At 4.20 on a Tuesday afternoon, in a room steeped in humidity, I am waiting my turn to interview Roky Erickson. No one seems to know what exactly is going on. The location appears to have mysteriously changed from CBS records UK headquarters in London’s Soho Square – where I am – to the Portobello Hotel, where Erickson is. Queries as to the whys and wherefores of the move are met with a vagueness that becomes increasingly irksome to have to confront. Finally a call from the Portobello fills me in as to the strategy afoot. A timid-voiced PR addresses the matter at hand: ‘Ah . . . we decided that doing interviews here would be more conducive. You see, Rocky is a . . . um . . . very sensitive person and uh . . . very shy. It would be wise, Nick, if you were . . . um, patient and a bit tactful when talking to him. The flight over has probably . . . disorientated him some what.’
The Roky Erickson interview. Extract 1
NK: Though you were raised in Texas, apparently you’re currently living in San Francisco, isn’t that so?
RE: [Long pause.] Uh . . . it’s a secret. Ah don’t give out mah address to anyone.
NK: Why is that?
RE: [Even longer pause] Beg pardon? Could you repeat that question again?
NK: Why do you keep your current base of operations a secret?
RE: Well . . . it’s a . . . [a pause of approximately sixty-five seconds’ duration] it’s a secret.
NK: [Changing subject] Your songs, the lyrics, are constantly referring to ‘demons’ and demonic forces. How do these creatures manifest themselves to you?
RE: [After an absurdly long pause] In secret. [Nods his head as if proclaiming some remarkable truth]
If this was the nineties, Roky Erickson would probably be termed ‘an alternative rock performer’. But as it’s only 1980, he gets to be called a cult-hero a lot. Which is to say, he doesn’t sell many records – in fact he doesn’t get to make many – but those few he does manage to release end up being bought by the most influential kind of people. Just don’t try asking him why that is, though.
He was born in 1947, the eldest of five criminal-minded brothers and his upbringing within the lower-middle-class confines of Austin, Texas, was shaped principally by a domineering mother, who’d once been an opera singer only to become a fervent Bible Belt fundamentalist. Throughout his formative years Erickson the eldest was constantly being force-fed a sensory diet of hellfire-and-brimstone religious dogma. Meanwhile, his own fixation with trashy fifties horror comics and the vintage black-and-white ghoul B-movies that appeared on late-night TV made for a queasy mix of instant culture shock.
The Roky Erickson Interview. Extract 2
NK: What was the first music you recall hearing?
RE: Uh . . . ah . . . ah don’t . . . [Complete blank-out for some forty seconds. Erickson eventually snaps out of his phase-out, scratches his nose and belches.]
NK: Well, when did you first play the guitar?
RE: Ah . . . uh . . . ah . . . didn’t play the guitar first. Ah played the piano first. Picked up t’ guitar when ah was ten years. But ah played piano first.
NK: What sort of music did you play on the piano then? Were you classically trained or did you try and play like, say, Little Richard?
RE: [Obligatory long pause.] Nooo, ah didn’t play like Little Richard. T’ way ah played piano was, uh, ah’d put a razor-blade between the keys so when anybody . . . y’know – [lethargically demonstrates a hand running over the eighty-eight keys] – their fingers’d be cut off. [He smiles at this, then his eyes return to their frozen zombie droop. He lights another cigarette.]
Inspired by British Invasion bands like the Kinks, Yardbirds, Who, Rolling Stones, etc., at fifteen years of age the diminutive Erickson formed his first group, the Spades. As lead singer and guitarist, Erickson also began song-writing, with the result that a local Austin label – International Artists – signed the group and released a single, ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’, composed by him. A fervent garage-band stab at the kind of white R’n’B that Them and Rolling Stones themselves were waxing at the time, it became a local hit before accelerating into a national Top 40 smash. During this time the Spades suddenly metamorphosed into the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
The name change came about when Erickson and his collaborators were approached by one Tommy Hall, a self-appointed Svengali-type several years their senior and a teacher in sociology around the Austin area. While the early acid experiments instigated by Ken Kesey on the West Coast were being immortalized by Tom Wolfe, similar less-publicized forays into the world of hallucinogenics were being undertaken by a clique of young Austin students who’d discovered mescaline and other intoxicants growing in the fields around their home state. Hall was among the first to discover the potency of ‘psychedelic’ drugs, and introduced his findings to Erickson and Co., also electing to become the group’s ersatz guru, lyricist and – oh yes – jug-player.
The Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ short, erratic history is a quintessential odyssey of the so-called psychedelic life-style run ragged, of Utopian ideals duly dashed into the dirt by the very drugs that set the whole thing in motion in the first place.
Basically the group weren’t that startling. They made sniggering references to the virtues of taking psychedelics in their rather silly lyrics, while the music was a curious grab-bag of folk rock, jug band and rhythm’n’blues that occasionally sparked to an inspired consequence but just as often sounded stodgy and self-indulgent. Of the original members, one has since been murdered, another has found Scientology, another is a junkie . . . And then there’s Roky, of course.
He’d already become addicted to methedrine during a ruinous stay in San Francisco during 1967 that had forced the whole band to return glumly to Austin. Once back in the Lone Star State, Erickson quickly became marked by the authorities as a subversive influence on the state’s youth owing to his band’s overt promoting of hallucinogenics. Soon enough he got busted for a small amount of hashish. Faced with the choice of jail or mental hospital, he chose the latter without fully comprehending the consequences of his decision. Once incarcerated, he escaped and was eventually caught again – in possession of some opiate though it could’ve been a frame-up – with the result that he was sentenced to stay in Shoal Creek Mental Institution for an indefinite period. Erickson remained there, subjected to thorazine and electro-shock therapy, for three long years, until certain acquaintances enlisted the aid of a lawyer to help get him out again.
The Roky Erickson interview. Extract 3
NK: The period you spent in the, uh, hospital – did you feel that you had been used as a scapegoat?
RE: No.
NK: What do you feel about the three years you spent there? How did it affect you?
RE: [Long pause.] Beg pardon? Could you repeat the question again?
NK: The mental hospital – your stay in the hospital. . .
RE: Uh . . . we-e-ell, that was propaganda.
NK: What was?
RE: [Pause.] The hospital, yup.
NK: Are you saying that you didn’t get locked away in a mental hospital, a sanatorium, for three years?
RE: Uh [long pause] . . . no, ah have to say ah didn’t. Oh, will you excuse me for a second!
Once released, Erickson found himself getting involved in flirtations with heroin and methedrine. Back in Austin he met up with Doug Sahm, whose Sir Douglas Quintet had been Austin’s other mid-sixties rock band of consequence, albeit purveying a Tex-Mex sound totally at odds with the Elevators’ rambling psychedelia. With a budget of exactly one hundred dollars Sahm took Erickson into the studio.
The result was four tracks, including a single, ‘Red Temple Prayer’ – also known as ‘Two Headed Dog’ – which was released on the little-known Mars label in 1976. Credited to Erickson and ‘Blieb Alien’, the cut was a quite extraordinary piece of music, commencing with what sounded like twenty out-of-tune Fender Jaguars imitating the sound of Hitchcock’s The Birds descending in full flight on a lone Volkswagen. Then Erickson opened his lips and commenced his deranged howlings, bemoaning the fact that he’d ‘been working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog’. The cumulative effect was something else again, not dissimilar to Captain Beefheart in terms of undermining conventions, although the basic chord structure was stock three-chord hard rock. The components, though – Erickson’s crazed vocals, the disorientating clash of rock guitar and electric autoharp, the fractured splurge of images that somehow conspired to mould together a vision of psychotic dread – created a record of quite unique mood and power.
Then just as the Erickson single appeared, so the Thirteenth Floor Elevators suddenly became a hip name to drop. First Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell raved about the group, even going so far as to perform ‘Fire Engine’, an Elevators original, as a kind of homage. Then Patti Smith, who always knew a good bandwagon when she jumped on one, immediately cited the group as ‘inspirational’. Cleveland’s Pere Ubu did likewise. All of a sudden, old long-deleted Elevators albums (there are four in all) were changing hands in London record stores for twenty pounds or more.
Erickson meanwhile was recording demos of new songs – he boasted of there being some three hundred to choose from – with titles like ‘Creature with the Atom Brain’, ‘I Walked with a Zombie’, ‘Mine Mine Mind’, ‘Bloody Hammer Dr Chane’, ‘Night of the Vampire’, ‘Don’t Shake Me Lucifer’, ‘I Think of Demons’ and ‘Bo Diddley was a Headhunted. Tapes circulated around proved conclusively that the perverse brilliance of ‘Two Headed Dog’ was not a one-off. Like Syd Barrett’s, Erickson’s music expressed a state of sanity dangerously at odds with convention. While the likes of David Byrne and Richard Hell attempted to articulate the psychotic mentality through the craft of study and assimilation, Erickson was quite simply the real thing running rampant.
So how does a special kind o’ guy like Roky get to land a major record deal with CBS when he’s clearly several bricks shy of a full hod? Well, this is actually all the province of a young A&R man named Howard Thompson who single-handedly battled to sign his idol up for one album, even when the American parent company would have nothing to do with the scheme. As a result, an album, Erickson’s first ever, entitled Five Symbols, is getting released. Unfortunately, where previous demo-tapes still sound alive with a menacing magnificence, Symbols removes all that edge, rendering the music as nothing more than average heavy-metal amps-ups. The production makes Erickson sound like a side-show freak spewing forth Hammer-horror mind-scrambles. Where Erickson’s music once was disturbing and rabidly radical, Five Symbols conspires to make it sound tame and rather insignificant.
To make matters worse, Thompson gets granted a three and a half thousand pound promo budget, insufficient funds to bring Erickson’s band over here to play gigs (Erickson is generally considered a forceful live performer ‘when the mood is right’). Instead, he gets flown in for a series of interviews with the music press spanning several days. Even though he is accompanied by his newly wedded bride, Holly (a former waitress whom he met at a club), plus managers Bruce King and Craig Luckin, Erickson appears to be a virtual zombie. Of course, the interview turns out to be a fiasco. Looking like a heavily sedated midget Rasputin with long crow-black hair and a lank beard to match, Erickson is barely capable of articulating more than two syllables every five minutes. The lights may be half on, but there is absolutely no one home. In fact, during an hour-long attempt at communication, Erickson only ‘awakens’ once. His eyes suddenly come alive, certain words catch his thus-far dormant brain-waves and he suddenly mutters, ‘Hey, yeah, positive love! That’s right! Hey, this is a good interview. Let me get another coffee, OK!’ (He’s already poured down five steaming black cups in less than half an hour.)
As he waddles off, his wife turns to me. ‘I’d advise you to ask all your questions again,’ she says evenly. ‘He’s woken up.’
Are his communication lapses something of a put-on then, I innocently enquire?
‘Oh no, not at all,’ she shrugs. ‘He’s like that all the time.’
‘The Devil. . . no, ah’m not afraid of the Devil. Why should I be? It’s mah religion.’
Welcome to my second Roky Erickson encounter. Apparently he tends to liven up a bit once it gets dark. It’s 10 p.m. Same location, two days on. Of course, he fails to recognize me. (Poor old Howard Thompson, who’s been with him all week, arrives later laden with presents – books on Stonehenge – for Roky. Roky doesn’t recognize him either.)
‘See, the Devil will punish you if you are bad.’
Each word is masticated over in an irksome Texan drawl that heightens the somnambulistic effect even further. ‘He stands at the gates of Hell and if you’re bay-ad he’ll send you down there. Ah know all this, see. Ah know ’cos the Devil is like mah friend. Ah am his, uh, chosen one. Out of all the people in the world he came to me and said, “Roky, you are mah . . . human” . . .? Ah don’t know just the right word for it. Maybe you do?’
Mouthpiece?
‘Uh . . . no. There’s this word, though. Like ah’m his “chosen one”. He chose me to do his biddin’, see.’
I’m sorry. Let me get this straight. You are the Devil’s chosen one. . .
‘Yup.’
The Devil being the very incarnation of Evil itself.
‘Well, ah wouldn’t say that! He punishes you if you are bayad. He’ll send you straight to Hell.’
And what, pray tell, is Hell then, Mr Roky?
Whew boy, it’s a . . . terrible place to be. Believe you me, it’s lahk all fiery and full o’ sinners. And you’re in there for ever.
‘No-oo, ah’m not frightened of goin’ to Hell. The Devil, see . . . he’s mah friend. Just as long as ah’m good, ah’ll be all right. See, them at the hospital, they tried to keep me in there but they didn’t realize mah power. How could they?
‘Poor fools! Them doctors and nurses, whew, they’re all crazy! They couldn’t hold me in! They couldn’t mess with the Devil’s chosen one! How could they?’
Quite. But back to the Devil himself.
‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing about the Devil. He don’t wanna rule the world. [Pause.] But then again maybe he does! [Longer pause] I guess I’ll have to figure that one out!
‘See, the Devil has chosen me on his, uh . . . own – but I’ve got to have mahself a good time at the same time. Now how do you figure that?’
Roky Erickson fiddles with what look like dried-up food particles festooned in his beard, squints and ponders this pressing dilemma awhile. You can literally see the eyes beginning to fog over again: a strange chemical mist descending around the retinas. In three minutes he’ll be back in the land of the living dead. (’Ah kinda liked that film. Ah love to see them zombies dance.’) I meanwhile will be silently praying the much-predicted psychedelic revival gets postponed just a little while longer.