Dirt Road to Psychedelia: Austin, Texas During the 1960s

We were all destined for utopia in our lifetime … that’s what it was really about. It didn’t happen. We got our fucking asses handed to us. – Don Hyde (Vulcan Gas Company co-founder)

Of all the bands claiming to have invented psychedelic rock, the 13th Floor Elevators stands a good chance of coming out ahead. However, it is one thing to explain how Roky Erickson and his band mates redefined music and it is another to explain how their electric jug psychedelic rock took roots in the arid landscape of Austin, Texas.

Fortunately, there is Dirt Road to Psychedelia. Scott Conn’s independently-produced documentary film offers some answers while contextualizing the birth of a counterculture in the Lone Star state. As such, the film is less concerned with the 13th Floor Elevators (and Janis Joplin for that matter) than it is with depicting the Austin cultural scene within which artists and musicians proliferated during the turbulent sixties. The Erickson and Joplin stories have been told before and so Conn focuses on those people whose voice is less often heard.

Dirt Road to Psychedelia documents, on a micro-level, the making of a 1960s counterculture. The film is based on interviews conducted with those men and women who spent their prime years building the foundation of Austin’s current music scene. But Dirt Road to Psychedelia is not a vehicle for them to reminisce or assert their self-importance. On the contrary, the interviewees all manifest a certain gratefulness to have had the opportunity to help formulate a collective response to the cultural and political conservatism of 1960s America. Liquid projectionist David Martinez unassumingly notes that “you could have switched the personnel” and the story would “have essentially been the same.” He adds: “All that is beyond personal politics or energy.”

Conn recognizes nonetheless that the story he wants to tell is populated by individuals and collectives. There is obviously the 13th Floor Elevators and a young folk-singing Joplin but there are also groups such as The Waller Creek Boys, Conqueroo and Shiva’s Headband. There are also the people who used funds from the Austin university student magazine to organize get-togethers which ultimately evolved into student union-sponsored folk singing sessions. Finally, there are the individuals who helped relocate the emerging scene from the dry university campus to proto-freak-friendly venues such as Threadgill’s and The Vulcan Gas Company. The latter served as rallying point for Austin’s counterculture until it closed its doors in 1970 – the artists-run venue welcomed blues and psychedelic rock performers, film collectives, visual artists as well as experimental theater and dance groups.

Dirt Road to Psychedelia is ultimately a familiar story told in familiar ways. The film might disappoint those who feel that a documentary on psychedelic rock deserves more than a few dissolves involving images of bubbling liquid projections. The redundant use of certain photographic images and footage – for dramatic accentuation or didactic purposes – might also leave a number of psych enthusiasts disenchanted (there really isn’t much about the 13th Floor Elevators). It is highly probable that Conn lacked resources to secure access and the rights to more material but he compensates with a clear focus and an unflinching drive to document the making of Austin’s counterculture.

Conn’s Dirt Road to Psychedelia is a story told with simplicity and generosity. It does not seek to romanticize or lament the past. Instead, it provides further evidence that creative collective actions are possible even in times of profound disillusion in the face of rampant conservatism.

A Dirt Road to Psychedelia: Austin Texas during the 1960s

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