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If psychedelia had a face, it would be that of Roky Erickson, the first - true - man to reach the outer limits of the Universe. In 1967, after the release of "Easter Everywhere", the age d'or of the psychedelic season was almost over, a movement he himself may have officially started, and so were the 13th Floor Elevators: with the departure of Tommy Hall and his visionary jug, the reins of the group were taken over by guitarist Stacy Sutherland, who, in "Bull of the Woods", the last album of the legendary Texan formation, delivered his predictable task based on fuzz-rock with marked bluesy hues. On this last recorded effort, paradoxically, Roky Erickson, almost absent from the recording sessions due to legal troubles related to his drug use like marijuana, peyote, and LSD, perhaps signed his definitive piece, that "May the Circle Remain Unbroken" which finally fused together in a single amalgam his cosmic stream of consciousness and the psychotic noise of the Elevators... It's the end of an era.
For Roger Kynard Erickson, another era begins, one much more painful and dark akin to a cell. After speaking glaring nonsense at HemisFair in San Antonio before millions of people, he was locked up in the psychiatric hospital in Austin from where he was transferred, after repeated escape attempts, to the county criminal insane asylum, where he would be bombarded with psychotropic drugs and released only a few years later. Exiting this claustrophobic tunnel seemed to dedicate himself to poetry before returning, urged by historical figures like Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet), another guru of the Texas sound who took care of the production of his comeback single, to making music, but with a completely altered attitude. Roky Erickson was no longer the cosmonaut of the previous decade who saw his music as a dream space "where the pyramid meets the eye" (his famous personal definition of psychedelia) and who wrote about souls to sell and heavens to reach; his new mood, irrevocably marked by electroshocks, was instead oriented towards a darker supernatural populated by zombies, vampires, and other disturbing monsters worthy of the worst lowbrow science fiction. The fifteen songs recorded in the studio of Stu Cook, ex-bassist of Creedence Clearwater Revival, all contained in this 1987 collection, are indeed a horror bacchanal that is played out in wild rhythm and blues ("Don't Shake Me Lucifer"), in macabre voodoo rites ("Night of the Vampire") and in gloomy rave-ups like that of "Stand for the Fire Demon", which best captures the bonfire & scary stories atmosphere that pervades all these recordings. The music of this resurrected Erickson’s new band, the Aliens, moves away from the colorful hallucinations of the Elevators and leans towards a rock-hard guitar-driven sound, born from an unprecedented need for simplicity and immediacy, which is best expressed in pieces like "I Think of Demons", made of climaxes and torrential solos, and "I Walked With a Zombie", perhaps the most famous of the batch, which with its unforgettable chorus is a true anthem to the grotesque. For our hero, however, the circle was not yet destined to close. And, after asking a notary to issue an official statement that he himself was an alien, he returned to another psychiatric hospital.
I like to think that if Roky Erickson ended up, within one of those corny lists of the greatest personalities of rock'n'roll amidst the names of Brian Eno and Keith Richards, he would fly away in a whirlwind of stardust. Because for someone like him, who camped under bridges but, at the same time, dreamed of flying above the sky, a five-star hotel will never be the ideal accommodation. And to such a character, especially in this world increasingly threatened by the monstrosity of the normal, all my blessings go: may he continue to undermine the normality of everyone, as he has overturned my own. Because the circle is not destined to close, but perhaps it's better this way.
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