He fronted the influential group the 13th Floor Elevators with his scream-inflected vocals, but struggled with mental illness for much of his life.
Roky Erickson, a defining force in psychedelic rock in the 1960s and the stuff of rock lore ever since, died on Friday. He was 71.
His brother Mikel posted news of his death on Facebook. The posting did not give a cause or location of death, although several news reports say he died in Austin, Tex.
In 1965 Mr. Erickson was invited to join the guitarist Stacy Sutherland, the lyricist and jug player Tommy Hall and others in the Texas band the 13th Floor Elevators, and his powerful, scream-inflected vocals came to define the group. The Elevators had a modest hit with “You’re Gonna Miss Me” in 1966 and late that year released their debut album.
“If not quite the first band to have the now seemingly ubiquitous P-word applied to their music,” Dan Maier wrote in The Guardian in 2015, when surviving members reunited, “their debut album, 1966’s ‘The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators,’ delivered a manifesto for better living through chemistry that no previous act had so explicitly set forth.”
As Mr. Erickson sang in “Roller Coaster,” a song off that first album, “After you trip life opens up, you start doing what you want to do.”
But, as he and other band members found out, you also start attracting the attention of the authorities. Mr. Erickson was eventually arrested on drug charges, and that was only the beginning.
In his book “Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound” (2007), Paul Drummond described what befell the short-lived band:
“By the end of 1969, Roky virtually re-enacted the plot of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ when he pleaded insanity and was incarcerated in a maximum security unit of a prison for the criminally insane, Stacy was imprisoned in the jail Roky attempted to avoid, Tommy spent two years living in a cave with an LSD mafia cult, their bassist was drafted to Vietnam, and the drummer was given involuntary shock treatments.
