When Paul Drummond showed up in Kerrville for the first time about ten years ago, asking questions of anyone who knew or remembered The 13th Floor Elevators, I thought he was just another feller from out of town here to try to exploit Elevator notoriety by making a stab at telling the "real story" of the band. Others had tried and died and the story, for the most part, remained untold.

Much to my surprise, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Drummond spent the next decade looking under every rock in Kerrville, Austin, Houston and San Francisco. The bittersweet story of the band needs to be told and Drummond’s objectivity and persistence have paid off. It may have taken him awhile to get "in close" with the Elevator’s family and friends but in the end he became one of us due to his passion for not only the band but their legend.

The sad tale of the Elevator’s rise to rock notoriety has been recounted many times but no other writer has come close to the detail and behind-the-scenes information that Drummond has found. These are not just some dusty rock icons but living breathing people; people who had dreams and lived to see some of them come true and some of them dashed.

Drummond doesn’t just gush about the band but also interviews the band’s detractors - most notably Texas law enforcement officials who have less than a stellar view of the band and their antics. The band’s relationship to the police was a cat-and-mouse game that ended with a series of busts that shattered the band and scattered it to the four winds. They fought the law and the law won.

Drummond doesn’t just underline the tragedy but leaves us with some sense of redemption for the band. The survivors are doing well and are gaining overdue respect, if not for their 60’s lifestyles, for their unique and revolutionary approach to mind and music. That this is a labor of love for Drummond is revealed on every page. Even knowing the "end" of the story, I found the reading compelling and learned more than a few things about the band that I had never known.

With all the tragedy that surrounds this story, one redeeming grace is that the story really isn’t over yet. Only recently have the Elevators begun to get the recognition they justly deserver. Induction into the Texas Music Hall of Fame was just the beginning of the praise that needs to be heaped on these rock survivors. Very few people could have been through what this band endured and survived to tell about it. And survive they did. Roky is back in action packing houses in the U.S. and Europe with a re-joined Explosives and Ronnie Leatherman and John Ike Walton still grace the stages of Central Texas with regularity. This book is destined to be the authoritative source concerning the Elevators and the birth of psychedelic music.