Up (and Down): Lungfish and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators

When it comes to music, everyone has their spike-in-the-rock experience: That moment an artist, a song, even a sound stops time for an instant, taking you someplace strange and yet eerily familiar.

I’m lucky enough to have had a few of these searing encounters, and one of them was the first time I saw the band Lungfish.

As with most psychedelic experiences, most of the details are now lost to me. I know it was 1988. Or maybe 1989. I remember a dark room—d.c. space—crammed with people, the crush of volume and the sound of something coming unwound. Or maybe that’s just the memory of then-bassist John Chriest pivoting like a wind-up toy as he detuned the low “E” string of his bass into a guttural growl. The songs were deceptively simple, driving mantras flecked with singer Daniel Higgs’ urgent fire. I’d never heard anything like it, and that night sparked a fascination that continues to this day. Where did they come from? I wondered.

Years later, I found myself careening around Europe with the band. It was 1993—that part I’m certain of—and my band Circus Lupus was paired with Lungfish on a grueling seven-week tour.

Being on tour, in case you’re unaware, consists mostly of long hours of silence and inaction. At least being with another band provided an opportunity for new jokes and stories to enter the mix. I’ll save Daniel’s stories for him to tell (though the one about the night he accidentally caused Black Flag’s PA stack to topple over using only his mind—oh, and a lot of LSD—is worth sharing). But one exchange stuck with me. “So Dan,” I asked, “what’s the deal with The Thirteenth Floor Elevators?” Daniel thought for a moment, running his fingers through his beard. “Well, I know this much,” he finally said. “I’ve listened to Easter Everywhere as much as any other record, ever.” Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like speaking the name of the album sparked something inside him, perhaps a memory of some prior journey. I made a note to myself; for someone as obsessed with lineage as me, it sounded like a breadcrumb trail I ought to follow.

Perhaps because my own family backstory was so occluded, I was obsessed with tracing the music I loved back to its source. Punk didn’t simply arrive on a meteorite one day; something inspired the musicians who’d in turn inspired me. The problem was how hard it was to find. As the eminent archivist Sam Knee has pointed out, in some ways the ‘60s feel closer today than they did in the ‘80s. Nowadays, the interweb is chock-full of facts (some of them true) on the most obscure of garage bands. In the dark days of the ‘80s, when I spent untold long hours pawing through thrift-store record bins searching for clues, it was a different story. 

It was a few years after that European tour that I finally found a copy of The Elevators’ The Psychedelic Sounds Of… in a now-defunct San Francisco record store; Easter Everywhere followed a few years later.

But the first time I heard the sliding guitar figure of “Slip Inside This House,” I understood what Dan was talking about. This band wanted to take me somewhere new, and I very much wanted to go there. The Elevators fused hard-edged rock and roll with a mission to shake people into deeper consciousness. If that’s not punk, I don’t know what is.

In the ensuing years I began a writing practice, though those first few years were purely functional (I was a food writer). It would be a few years more before I first tried tackling music, and not until 2019 that I felt I might be up to writing about The Elevators. I got as far as singer Roky Erickson’s manager, who responded: “Roky doesn’t really do interviews.” A few months later, Erickson was dead at the age of 71. Had I been a better researcher at the time, I would have known there was already a book about the band, Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind. But it’s only in the last few months that I picked up a copy for myself.

With all respect to Mr. Drummond, Eye Mind is not a great book. There’s little narrative arc, the lack of editing renders the thrust of crucial points in doubt, and it’s a challenge weaving the tangled threads of the band’s story together. We learn some details—at least, those that can be seived from the notably drug-damaged cast of characters—but we rarely feel the questing urgency and drive that made The Elevators so essential. I wanted to know what it was like being in the presence of the band, but the first-person recollections are too often fractal and difficult to parse.

Then again, maybe that’s only appropriate. I get the sense that The Elevators were a lot closer to Scratch Acid—another monumentally unhinged Texas band—than the more mannered San Francisco Summer of Love acts (Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, Quicksilver Messenger Service, etc.) with whom they’re often compared. With the exception of original drummer John Ike Walton, the band were notoriously guileless and disorganized, often failing to materialize at the same gig. In one of the book’s most revealing moments, a friend of band characterizes their rural core—guitarist Stacy Sutherland, Walton, and original bassist Benny Thurman—as “goat-ropers.” They weren’t conceptualists; they were hicks, turned on first by the rawness of ‘50s rock and roll and later by the band’s notorious svengali, Tommy Hall.

Hall, a divisive figure to this day, deserves special mention. An avowed non-musician, he played the “electric jug,” modernizing an avowedly hillbilly percussion instrument by using it to make echoey sounds with his voice. It’s a weirdly effective trick, presaging (and doubtless inspiring) the use of dissonant synthesized noises by Pere Ubu, Devo, and countless other punk and new wave bands.

Tommy Hall’s response to Dick Clark’s question at the :10 second mark is priceless.

In addition to writing the majority of the band’s lyrics, Tommy Hall had access to two essential resources: A complex and highly (over)developed theory of personal and cultural growth through psycho-spiritual exploration, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of drugs.

Convinced that mass acid drops would wrench society from its inward-focused and self-destructive path, Hall used his connections to exert control over his bandmates, in particular singer Roky Erickson, whose extraordinary talent was counterbalanced by a curiously childlike and hapless nature.

In strictly aesthetic terms, it was a powerful match. Hall choreographed Erickson’s vocal delivery so strictly that the two came to blows during the recording of Easter Everywhere. But the resulting “Slip Inside This House” is a masterpiece, a song that expresses the consciousness- and soul-expanding potential of psychedelics without resorting to any of the dated “way-out” sonics of its counterparts. Of course in ethical terms, Hall’s approach left something to be desired. Already fragile, Erickson soon descended into full-blown schizophrenia, or something very much resembling it.

Predictably, the story of The Thirteenth Floor Elevators ended badly, spectacularly so. Locked into a Kafkaesque record deal and hounded mercilessly by Texas police, the band were hamstrung, eventually consigning themselves to cult status. Following serial drug busts, Erickson escaped jail time by being sent to the infamous Rusk Prison for the Criminally Insane, but he wasn’t the only Elevator to go down. After Tommy Hall’s sideline in drug dealing finally caught up with him, he did a stint in prison himself. He got out, discovered Scientology, and retreated to an SRO in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where he spent the ensuing decades crafting a universal theory of everything. It’s a twisted irony that in recent years Hall, a lifelong Republican, has imbued his otherwise expansive worldview with racist and homophobic invective. Perhaps it’s karmic payback that no one seems to be listening.

Tragically, guitarist Stacy Sutherland fared even worse. As Eye Mind convincingly argues, even more than Erickson’s trademark screams and Hall’s burbling mouth noises, Sutherland truly was the sound of the band. Already plagued by a famously dark disposition, when the band dissolved he found hard drugs and ended up in jail. A few years after his release, adrift and floundering in alcoholism, he died after being shot by his wife during a drunken dispute. If the book (and the testimony of Sutherland’s wife) are to be believed, the incident sounds heartbreakingly like suicide. He was thirty-two years old.

By the close of Eye Mind, it’s hard not to feel deflated. The Elevators created something truly unique and inspiring, yet at every turn they were done in by ineptitude—both their own and others’—and sheer bad luck. While Roky Erickson was celebrated, belatedly, in the 2005 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me, his bandmates never received much in the way of acclaim or financial rewards. John Ike Walton, whose family poured thousands of dollars into the band to purchase equipment and otherwise keep them afloat, claims he received a single royalty check for $4.06, in late 1967. It bounced.

Which brings me, finally, back to Lungfish, another band that—while I’m not privy to the group’s finances—probably would not qualify as a remunerative enterprise. Then again, unlike The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Lungfish never angled towards any kind of mainstream success (though their brief stint opening for Joan Jett was memorable in several regards). Yet by the time they’d stopped playing in 2006, they’d reached a plateau of sorts. “We’re at the point where we could go to any city on earth and forty people would come to see us,” drummer Mitchell Feldstein told me. “That, to me, is success.” 

That combination of minimal fame (but enduring fascination) is The Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ greatest legacy. A full half-century after their studio recordings were released, I’m still hungrily absorbing their music; if you’ve read this far I’m guessing you are, too. For a brief and shining moment they created something both epochal and strange. The Elevators flew far too high—it turns out taking LSD literally every day isn’t actually that great of an idea—but in doing so they touched the sun, and brought back a tiny piece of it for us to hear.