Roky Erickson

Roky Erickson (born Roger Kynard Erickson on July 15, 1947) is an American singer, songwriter, harmonica player and guitarist from Texas. He was a founding member of the 13th Floor Elevators and a pioneer of the psychedelic rock genre.


 * Tommy Hall's insistence that they take LSD before every show led to weeks straight where almost every member was cooped up in a van or cheap motel or a dingy backstage dressing room, engulfed in a perpetual acid trip
 * In three years, Roky's band had gone from being an overnight success to a stalled-out commercial failure. To young and hip Austinites though, Roky Erickson was still a psychedelic icon, having notoriously dropped acid an estimated 300 times. Everyone that Roky met wanted to give him drugs so they could tell their friends about the experience. By mid-1967 he had begun behaving erratically. Acquaintances from that time remember a paranoid Roky wearing a bandage on his forehead to cover up unwanted broadcasts to his "third eye".
 * Roky's mother found him standing in her backyard in the early hours of the morning, "talking gibberish." She checked him in for two weeks of psychiatric evaluation. When the two weeks were up, Evelyn Erickson claims the doctor pronounced Roky "a vegetable," so she took him to a second doctor, known around town as "Crazy Harry" Hermon, who was notorious for prescribing LSD to his patients.
 * Eventually, though, Roky's mental condition deteriorated further. When he began telling people that Russian transmissions he was picking up through his teeth were ordering him to kill Jacqueline Kennedy, some of his friends decided to bring him home to his family. On the drive home, they game him acid. When he started insisting that his body had been posessed by demons, some other friends gave him heroin. They delivered him to his mother in an "incoheren" state, where she bathed him with Tide and ammoniated mercury.
 * - In the album cover of True Love Cast Out All Evil told by album producer Will Sheff.
 * - In the documentary You're gonna miss me http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791268/