ROKY ERICKSON
A new Roky Erickson tribute album, with Billy F Gibbons, Lucinda Williams, Jeff Tweedy and more!
There’s a new tribute album to Austin, Texas’ psychedelic genius, and Billy F Gibbons, Jeff Tweedy, Margo Price and more are along for the ride. But how’d it happen, and why?
“BACK IN January ’66 when I first saw The 13th Floor Elevators, I’d never seen a band as strong,” says Austin, Texas writer and producer Bill Bentley. “Their music gave a lyrical reality to what I was looking for – it was like the Bible, it taught me something about another world that was real. I’ve searched for that in everything since then.”
Heady claims for a band – usually. But when it comes to the still-strobing legacy of Roky Erickson and his band of psychedelic kamikazes, all rhetorical norms are suspended. In 1990, Bentley was behind the Roky covers album Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye, when ZZ Top, Julian Cope, R.E.M. and more paid homage and raised funds for the embattled singer and songwriter, whose mental health struggles were ongoing. Bentley’s new set, May The Circle Remain Unbroken:
A Tribute To Roky Erickson, was sparked at a San Francisco show in April 2019, when Erickson reprised the Elevators’ 1967 classic Easter Everywhere in full. He died a month later.
“I saw him struggling to breathe between songs,” says Bentley of his friend. “I saw that Roky’s time on earth was over. And what the Elevators taught me was, that’s not the end of things. That night in 2019, I said, I’ve got to do another tribute record to Roky. There are several generations that are new to him, and maybe we can show them what he and the Elevators did.” Whereupon Bentley, who has also helmed similar love-ins for Skip Spence and Doug Sahm, put the word out. The result is a heartfelt salute to Roky’s writing, from third-eye dilating
Elevators faves and by-demons-driven solo work to beauteous meditations on love and oneness, with contributors including Jeff Tweedy, Gary Clark Jr, Chelsea Wolfe, Ty Segall, Mark Lanegan and Mosshart Sexton, AKA Alison Mosshart and Charlie Sexton.
The latter musician, an Austin guitarist who plays for Bob Dylan, speaks for them all when he tells MOJO, “When Bill called me about it, I said, Cool, of course I want to do it for Roky. It was strange and daunting and fun.”
Sexton first met Erickson in Austin when he was a kid in the late ’70s, and recalls Roky, in satin bell-bottoms and matching shirt with a captain’s cap, coming back to the family home to sleep on the couch. He smoked so many cigarettes they thought the house was on fire. He remembers a man who was much more than a sufferer of schizophrenia.
“Roky had that sparkle in his eye,” says Sexton. “He really worked on his songs. He had, obviously, the situation that he was in, but was very clever too, very funny, and he really was sweet. He’d do certain things, and play off that kooky thing, you know? You’d catch the corner of his eye and he’d be looking at you, like, ‘Ha Ha!’ You know?”
Sexton and Mosshart bring a beatific recreation of Starry Eyes to the party; other standouts include Williams’ feral revisiting of You’re Gonna Miss Me, Billy F Gibbons’ flashback to Levitation (“He went out of his way to learn how to do jug parts on guitar!” says Bentley. “That’s intense!”) and Margo Price’s roadhouse gothic creepy-crawl around Red Temple Prayer (Two-Headed Dog).
“I’ve never seen an artist go as far out mentally as Roky and still survive,” muses Bentley. “He kind of left the planet. But he came back. My mission now is to get a statue in Austin for him, next to Stevie Vaughan. The two albums are 30 years apart which means I’ll be 100 when I do the next one! In one form or another, we’ll still be here, right? So let’s do it, man!”
May The Circle Remain Unbroken: A Tribute To Roky Erickson gets a Record Store Day vinyl release on July 17. A CD will follow.
“I’ve never seen an artist go as far out mentally as Roky and still survive.” BILL BENTLEY