You're Gonna Miss Me

"'Easter Everywhere' was the last gasp. Though the band performed sporadically throughout 1968, Erickson was frequently absent, increasingly unhinged at the prospect of going onstage. A year later, it had fully blown apart. Sutherland was hooked on smack, Hall was dealing drugs and Erickson, whose grip on reality had slipped, was persuaded by a public defender to plead insanity to avoid hard time for possession of a small amount of pot. He was charged with offending 'the peace and dignity of the state,' diagnosed as schizophrenic by the court and spent nearly four years in a maximum-security asylum. As Drummond puts it: '[T]he vision of utopia that many tried to achieve by "turning on" led to a massive toxic overload by the end of the decade.' By the end of the 1970s, Sutherland was dead and Erickson had legally declared himself a Martian."

Erik Himmelsbach reviews Paul Drummond's Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound in the Los Angeles Times.