Price paid: £5 from a record fair in a gymnasium in Leicester, circa 2004-ish.

At the time I spied this LP, Roky Erickson’s solo career was still very much an unknown to me. Of course, I already knew and loved the work of The 13th Floor Elevators (I have a budget two-fer CD package bought from a Borders clearout sale at an impressionable age to thank for that one), but beyond that…? I was vaguely aware that the guy had made some scattered recordings subsequent to his release from Rusk State mental hospital in the mid-70s, but – to their eternal shame - none of the sources I relied upon for musical guidance at the time had clued me into the fact that this music might be worth tracking down and listening to.

Since then, both reissues of Roky’s ‘official’ discography and his surprise re-emergence as an active presence in the world circa 2007 have helped to raise the profile of his solo work to some extent, but if you ask me, it STILL doesn’t get its due, and, back in the early ‘00s, this disc felt like some way-out, marginal shit, lurking on the fringes of the cult-rock canon; a shrugged off footnote to the litany of collapse and mental illness that ended every potted Elevators biog.

As such, I had no idea what I was getting into. “Oh, that guy from The 13th Floor Elevators who went crazy,” I remember thinking to myself. “I wonder what he got up to after the band broke up?”

Even in those pre-vinyl revival days, £5 seemed like a strikingly low sum to fork out for an answer to that question, so I took the plunge, returning to my dusty, rented garret and only to drop the needle and discover THE BEST ANSWER I could possibly have imagined.

I had been expecting, I suppose, merely a curio – some damaged, acid casualty folk meanderings would have been my best guess. So, you can imagine the joy I felt being hit full on by the raging, high energy distorto-choogle of ‘The Wind And More’, and realising that Roky Erickson had actually spent the decade following his incarceration crafting an awe-inspiring catalogue of raw, punkoid heavy rock songs dealing with vampires, zombies and the wiles of Satan, and indeed had performed them with raucous gusto, backed up here by what sounds like the most shit-hot bar band in the entire universe. Holy cow!

Why didn’t anyone TELL ME he was this great?, I remember thinking. As I proceeded to dig deeper into some of Rykodisc’s CD reissues, discovering the sinister, synapse-blazing wonders of Two Headed Dog, I Think of Demons and I Have Always Been Here Before, my disbelief at the fact that Roky Erickson wasn’t enthroned amid the highest pantheon of weirdo rock’n’roll royalty only grew. I mean, whichever way you approach it, this shit is just amazing. These records are raw and uncouth and mind-bogglingly strange, but, through all his travails, the guy’s aesthetic vision remained pure, whilst, in terms of melodic song-writing, he just knocked out hit after hit after hit.

All these years later though, I still think that this shady bootleg, of uncertain provenance and unknown recording date, remains one of the strongest Roky performances ever captured on tape, and one of the best possible introductions to his particular thing.

As his fans will be painfully aware, Roky’s tempestuous mental health made the quality of his live appearances pretty hit and miss, to say the least. I was lucky enough to see him perform on three separate occasions following his surprise come-back in 2007, and, though he was by all accounts experiencing a greater degree of personal stability than he had enjoyed in decades, it was still pretty eerie to hear him perform his songs in perfect, note-for-note fashion, dutifully recreating every slurred line and vocal tic of the studio-recorded versions, before staring vacantly into the middle distance once the applause died down, not saying a word, and often relying on his band members to prompt him by whispering the title of the next song in his ear. (Those who have attended Brian Wilson concerts during the 21st century will quite possibly have noticed the same phenomenon.)

By contrast, the performance presented on ‘An Evening With..’ finds Roky on absolutely top form, sounding sharp, energised and clearly in the mood for some ad-libs and improvisation. (I STILL don’t know where and when this album was recorded by the way, but The Explosives began acting as Roky’s backing band from 1978 through to the beginning of his “lost years” in the early/mid ‘80s, so… probably sometime around then.) (1)

“The Hells Angels at the Mick Jagger concert…. stabbing the girl at Altamont!” he exclaims, apropos of nothing, during the instrumental coda to opener ‘The Wind And More’ (basic fact checking = not a Roky specialty). This song, apparently written in celebration of Luciferian powers of telekinesis, has incidentally become one of my favourites in Roky’s horror-rock repertoire, and it gets a great extended work-out here.

“The forces of evil are in full sway!”, he cheerfully declares as the ominous, opening chords of ‘Night of the Vampire’ kick in, and indeed, the old boy seems to have been having a whale of a time, his rhythm guitar ringing our rude, loud and in perfect time. Encouraged perhaps by this, the band seem to be at their ease and proceed to play a veritable blinder. (2)

Lead guitarist Cam King is, it must be said, very dominant here. Building on the tricky lead lines devised by Duane Aslaksen of Roky’s prior backing band The Aliens, King takes things to what I think can be safely deemed “the next level”, packing every available second of these recordings with grandstanding, soar-with-the-eagles shred. Crucially however, he never steps on his boss’s toes, and remains in sympathy always with the spirit and melody of the songs. A perfect “church key” accompanist, he brings a variety and excitement to the sound that keeps even the gruelling, mantra-like repetition of the eight minute ‘Stand For The Fire Demon’ sounding fresh.

At the end of the side one, goaded on by shouted requests from a woman in the crowd, the band even take a shot at ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’. “This is a song they play in old Baptist church houses, on the old wooden organ..” Roky rambles by way of an introduction, before being cut off by The Explosives, who proceed to transform the song’s immortal four chord stomp (one of the first things I ever learned to play on the guitar, incidentally) into a punkoid juggernaut so joyous it almost succeeds in eclipsing the original Spades and Elevators versions in my affections, aided by King’s valiant attempt to recreate the inimitable sound of Tommy Hall’s “electric jug” by means of some high velocity, tremolo neck-tapping.

I believe it was Jad Fair who once said that there are only two kinds of songs that matter, love songs and monster songs, and rarely has an artist taken that ethos to heart quite so thoroughly as Roky Erickson. Another thing then that helps make this bootleg so great is that it’s track list takes the time to highlight the oft-overlooked former aspect of his catalogue. In between the scarifying odes to gremlins, ghosts and demons, each side of the LP contains a beautiful example of Roky’s gentler balladry, reminding us that, in a kinder, less weird world, he could easily have enjoyed an alternative career as a romantic pop troubadour, slotting straight into the specifically Texan tradition of Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller.

‘For You’, on the A side, is in particular a wonderful song, and Roky’s stuttering declaration that “the other girls were around / but I never tried to score” [because] “I'd stay completely true / I who would wait forever / wait for you” is incredibly touching – a disarmingly sweet flip-side to the kind of swaggering, travellin' band machismo we’d reasonably expect from this brand of OTT ‘70s heavy rock, and a reminder that, in a weird sort of way, Roky also often feels like a spiritual precursor to the oddball, heart-on-sleeve stylings of the aforementioned Mr Fair, or to his sometime movie buddy Daniel Johnson.

(Insofar as I’m aware, this was ‘For You’s first recorded appearance, although it was reprised in slightly altered form on Roky’s excellent 1995 ‘comeback’ album All That May Do My Rhyme, a beautiful set which concentrates primarily on his love songs, and is well worth tracking down.)

At the complete other end of the scale meanwhile, Side B also contains what I feel is one of the best available versions of the oft-recorded Bloody Hammer, arguably the definitive statement of Roky’s post-hospital era, and a singular landmark of post-traumatic outsider art / heavy metal damage. It’s impossible to fully compartmentalise the disorientating rush of mixed emotions embodied in this song, but, like the very best of the horror movies Roky loved so much, it is a pretty overpowering experience, both exhilarating / empowering and sickeningly disturbing.

Marking what I think is the only instance of Roky explicitly addressing the nightmare of his incarceration and electro-shock “therapy” in his lyrics (“I am the doctor / I am the psychiatrist / to make sure they don’t hammer their minds out”), the song’s implications of real world abuse swiftly dissolve into a terrifying melange of incoherent horror imagery (“the baby ghost in the 1900s says, beat it with your chain!”) that, paradoxically, feel far too much like a raw wound for its public airing as a rock n’ roll freakout to seem at all comfortable.

For all that some may see a bottomless, Mansonite black hole at the heart of Roky’s music though, he – and, by extension, we – can take strength from the fact that, in spite of all the ugly obstacles placed in his path, he never went fully over the dark side. For all the shrieking demons he conjured on stage, he never lost his natural gentleness, or his stuttering, schoolboy naivety. As he is determined to tell us, even in this darkest corner of his songbook, “I never have that bloody hammer”.

Throughout his life, Roky Erickson treaded a harder road than most of us can imagine, but by embracing his demons and inviting them out to party, he came through it smiling, with his amp roaring, ready to entertain, and may God and Satan alike bless him for that.

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Throughout the halcyon years of file-sharing, I searched in vain for a ripped mp3 copy of ‘An Evening with Roky Erickson & The Explosives’, longing to carry it around with me and plunder it for mix CDs. After much frustration, I finally discovered that the exact same recording is in fact far better known under the seemingly arbitrary title of ‘Casting The Runes’, and that it first appeared in 1987 (see footnote below), and subsequently on CD during the ‘90s.

You can listen to it in its entirety on Youtube here, and you know what? If anything I’ve written above remotely interests you, you REALLY, REALLY should.

After that, you will naturally want to hear more, so I would recommend atoning for your bootlegging sins by buying some of the official Roky Erickson reissues, from which his family and estate will hopefully receive some royalties. (Gremlins Have Pictures would be my number # 1 pick for beginners.)

An Evening with Roky Erickson & The Explosives gets the square root of a zillion kaleidoscopic thumbs ups, and an eternal, three-eyed love triangle stare.



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(1)Whilst researching this post, I have finally ascertained that the tracks on this LP were recorded at the Soap Creek Saloon, Austin TX, on November 27th 1979, and at the Rock Island club in Houston on December 22nd 1979. The recordings were made by David Hough for use in a planned documentary entitled ‘Meeting with an Alien’, and Edwin “Savage Pencil” Pouncey provided sleeve notes for the first LP release under the title ‘Casting the Runes’, which appeared in 1987. Thanks Discogs!

(2) We should put in a word here about Erickson’s fondness for excessive volume and full spectrum guitar distortion when playing in a band context – an element that lends a hair-raising proto-punk kick to his earliest solo recordings. Throughout his post-hospital years, Roky reportedly used blaring noise from TVs and radios as a kind of DIY therapy, and his maximalist approach to guitar-playing (pretty rare in children of the ‘60s) seems to have reflected this, to the extent that, during a series of ill-fated Elevators reunion gigs in the early ‘70s, the other band members were forced to rig up a system that allowed them to covertly turn his amp down, because otherwise he’d just crank all the dials to ten and deafen everybody. (This story is recalled from the book ‘Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound’ by Paul Drummond, which came out in 2007 and is a *great* read, albeit a rather expensive one at the time of writing (reprint please!)).

Labels: album reviews, deathblog, old LPs, Roky Erickson, The Explosives