There were nearly as many people on stage as in the crowd at the Echo last night to witness the phenomenon that was a 35-minute set from Dark Meat, the 17-piece psychedelic rock collective from Athens, Georgia. Dark Meat has been tearing up small venues in the South for a few years. Now signed to Vice Records, this orgiastic cacophony of punk vocals, horns, gospel, double drums, and manic prancing on the dance floor made......

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, died at his home near Basel, Switzerland on Tuesday. Hofmann synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) in 1938 and five years later became the first person to experience a full-blown acid trip. On April 16, 1943, Hofmann inadvertently absorbed a little LSD-25 compound in his fingertips at the Sandoz laboratory (now Novartis) where he worked. In a note to the lab director he described what happened next:“I was......

For a night largely dedicated to tales of Lucifer and his minions, it was bit strange to look around the El Rey on Sunday night at a sea of smiling faces. But Roky Erickson’s return to the LA stage for the first time in twenty-six years was cause for celebration. The audience - a family reunion of freaks, old punkers, and psychedelic survivors - received every devilish incantation as if it was a Christmas......

There may be no American musician more ripe for the documentary treatment than Roky Erickson. There’s the tale of great promise in 1966 as the 13th Floor Elevators invent psychedelic rock and gain a reputation as the most other-worldly group alive. There’s a long period of reinvention as he continues to produce great stuff – cryptic and haunted though it is - into the 1980s. There’s a backstory of madness and decline. There’s even a......