[anonymous]
This Actually Happened: Roky Erickson & GG Allin, Dallas, 1992

I already knew this photo, which portrays two of the most controversial and certainly influential figures in the history of rock 'n' roll. Nonetheless, I was struck by a comment, a kind of subtitle, that I found accompanying one of the various reproductions around the web: 'This Actually Happened.'

All this really happened. It really happened, it took place: this moment when someone, the author of the photograph I believe is unknown but if anyone has information on the matter, they are welcome to share (it could be a self-timer, who knows), captured in a photograph Roky Erickson in the company of GG Allin. And note that the exceptional thing about this photo is precisely the moment. We are not celebrating a photographic shot nor are we celebrating people portrayed in spectacular poses, nor are we celebrating those who, like it or not, we can certainly consider two greats in the history of rock. Here we are celebrating life in its most important meaning: that of being present, of living in the present time.

The history of rock 'n' roll is full of people who have harmed themselves. There are a bunch of murdered or suicidal deaths, people who have died due to excessive drug use and a reckless life, and someone else who is simply a survivor. There are those who have gone mad and those who have lost themselves; those who have sinned and never repented and someone who has seen the light and converted to the cult of some exotic deity. There are people who have made their life a kind of cult, in the sense of the manic pursuit of rules in some way that can be defined as obsessive-compulsive. And then there is us. We who listen to this music and know these stories and in the end, we are no different from these who are still people and with whom we can share emotions and even fears and sufferings. We all love, suffer, and all of us have problems that we face or pretend not to see, and how many times do we harm ourselves and how many times we simply cannot understand and would just like to escape from ourselves. It happened to me. It happens to me all the time, every time, and even though each time I hope it is the last, I always feel a state of agitation, like there's some demon inside me that I can't drive away. That I can't expel and with which I have to find a compromise. We all have to do it: it means finding one's own point of balance. But perhaps rock 'n' roll, what made it so mythical, lies precisely in a kind of cult and devotion to total lack of balance. And maybe that's why it means so much to me as it does to many other people. This music doesn't teach you anything, perhaps, there aren't (always) didactic contents in rock music and in what can be the parables and stories of those figures we consider legendary in some way, but very often, almost always, this music can tell you something about yourself and who you really are. So maybe if it doesn't teach you anything, it can still accompany you and in some way, in a transmatic process, make you feel less alone: because in the end none of us really is, at the moment we realize that our miseries, are the same as all others belonging to our same species.

Now someone might turn up their nose and consider it even offensive to be in some way akin to a character like GG Allin, an extreme and certainly also easily attacked figure from many points of view. He took to extreme consequences those who had been the attitudes of Iggy Pop or the theatricality of Alice Cooper and everything about destruction and self-destruction that rock and punk had taught him. He was completely crazy (perhaps) and yet at the same time somehow lucid and maniacal in his perfection and continuation of every intent of his. But after all, to say, isn't it true that serial killers have a higher than average IQ?

GG Allin, born in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and baptized by his father with the name Jesus Christ, for many could have been just a provocateur or a jerk, but he was an authentic person who suffered greatly and this up to hating himself and made this status of his and this feeling a real show and show, as if this could somehow lead him to exorcise those contents of life he couldn't understand. We will never know how lucid or not he was while engaging in self-mutilations and violence towards himself and others, while smearing his face with his own feces and swallowing his own seed. Maybe he simply hated life and hated himself and what I know is that there are many people who hate life and hate themselves, but can someone who hates themselves be considered completely lucid? I feel some affinity with this person and like all other people who suffer and feel pain and perhaps can't even understand why. GG Allin was like Jesus while exposing himself publicly and carrying his cross, except that when he died he didn't resurrect after three days and instead they organized a big party and everyone got drunk and did heroin around his corpse and they made a DVD out of it.

Roky Erickson instead is Roky Erickson. The father of USA psychedelic music who, crazy as a loon, began going in and out of asylums and detox centers starting from the late sixties.

Many draw a parallel between him and another troubled personality like that of Syd Barrett, because even if less known, Roky's contribution to rock and psychedelic music was not inferior to that of the former Pink Floyd, and who also withdrew to private life until the end of his days, but Erickson's personality has always been restless and pervaded by a certain state of agitation which is clearly visible in this photo from his appearance always somehow suffering and the way he screams in all his songs and albums released sporadically since the 1980s. Unlike Syd Barrett, who perhaps never found his own balance in this refuge of his until the end of his days, perhaps not, Roky has continued and continues to pop up where you least expect it. He never found his own balance, but he never stopped trying and every time he falls and then gets up, and every time there may be wounds that we can see in those eyes so deep and hollow within his face, but here, I think that here in some way is life. You can live your life even when you flee from it: it is more difficult, everything becomes in some way irregular, you're there and then you're not, you don't know how to do it, but you try anyway and this somehow counts. It still has some significance.

Why I like this photo. What's special about it. It was taken in Dallas, Texas, in 1992, GG Allin wouldn't have lived much longer and would have died the following year in New York from a heroin and alcohol overdose. It seems that that evening he escaped naked from a concert in a small club in Manhattan, when the power went out, and he ran through the streets of the city covered in blood and his own feces. I don't know the author of the photo, as mentioned, nor the exact circumstances in which it was taken and as far as we know the two could have considered that moment in a particular way or not. I don't know. But all this is not important. What matters is that this really happened, that there was a moment when someone managed to trap them together on a photographic film and in this way somehow made them so close and full of humanity in all its wonderful flaws and for this less alone. No, I don't feel better looking at this photo, what I feel is not some kind of soul serenity. It doesn't make me laugh, but perhaps in some way, it makes me smile and if it doesn't make me feel good, looking at them makes me feel less alone and in the company of someone else besides my demons that never leave you alone.