The 13th Floor Elevators are one of those bands you know, even if you aren’t aware of it. Emerging from Austin, Texas in the 1960’s, before it was the absolute Mecca of North American Independent Music, the band quickly rose to prominence in the turbulent landscape of San Francisco. Holding down dates at the Filmore, the 13th floor Elevators helped to craft and define what we know today as Psychedelic Rock. Like most movements, adherence to the philosophies espoused by those at the center of the height Ashbury scene required a little give and take. In this sense, the band, and lead singer Roky Erickson, took all the LSD they could find. After all the pioneers of psychedelia, who would be massive influence on everyone from Janis Joplin to the Beach Boys had to practice what they preached. As Kevin McAlester sees it, this massive drug use, while not the supreme cause of Roky’s decent, was the point at which it all began to fall apart.
“You’re Gonna Miss Me” is not so much a rock biography, as a portrait of Schizophrenia. It just so happens that in this instance the man in question is not just a nameless face at the bus stop, or a haggard pan handler. He happens to be one the most influential rock musicians of the last fifty years. If anything McAlester forces us to rethink our perceptions of the men tally ill, and homeless, by giving this, decidedly ragamuffin, character a history.
Filmed in 2004 and 2005, the film finds Roky living in Austin, completely removed from his music, and trapped in his psychosis. His mother is his primary caretaker who seems to indulge his neurotic whims. She has her own personal psychological demons to deal with. It’s obvious that Roky’s mom is the seat of a lot of the instability in the lives of her children. Her ramshackle abode mirrors his own. The scattered trash and clothes of their homes is a reflection of their cluttered minds. In one of the most poignant scenes of the film, Roky comes home to take a nap. He wanders from noise emitting electronic device, to noise emitting electronic device finally coming to rest in a recliner. As he places dark sunglasses over his face the hum, buzz and whine of innumerable televisions, radios and oscillators fill the air. To this cacophony he announces “Okay, I’m taking a nap now.” His mother merely slips out the front door, leaving her son without medication.
Fortunately for Roky, the rest of the family does not feel the same way. While many of his siblings have led self-destructive lives in the wake of his success, Roky’s youngest brother, Sumner, has emerged from strange upbringing to be a member of the Pittsburgh Philharmonic and moderately well-rounded. About halfway through, the film becomes Sumner’s story, as he attempts to wrest control of Roky from his mother. While this would seem a perfect chance to take the documentary into an exploration of a family coming apart, McAlester instead focuses on the healing that a life with Sumner can offer Roky. This is precisely the type of narrative choice that elevates this film beyond an HBO special.
The film nuances the real characters of Roky, Sumner, and their mother without ever feeling like it’s openly mocking them. These are very eccentric people, all of them. There are a few instances in which you can’t help but laugh at them, but these are always of their own creation. You get a sense that the director’s camera was just lucky to catch them at these moments.
One can only imagine the amount of time it took for the Erickson’s to open up to the film crew. In the film a British rock writer who is working on a biography of the band visits Roky. It’s obvious that he has been working closely with the other members of the Elevators. He fails to illicit even the tiniest bit of confidence from his subject though. Of course his time with him was brief, and McAlester must have spent months, if not years with Roky. It is this dedication to his subject that ultimately comes through in “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. The film is as deep a portrait of a tortured soul as has ever been committed to film.