Roky's children

Music under the influence of Roky Erickson, from Janis Joplin to Henry Rollins to Red River Street

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, July 12, 2007

Pop music influence is notoriously hard to track. To sound cool, artists lie about whom they love; influences sneak in without musicians noticing; and the whole thing becomes a big tangle of myth, fact, time and sound.

It gets even harder when the musicians doing the influencing are pop music's secret heroes, the obscure artists who caught the ear of those who became popular.

Roky Erickson is just such a figure. A regional psychedelic pioneer in the '60s with the 13th Floor Elevators, a punky cult act in the '70s, a damaged recluse who seemed to get more damaged and more reclusive in the '80s and '90s — the full extent of Erickson's influence and resonance is only now becoming fully recognized.

So who are the musical sons and daughters of Roky Erickson?

The voice

Perhaps the first and most controversial is Janis Joplin. It's hard to ignore the vocal similarities between Erickson's bluesy bark and Joplin's craggy belt.

Eddie Wilson seems a good person to ask. After all, it was at his original Threadgill's that Joplin got her start.

"The best I can tell you is Roky was a major impact on the town as Janis was just starting to lay her vocal eggs," Wilson says. "Without a doubt, Roky put this scream into vocals that just wasn't very common at the time."

Of course, both artists were fond of '40s and '50s R&B, but Wilson says that people forget Joplin started out as a folkie, strumming her autoharp. "You know, I've heard tapes of her sitting around singing stuff like 'Sloop John B,' " Wilson says. "Not just old folk songs, but really old Anglo stuff."

Wilson paused. "But you should talk to Powell St. John," he says. "He's one of the few places where the Elevators and Janis crossed in broad daylight."

Powell St. John is old school. A songwriter who started in Laredo before ending up in Austin in 1959, St. John landed in the Threadgill's scene, performing with Joplin and Lannie Wiggins in the Waller Creek Boys. He also wrote songs for the Elevators before splitting for San Francisco in the spring of '67 (good timing, that).

"That stuff's been kicked around for years," St. John says. His voice is almost impossibly quiet on the phone. "I was not aware of the association, but there probably was a certain amount of cross-influence. Of course, she took it somewhere else and made it Janis."

As for the old tale about Joplin almost joining the Elevators, St. John says they were certainly compatible, but there might have been extra-musical issues that kept Joplin at arm's length. "The Elevators were too hot to handle," St. John says, laughing softly. "Janis didn't want to get busted."

All the young punks

There's little doubt that the Elevators were an undersung influence on the San Francisco acid rock scene, psychedelic evangelists bringing hallucinogenic music to a scene that was just figuring out what it wanted to be.

The Stonesy, gritty rock subgenre that became known as garage rock is almost impossible to imagine without the howl of "You're Gonna Miss Me." Just check out any given night at Beerland for proof.

But as the '60s turned into the '70s and Erickson's legal troubles magnified, his music became more obscure, both aesthetically and physically. There were one-off singles of prot-punk and horror movie lyrics, poorly distributed EPs, a solo album of '70s tracks that went unreleased until 1980 in the U.K. ("Roky Erickson & the Aliens") and '81 here ("The Evil One"). This was bad for Erickson, but probably pretty good for his myth.

A young Henry Rollins sure got sucked into it. As a young punk recently drafted into the touring boot camp that was hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag, Rollins was hanging around undergrounders who were a little older, a little more versed in subcultures.

"For me, it's the Roky solo stuff that is truly brilliant," Rollins says. "I first heard 'The Evil One' at Raymond Pettibone's place ... and I was just floored." Rollins tried to tape everything he could get his hands on, the gritty guitars and whacked-out lyrics not too far afield from the confluence of '70s hard rock and punk that Black Flag ended up exploring on albums such as "My War."

"When the real book on American music gets written, he's going to be one of those Mount Rushmore faces," Rollins says. "There's no song or album where you're like, 'What the hell was he thinking?' "

It's the world-building that got to Rollins, Erickson's ability to crack open his brain and show it to you through song. "Guys like Roky make music that amazing place to go," Rollins says. "(John) Coltrane and Miles (Davis) and (Jimi) Hendrix were able to do this. It becomes more than the music and more than the lyric, a total environment. You just kind of forget about other music when his stuff is playing."

Rollins was also taken with the singular combination of Erickson's musical guilelessness and his natural ability with song, two qualities that often seemed in short supply as hardcore became more regimented.

"The music is so completely giving you all you need and it's coming from a very innocent place," he says. "The love songs are so irony-free and unconscious. He's not going around saying 'Who's going to laugh at this?' You hand the guy a guitar and music comes out and it's as good as anybody. He's like Dylan. He should be writing songs until he falls over."

The new super heavy psych

The past few years have seen a dramatic revival in the American psychedelic underground. The magazine Arthur seems to be its spokesrag and propaganda arm, drawing connections between '60s music and activism and its 21st century equivalents. Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and underground rock critic/archivist Byron Coley, both outspoken Roky worshippers, write a column for Arthur. Music coming out of the "freak folk/free folk" scene doesn't seem all that different from Erickson's mellower, acoustic numbers, especially his demos compiled on the "Never Say Goodbye" album.

Greg Ashley, born in Texas, living in Oakland, Calif., is all over this scene. Ashley's Texas band the Mirrors and his current outfit the Gris Gris are effortless combinations of acid folk, garage rock and hypnotic punk. Sound familiar?

"I think I was like 19 or 20," Ashley says. "I went to this record store in Houston called Black Dog Records. Everything was marked up about 4 million percent, but I happened to have a bunch of money, and I just asked the guy behind the counter about psych records. He sold me (an Elevators bootleg called) 'Fire in my Bones' and I just wore that (expletive) out."

Ashley, all of 27 now, seems taken with the lyrics as much as the sound. "The lyrics are just amazing for any time, let alone '60s rock music," Ashley says. "Those songs were really well put together and had real content."

Utrillo Kushner is the drummer from the hiatus-bound Comets on Fire, another band that embodied 21st century heavy psychedelic rock. He got to meet Erickson backstage while Comets was opening for Sonic Youth at Stubb's in 2004. He first heard Erickson's songwriting through punk legends the Minutemen's cover of "Bermuda." "I had no idea that was a cover," Kushner says. "I was astonished when the truth was revealed."

Meeting Erickson was another matter altogether. "It was totally like what I expected, really," Kushner says. "I heard that he was there, that he had been doing better, but he still freaked out when I took out my camera and asked if I could take his picture. He was still very much a fragile dude, very shy."

But his music sure wasn't. And isn't — these songs have stuck around, half-remembered from an Austin gig before the summer of love or on a tape played in the tour van or obsessed over with monkish devotion. It's that kind of music. The sons and daughters of Roky are everywhere, whether they know it or not.

"Whenever I put on a Roky album, it's always, 'Wow, who is that?' or 'Oh my god, I love Roky,' '' Rollins says. "I always love having that conversation."

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926