Born out of a union of club bands on the burgeoning Austin bohemian scene and a pronounced taste for hallucinogens, the 13th Floor Elevators were formed in late 1965 when lyricist Tommy Hall asked a local singer named Roky Erickson to join up with his new rock outfit. Four years, three official albums and countless acid trips later, it was over: the Elevators' pioneering first run ended in a dizzying jumble of professional mismanagement, internal arguments, drug busts and forced psychiatric imprisonments. In their short existence, however, the group succeeded in blowing the lid off the budding musical underground, logging early salvos in the countercultural struggle against state authorities, and turning their deeply hallucinogenic take on jug-band garage rock into a new American institution called psychedelic music. Before the hippies, before the punks, there were the 13th Floor Elevators: an unlikely crew of outcast weirdo geniuses who changed culture. Paul Drummond has spent years documenting every aspect of the history of this amazing band and amassing an unprecedented archive of primary materials, resulting in this comprehensive visual history. The book recounts the story not just of the Elevators as a band--wild and remarkable though it is--but that of the American counterculture itself: the hallucinogens, the rebellion and the truly profound music that resulted. The 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History places the band finally and undeniably in the pantheon of innovators of American rock music to which they have always belonged.

The trailblazing 13th Floor Elevators released the first' 'psychedelic'' rock album in America, transforming culture throughout the 1960s and beyond. The Elevators followed their own cosmic agenda - to change society by finding a new path to enlightenment. Their battles with repressive authorities are legendary. Lead singer Roky Erickson was put away in a maximum security unit for the criminally insane for years. Tommy Hall, their Svengali lyricist, lived in a cave. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was imprisoned. The drummer was involuntarily subjected to electric shock treatments. This fascinating biography breaks decades of silence of band members and features dozens of never-before-printed photos. ''One of the most exhilarating rock n' roll stories ever told.

A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularity of the annual Austin Psych Fest. Grounded in a strong social, cultural and historical context, the book asks how Texas produced some of the most extreme and influential psych of any era despite a prevailing social ethos of Christian conservatism and the strictest drug laws of any American state. It looks at how this environment shaped and affected the music, alongside the Texan frontier spirit and its championing of expansion, freedom and individualism.

Founded in a working-class neighborhood in southeast Houston in 1941, Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios is a major independent studio that has produced a multitude of influential hit records in an astonishingly diverse range of genres. Its roster of recorded musicians includes Lightnin’ Hopkins, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Clifton Chenier, Sir Douglas Quintet, 13th Floor Elevators, Freddy Fender, Kinky Friedman, Ray Benson, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child, and many, many more. In House of Hits, Andy Bradley and Roger Wood chronicle the fascinating history of Gold Star/SugarHill, telling a story that effectively covers the postwar popular music industry. They describe how Houston’s lack of zoning ordinances allowed founder Bill Quinn’s house studio to grow into a large studio complex, just as SugarHill’s willingness to transcend musical boundaries transformed it into of one of the most storied recording enterprises in America. The authors offer behind-the-scenes accounts of numerous hit recordings, spiced with anecdotes from studio insiders and musicians who recorded at SugarHill. Bradley and Wood also place significant emphasis on the role of technology in shaping the music and the evolution of the music business. They include in-depth biographies of regional stars and analysis of the various styles of music they represent, as well as a list of all of Gold Star/SugarHill’s recordings that made the Billboard charts and extensive selected historical discographies of the studio’s recordings.

In Texas in the mid sixties some local boys, rock and rollers from rural Kerrville banded together and were joined by some hip Austin music makers to pioneer one of the first psychedelic bands of the day. Thirteenth Floor Elevators led the way in the Haight-Ashbury scene like pied pipers heralding the upcoming summer of love. Stacy Sutherland was one of those legendary boys and this is his story.

"Transcendence came with a price," Brian T. Atkinson writes in his introduction to this collection of reflections by and about pioneer psychedelic rocker Roky Erickson (1947-2019). The singer and songwriter who fronted the 13th Floor Elevators burst onto the Texas music scene in 1966 with the release of "You're Gonna Miss Me," the band's only charting single, which featured Erickson's primal vocal stylings. The band attracted considerable regional attention, including interest from a young Janis Joplin, who considered joining the group before opting to go to San Francisco instead. Through his interviews with those who were there and presentation of Erickson's own words, Atkinson chronicles how Erickson was haunted for most of his life by mental illness, likely compounded by his liberal usage of hallucinogenic and other drugs. Despite that, however, his influence on Texas musicians of various genres is vast. As Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top attests in his foreword, "He stands alone to this day and is revered as an artist because he had the gift of a wonderful voice." As with his previous books on Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Mickey Newbury, Atkinson has recorded hours of interviews with veteran and upcoming musicians who were impacted by Roky Erickson. Along with the insights of long-time music journalists like Joe Nick Patoski and the bittersweet recollections of friends and family members like Mikel Erickson, brother of the singer, this work includes poetry and lyrics written by Erickson during his confinement at Rusk State Hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The picture that emerges is that of a brilliant, troubled mind and an artist whose influence extended far beyond the period of his greatest notoriety, continuing even beyond his death.