Roky Erickson
Frontman with the 13th Floor Elevators whose career was derailed by struggles with mental illness
ROKY ERICKSON, the Texan psychedelic rocker, who has died aged 71, is best remembered for his driving 1960s classic You’re Gonna Miss Me and as the singer in the ground-breaking acid rock outfit, the 13th Floor Elevators.
When the British music journalist Tom Hibbert visited Erickson in the mid-1990s in the singer’s hometown of Austin, Texas, he encountered a shack-dwelling, somnolent individual living on welfare with “top front teeth worn down to fangs of minimalism, hair matted and trousers that hardly fit at all” – who was nevertheless still capable of “conjuring beguiling music from the clutter of his mind”.
Erickson had long been a member of the pantheon of performers whose exposure to drugs in the 1960s expanded the horizons of rock but came at a serious cost to their mental health when exacerbated by brutal treatment by the authorities.
Arrested for possession of marijuana not long after the release of the Elevators’ now-lauded second LP, Easter Everywhere, Erickson was diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent for a spell to the Austin State Hospital asylum. After going on the run, he was committed to the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where electric-shock therapy and hefty doses of chlorpromazine shattered his already fragile mind.
Released into the care of family members, Erickson blossomed again with a new band and a series of fractured classics including Two Headed Dog and I Walked With A Zombie under the patronage of such fans as his fellow Texan Doug Sahm, of the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Stu Cook of Credence Clearwater Revival. Although Erickson lived in reduced circumstances and spent more time in a variety of institutions, a cult following steadily grew on both sides of the Atlantic over the ensuing decades.
The New York group Television covered the Elevators’ track Fire Engine, the title of which was appropriated by Edinburgh’s premier post-punk outfit, the Fire Engines, while Primal Scream’s acid-house version of Slip Inside This House became a key component of their era-defining, Mercury Prize-winning album Screamadelica. This had
resulted from the group’s participation in a tribute compilation in which other Erickson songs were covered by the likes of REM, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Julian Cope and ZZ Top.
The inclusion of You’re Gonna Miss Me in the 2000 cinema version of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity coincided with a career resuscitation chronicled in the 2005 documentary which took the same name as the track. The film shows how Erickson’s brother, Sumner, rescued the singersongwriter from the religious zealotry of their mother, who believed that the answer to his ills lay in prayer. Sumner – who became a tuba player with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra – helped wean Erickson off antipsychotic medication and set his life on a more stable path.
In 2007 the Pulp singer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker included the now-transformed Erickson in the line-up for the Meltdown Festival at London’s South Bank, where one critic described him as being “in fine fettle”.
Roger Kynard Erickson was born on July 15 1947 in Dallas, the oldest of five brothers, to Roger Erickson, an architect, and Evelyn, an amateur singer who encouraged the young Roky – which came from a contraction of his first names – in his early musical development. Erickson dropped out of high school just before graduation to join the local beat group the Spades, for whom he wrote and performed an early version of the raucous You’re Gonna Miss Me.
Erickson was soon spotted by the University Of Texas student and LSD proselytiser, Tommy Hall, who recruited him to the 13th Floor Elevators as frontman and rhythm guitarist. The group’s sound swiftly graduated from the garage R’N’B of their 1966 debut, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, to full-blown acid-rock with the release the following year of Easter Everywhere.
The group issued another LP – Live, a collection of studio out-takes with audience applause dubbed between the tracks – as things started to fall apart. Recording sessions for their final album, Bull of the Woods, collapsed, and Erickson appeared on only four tracks. Its release in 1969 came shortly before the first of his mind-numbing incarcerations.
Through the ensuing decades Erickson remained a prolific songwriter. Comic books, alien invasions, horror films and an obsession with Cold War spying informed his work, and there were occasional shots at mainstream success. Tom Hibbert first interviewed Erickson in 1980, when he was signed to the major label, CBS. Among the garbled revelations was the fact that he had insisted that Doug Sahm officially witness notarisation by Erickson’s lawyer that Erickson came from Mars.
The CBS contract was short-lived and thereafter Erickson relied on the support of such small independent labels as South London’s One Big Guitar, who helped expose his talents to a fresh generation of rockers.
But Erickson would have to wait another quarter of a century for mass audiences to catch up. In 2007, as well as travelling to Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown, Erickson performed at California’s Coachella festival and went on to play prestigious venues in New York, Australia and New Zealand. He collaborated with the Scottish band Mogwai on their Batcat EP, released in 2008, the same year that he was presented with a lifetime achievement gong at the Austin Music Awards by his friend, the ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons. Austin’s celebrated Amy’s Ice Creams even named a malted milk in Erickson’s honour. Latterly Erickson was reunited with the surviving 13th Floor Elevators, augmented by his son Jegar, for a performance at the Austin Psych Fest, which was renamed Levitation after one of the group’s songs in 2015. Two years later, the hot ticket in town was for Erickson’s 70th birthday party at the elegant pre-civil War mansion, the Charles Johnson House, where he was joined on stage by several music luminaries.
Recently Erickson had been recording new songs with Jegar for an album with his new band, the Hounds of the Baskervilles.
Roky Erickson married, first, Dana Gaines; they divorced, and he married Holly Patton. That marriage also ended in divorce, and he was later reunited with Dana (by then Dana Morris), who survives him along with three children.