“Most of the time Roky would have a yellow legal pad, and he’d be sitting in the hallway somewhere, writing music, real weak and slumped down like that. He was a real nice little guy, didn’t have a whole lot to say.” So remembers Bob Priest in the 2005 Roky Erickson documentary, You’re Gonna Miss Me. According to Priest-- a psychiatrist at the maximum-security mental institution Rusk State Hospital in East Texas during Roky Erickson’s imprisonment there in the late 60s and early 70s-- writing music is what kept Erickson going during those horrifying years of compulsory electroshock therapy and Thorazine doses: “He wanted to write his music, and he wanted to play his music. And that’s all. At least it took his mind off where he was.”
The legend of Roky Erickson is one of the most compelling in rock history. As the leader of the 13th Floor Elevators, he codified 60s psychedelia-- helping establish the genre’s American vernacular, distinct from the prim Sgt. Pepper’s-isms of its British counterpart. Even further, the native Texan staked out a parochial claim on druggy, transcendental rock that was fuzzier and more deeply fried than the West Coast’s more cultured iteration. Regardless of geography, it was clear Erickson claimed citizenship in one place and one place only: his own head. At Rusk, he was forced to explore-- or retreat into-- previously uncharted fringes of that psychic territory. There he peered inward, hummed to himself, and wrote. And when he was released in 1974, he took that yellow legal pad and set about making those visions real.
Fits and false starts later, The Evil One was made manifest. Erickson’s official solo debut album, I Think of Demons, was released on CBS in 1980, but it was recorded concurrently-- by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook-- with the tracks that appear on The Evil One, which came out in 1981 after Erickson had been shunted to the Columbia-subsidized indie label 415. Erickson was just as out of place on a new-wave imprint as he was on a major. By then, he'd burned through a litany of sidemen and backing bands, not to mention a significant amount of momentum. Still his songs refused to trade in on the lingering glory of the Elevators or 60s nostalgia at large, hewing instead to a monster-movie fixation that-- at least in the arena where Erickson now found himself-- only the Misfits and the Damned might have been able to relate to. It was almost as if, after serving nearly four years in the mental institution at Rusk, he was being sentenced to another: punk.
Thanks to synchronicity, osmosis, or both, the punkness of The Evil One is one of its great strengths. Played by his new band the Aliens, “Two Headed Dog” and “Bloody Hammer” pump and slam with a stiff, chiseled precision that couldn’t be further from the Elevators’ shimmering multi-dimensionality. Then again, Erickson is a fucking monster-- one who sings about monsters. In a spasms of feral, lip-twisted fury, he snarls about demons, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and demons again with all the intensity of a rabies victim. That said, the album has just as much in common with the progressive, sci-fi-obsessed hard rock of Blue Öyster Cult-- or the lurid phantasmagoria of Alice Cooper, minus the camp-- as it does with punk.
The best-known track on The Evil One, “I Walked With a Zombie”, neatly pinpoints Erickson’s perception of rock'n'roll circa 1980. It’s batshit-- but in the most composed way, possessing the kind of coherent, clear-eyed, convinced-of-its-own-sanity insanity that makes the blood of the observer run cold. Zombies it is, then, as Erickson draws on (or gives in to) his preoccupation with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”-- decades before those signifiers would become self-consciously cool again. There’s also something eerily Television-like about the oscillating, icicle guitars and the emotionless petrification of Erickson’s voice. He may have, as he sings, “walked with a zombie last night”-- but the zombie probably had more to fear than Erickson did.
The Evil One is getting a fresh coat of paint as part of a trifecta of Erickson reissues, the other two being Don’t Slander Me and Gremlins Have Pictures, both from 1986. Their genius is less feverish, but only by a few degrees. Originally released on the retro-garage label Pink Dust, Erickson was now being lumped in with the pointy-booted likes of Plan 9 and Plasticland-- not to mention a forward-looking new psychedelic outfit called the Flaming Lips, whose Pink Dust debut Hear It Is also came out in 86. Perversely, Don’t Slander Me has more in common with early Lips than with the retro-60s acts; predictably, it still sounds like no one but Erickson.
If Erickson’s schizophrenic paranoia was on the rise-- at the time he was fanatically obsessed with finding messages in random pieces of mail, leading to his arrest in 1989 for mail theft-- his music didn’t show it. The Aliens now gone, he led his new outfit the Explosives through a lean, sinewy batch of songs that display Erickson at his most lucid and direct. True, he sings about “false gods” and “devils” on the album’s title track, but the song also ditches the hard-rock sheen of The Evil One in favor of souped-up garage rock. Erickson sounds more at home in his skin, even as he sings far more prosaic lyrics about love and, well, the Bermuda Triangle. There’s even a lunge toward power-pop on the ringing, jangly “Starry Eyes” and the Buddy Holly-esque “You Drive Me Crazy”, which aches so sincerely for Erickson’s lost 60s that his “heart pounds suffocatingly loud.” And even when he laughs maniacally after singing “the candles in my candelabra burn hellishly” in “Burn the Flames”, it’s good, clean, Halloweenish fun.
The cleanliness and control of Don’t Slander Me makes for a more palatable but less vital Erickson. Gremlins Have Pictures has no such problem. Culled from a decade’s worth of live recordings and studio outtakes-- ranging from his first post-incarceration show in Austin in 1975 to his sessions for Slander-- Gremlins provides a candid peek under Erickson’s hood during his most potent years as a solo artist. Top to bottom, it’s a revelation. Songs that would later appear on The Evil One, including “Night of the Vampire” and “Cold Night for Alligators” (renamed “It’s a Cold Night for Alligators”), are rendered live, jagged, and unhinged enough for the chaos of Erickson’s subconscious to bleed through. And his pummeling cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” is so hoarse and harrowing, it gives new insight into the taken-for-granted original.
But it’s the acoustic material on Gremlins Have Pictures that truly stuns. The queasy slide guitar on “I Am” removes any semblance of solid ground from Erickson’s hammering folk and Satanic sentiment; “Song to Abe Lincoln”, with its lo-fi sing-song and off-kilter shuffle, could pass for the Shaggs; “I Have Always Been Here Before” allows Erickson to extend his titular paradox into a skeletal meditation on memory-- both its contents and its malfunction. Of Gremlins’ many high points, “I’m a Demon” sears the brain most vividly. An unplugged, unaccompanied rockabilly stomper that suffers not at all from its starkness, the song burns through a litany of variations on Erickson’s beloved demon motif: “I’m a demon and I love rock'n'roll”; “I’m a demon/ I have a big family”; and spine-chillingly, “I see a demon/ And at the same time I see you.” It’s an eternal, elemental performance, a roughhewn mass of outsider self-exorcism that echoes alongside Hasil Adkins, Syd Barrett, Jonathan Richman, Daniel Johnston, and Alex Chilton. It does this all in a minute and a quarter.
Erickson’s place in the pantheon of outsider art isn’t in question. The best thing about this trio of reissues, though, is how accessible Erickson actually is. Even at his most deranged, his songs snag and beguile the mind with jagged remnants of classic pop-rock hooks-- as if remembered from a previous life-- and imagistic twists of phrase that turn schlock into catharsis and b-movies into mythic sagas. Erickson’s own myth does not enter into the equation. After his comeback bid in the 80s, he wound up retreating again, popping up occasionally in the 90s and early 00s before You’re Gonna Miss Me (and a new generation of disciples) sparked his current renaissance. He may be a character in his own narrative, hero and/or villain, but he sings from the perspective of a man standing outside himself, having escaped the prison he carries with him. If only for a few minutes at a time-- just long enough to commit it to his yellow legal pad, or what passes for it.
