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If there's a transistor radio on in Tommy Hall's apartment now, its din has long been drowned out by newer electronics. On a giant flatscreen TV, cable news competes for attention with an Arabic dance CD, both blaring at a volume no sober person could withstand.
To get into Hall's place at the Artmar Hotel, you're buzzed in through two sets of gates. He's down a stained hallway from the shared bathroom. He doesn't own a phone, so visitors just show up, avoiding the paranoid glares of the crackhead neighbors. Hall claims he feels safe here. He survives on government assistance, leaving little money for anyone to steal.
Over the years Hall has created a cozy media metropolis at the Artmar, one as cluttered as his thoughts. The shoebox apartment is populated by skyscrapers of cassettes, CDs, and VHS tapes Hall says offer psychedelic training for the future. He's an avid reader, viewer, and collector of new ideas. These media high-rises reach toward the thick gray cobwebs that hang from the ceiling like stringy clouds.
It's hard to imagine how Hall lives in an apartment with so little space for movement, but when he's here, he resides primarily in his mind. He sits on his twin bed for hours at a time, getting high and working out the holy secrets of the stars, a thesis he's tagged "the design."
Ask Hall what he's been up to lately and he'll answer that he's been "running the design," like he's a supercomputer spinning infinite numbers through complex calculations. The exact nature of this design is something even his close friends cop to not quite understanding. His explanations are dotted with mentions of the fourth dimension, yogic theories, and patterns in the universe. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
"Like, right now I'm not even working with galaxies," he says. "I'm just on suns, although I've done those before."
Hall is as diligent and yet secretive about working on the design as a nuclear scientist unlocking the mysteries of the first atomic bomb. One day he hopes to publish his findings, and to make enough money off them to travel to England. Since he doesn't write anything down, though, it's doubtful these ideas will end up in book form — and even if they did, it's even less certain that anyone, except Tommy Hall, could comprehend them.
His process is nonetheless fascinating for the rituals it involves. Hall first focuses on a faded Mickey Mouse poster. He imagines the real galaxy looks much like the swirl behind the Disney icon, which reinforces to him that the design is real. While this is going on, he has the television tuned to European golf (he likes the slow-moving sport; you can miss a couple of shots and it's no big deal), and jazz on the CD player.
Hall spends $200 a month on new CDs, explaining that the art of creation requires the art of surprise, and you can't be surprised if you play the same old music all the time. He chooses jazz specifically because he believes it's an evolved art form. This is despite his racial bias against his favorites like Miles Davis or Donald Byrd.
Hall works off stereotypes that demean his intelligence. Some of these observations are humorous in their hypocrisy — like the fact that he's an acid-rock icon who hates hippies. "What did the hippies do with acid?" he asks. "They were out there throwing bombs. You can't blame Nixon for cracking down." Or that he's a lifelong Republican who supports the very politicians who sponsored the drug war.
But then there are the disturbing diatribes, where this spiritual man's talk of human evolution doesn't extend to specific minority groups. Hall often rants about a "fag agenda" (a convoluted idea involving vampire allusions in pop songs). And his high praise of African-American jazz and blues artists is dashed when he makes crass statements like "The white consciousness is the most evolved. The blacks aren't as evolved as we are."
His racism and homophobia can't, and shouldn't, be overlooked. These topics pop into many of his conversations. Even his best friends admit they change the subject when Hall brings up race or sexuality. Tausch says that there are certain subjects he is simply not allowed to discuss with her anymore.
But Hall isn't alone in being respected for what he created musically while having beliefs that are at odds with decent society. From Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism to Ike Turner's violent misogyny, we have unfortunate examples of artists who hold deplorable beliefs. But that doesn't alter the history they made musically.
The design won't bring Hall the riches he wishes for, but he will always have his Elevators legacy to stand on. Local music authority Richie Unterberger, who has written extensively on underground legends of the '60s, compares Hall to other icons of his era like Skip Spence and Arthur Lee, artists intent on exploring beyond the conventions of everyday experience. Listeners connect to that quest because it's different from their casual music encounters. "There's an element of really being on the edge that helped them tap into some very raw and deep emotions," Unterberger says of this category of musician. "They might be disturbing, but they're also the emotions you don't encounter very often in art."
The only known homage to Tommy Hall hangs in Bill Bentley's Los Angeles office. It's a painting by Memphis artist Lamar Sorrento, a portrait of Hall with a finger to his lips surrounded by lyrics from Easter Everywhere: "Leave your body behind. Keep on climbing."
Bentley says Hall is a link to a period of hallucinogenic exploration that has more casualties than it does survivors. Yet he keeps the faith in this philosophical mentor. "Tommy's still really in the middle of trying to go to a different place, to find a new reality," he says. He adds that after Hall fought so blindly for his band and his beliefs — against arrest, to the mental destruction of his bandmates, and into a life of poverty — he hopes Hall isn't disappointed in how things have turned out.
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