The best tribute album ever made

Roky Erickson's music celebrated by others, from R.E.M. to ZZ Top to the Jesus and Mary Chain

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Most tribute albums are terrible, full of dull retreads of songs you already know well. "Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson" is not.

Released in 1990 on Sire Records, it both prefigured the tribute album craze and largely surpassed it. Unlike tribute albums to Elvis or the Beatles, a generation of rock fans had grown up knowing almost nothing about Roky Erickson or his music. These were excellent songs that had seemingly come out of nowhere, recorded by the popular (ZZ Top, R.E.M.) the semi-popular (Julian Cope, Thin White Rope, T-Bone Burnett) and the underground (Bongwater, Sister Double Happiness).

The man behind the album was Bill Bentley, a former Austinite then living in Los Angeles, working in publicity for Warner Bros. Records. Born in Houston, Bentley grew up a fan of Houston blues, becoming a fan of Erickson's 13th Floor Elevators and a music writer for the underground newspaper the Austin Sun. He ended up as the publicist for the L.A. record label Slash in 1983. Slash was purchased by Warner Bros. in '86; Bentley moved through the ad department into publicity in '88.

"It was at the second South by Southwest," Bentley says. "I was talking to (producer) Tary Owens about Roky. The last of the 1980s were not good years for Roky and we thought a benefit album would be a good idea."

Fortunes seemed to smile on the project from the beginning. "I brought it up with (future Reprise/Warner Bros. president) Howie Klein, who had just come over to Sire." Klein was the founder of the late 415 Records and released Erickson's first solo album, "The Evil One," in 1981, so naturally he was enthusiastic.

Bentley started contacting bands for newly minted covers as well as tracking down a couple of already extant tracks he thought would be solid additions, such as Bongwater's stately, heartbreaking version of "You Don't Love Me Yet," which had been released on a limited edition single on Bongwater founder Mark Kramer's label Shimmy-Disc. It was not easy to track down.

" I must have gone to about 20 little indie record stores looking for that thing," Bentley says. "Finally, I happened to walk into CBGB's and there it was on the counter."

A few of the original tracks had their own surreal stories. Bentley says the ZZ Top song, a ripping version of "Reverberation" that opens the album, almost didn't happen.

"(Billy) Gibbons used to play in the Texas garage band the Moving Sidewalks, so I knew he was a fan of the Elevators," Bentley says. But as the deadline drew closer, Bentley still didn't have the promised cover of "Reverberation" in hand. He already had a version, a quick-fire drum-machine-driven take by the Jesus and Mary Chain that deftly sampled the original, but ZZ Top were part of Texas rock history.

"It was literally the day I was going to take the DATs of all the songs down to the mastering lab," Bentley says. "(ZZ Top's then-manager) Bill Hamm walked into my office and said, 'I just want to tell you one thing about my band: Consistency.' He pulled Top's DAT out of his pocket and tossed it to me."

Then there was Julian Cope, whose music with the psychedelic New Wave band Teardrop Explodes probably owes the most to Erickson's sound and vision. Compared with Erickson's spare original, Cope's take on "I Have Always Been Here Before" is almost shocking, full of breakbeats, buzzing guitars and Cope's spacey vocals, which sound beamed from the other side of the galaxy.

"Cope did the track, but he mailed it to his label in America, not to me," Bentley says. "Cope was on Island at the time, and nobody over there had any idea what I was talking about. A pal had to go through the mail to find it."

(Neither Hamm or Cope could be reached for comment.)

R.E.M. wanted to do "I Walked With a Zombie" and thought someone else had claimed it. Bentley was quick to reassure one of Warner Bros. prestige acts: "I said, 'Um, guys, you can do anything you want.'" The alt-rock superstars show up a second time on the album. "The version of 'Bermuda' on there," Bentley says, "the one credited to Vibrating Egg? That's R.E.M. with their manager Jefferson Holt singing."

There's Poi Dog Pondering doing an acoustic "I Had to Tell You," ("just beautiful"), Doug Sahm doing "You're Gonna Miss Me," recorded with a very young Shandon on drums ("Doug did the jug parts with his mouth") and the Judybats' take on "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" ("The best thing they ever recorded!").

The biggest financial triumph for Erickson came from Primal Scream's cover of "Slip Inside this House," which gets transformed utterly into the electronic acid house sound that had galvanized the UK.

"That one was really important to me," Bentley says. "That song is my Holy Grail, and that version took awhile to grow on me." But Primal Scream also included the track on their 1989 album "Screamadelica," a record that made little impact in America but was a cultural event in Britain. "That probably made more money for Roky than the tribute album," Bentley says.

Bentley says the record generated about $40,000 in publishing royalties for Erickson, but, sadly, the album never recouped recording costs, so there were no royalties generated by the album from that side.

"Tribute records to me are all about leading people to the source," Bentley says. "I think the album's true value was getting Roky's name in front of people at a time when it wasn't."

Bentley left Warner Bros. last year and these days is working with the independent promotions company Fuzz. But "Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye" holds a special place in many hearts. After all, the songwriting's not too shabby either.

"I think Roky made some of the best music ever recorded," Bentley says. "I'll stand by that forever."

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926