall's mentorship. Hall poached him from the Spades, matching him with a local group he liked called the Lingsmen.

Their first jam session took place in November 1965 at the Hall residence. Tommy doled out the LSD and grabbed a clay whiskey jug, eager to be part of the action. He ushered the instrument into the electric age, holding a mike in one hand and making noises into the jug's interior, the echoes of his voice producing the Elevators' ghostly je ne sais quoi. Hall's primitive sound effects alternately came off like pigeons mating ("Earthquake"), emergency sirens ("Fire Engine"), and carnival rides ("Roller Coaster").

"The first thing you notice, before anything really, is Tommy Hall's electric jug sound," notes Elevators fan Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain. "Never could quite work out how that sound was made."

Second to Erickson's soul-wrecked wail, that jug stamped the Elevators' signature on the burgeoning psych scene of the mid-'60s. The group's third charm was guitarist Stacy Sutherland, whose use of heavy reverb gave the group its acid-drenched garage-blues style.

Tausch claims she named the band, joining an "elevating" word with her lucky number 13. But the Elevators were nonetheless a remarkably unlucky act during their brief three-year run. Every time they'd catch a break (1967: lip-synching on Dick Clark's American Bandstand!), something negative would counter the streak (Dick Clark steals their manager!)

Their biggest problems, however, came from their record label and the law. The Elevators signed to International Artists, a company many say kept the group in the poorhouse. Soon after the band formed, International Artists picked up its first single, "You're Gonna Miss Me." In 1966, the song had risen to #55 on the Billboard charts. That same year, the Elevators put their mark on a movement by titling their first official LP The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. It became one of a string of records for which the band saw minuscule royalties.

Psychedelic Sounds' artwork was unusual for the time, featuring swirls of color with a pyramid and an eye in the middle, a takeoff of the image on the back of the dollar bill. But most importantly for Hall, the record sleeve gave him space to deliver specific, if unsigned, messages about the philosophical quest for "pure sanity" that informed the album. Song titles came with his explanations, such as the revelation on "Reverberation" that you can reorganize your mind against self-doubt. "Tried to Hide" was a dismissal of superficial trippers. And "Splash 1" — a song written by Erickson and Tausch, who played den mother to the band — described the connection felt between two honest seekers.

In his lyrics, Hall penned elegant lines about trust: "Don't fall down as you lift her/Don't fall down/She believes in you," and spiritual bonds: "She's been always in your ear/Her voice sounds a tone within you/Listen to the words you hear." There were also, of course, plenty of encouragements to take a magic blotter ride: "You finally find your helpless mind is trapped inside your skin/You want to leave, but you believe you won't get back again."

This new musical mysticism attracted a following in Texas. Elevators bassist Ronnie Leatherman remembers Hall hosting weeknight sessions in Houston where he'd play records and deliver his divine philosophies to gathered flocks.

As the band started touring Texas, though, young idealists weren't the only ones listening. The Elevators lived in a conservative hotbed when, as drummer John Ike Walton tells it, rednecks were really red. The Elevators were seen as threatening to the very moral fabric of the state; their arrests were broadcast on television. Walton says the cops wanted to beat them up, cut off their hair, and throw them in jail. Band members spent time behind bars or were threatened with hard labor on the cotton farm for such minor violations as possession of a joint.

The Elevators decamped to the more supportive environs of San Francisco in 1966. With connections to Joplin and other Lone Star State buddies gone West, the group was quickly playing venues like the legendary Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, its audiences growing exponentially. The Elevators shared stages with the popular acts of the time: Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape. They were embraced by the locals, despite having much shorter hair — a consequence of going through so many drug trials — and Hall occasionally getting smacked around for taking Richard Nixon's side in political debates.

They were barely scraping by, though, getting paid $100 each for Avalon gigs, and by the beginning of 1967 they moved back to Texas. Deeper fractures also plagued the group. Hall's insistence that the band "play the acid" every time they picked up an instrument was at odds with the members who didn't enjoy the drug, and it was taking its toll on the ones who did.

The Elevators' last hurrah came in the form of 1967's Easter Everywhere. The landmark album was littered with allusions to Hall's Eastern religious studies. The songs were ethereal love ballads lifted by exquisite harmonies ("She Lives (in a Time of Her Own)"); and parables with heavy visual imagery ("If your limbs begin dissolving/In the water that you tread/All surroundings are evolving/In the stream that clears your head"). The record's lo-fi production value added to its eerie aesthetic, as did Hall's photo on the back cover. He's holding a finger to his lips in a warning to handle the mysteries of the universe cautiously.

From that minor peak the band fell mightily, starting in 1968. Erickson's story became perhaps the most tragic. After becoming increasingly irrational on- and offstage, he cycled through mental institutions and in 1969 was locked up in Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Texas on drug charges, the final patch of dirt on the Elevators' grave. Sutherland also entered dark times: He battled for years with hard drug addiction before being shot to death by his wife, Bunni, in 1978.

Hall's path became more difficult to trace.

[....]

Read all of this article here / S F Weekly

Also see Austin Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog/ June 24, 2008

And Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

Thanks to Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog

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