Roky Erickson

(1971 – Included on the album “Never Say Goodbye”, Emperor Jones, 1999)

The history of rock is full of “burnt-out brains”, more often than not from the excesses of a life lived with alcohol and drugs as the accelerator, other times from the inadequacy of certain “science” to treat psychological disorders with methods only marginally more humane than electroshock. Often it’s both. And yet, between moments of lucidity and flashes of madness, the talent of these musicians still managed to hand down to eternity magnificent, moving records, where purity of vision, delirium and existential torment shake hands and meet on the mezzanine floor between heaven and hell. Long before it became a staple of grand rock mythology, madness as a creative engine had already earned full citizenship among avant-garde art movements. In particular, starting from the late 1940s the French painter Jean Dubuffet worked to have recognized the poetry hidden behind scribbled figures, deformed scrawls and graphic marks steeped in life. The Compagnie de l’Art Brut, which he founded, gathered and catalogued hundreds of examples of “other” art (drawings, sculptures, paintings) that found no place in official categories because they were made not by recognized artists, but by inmates suffering from some kind of mental disorder. People who simply sat down in front of the page and, without any “professional” concerns – like compositional balance, style, or how the public would react – or inhibitions of any kind (moral, social, cultural), laid bare, without aesthetic tricks or intellectual indulgence, whatever they had inside. And what a person forced to endure some form of restriction or deprivation has inside, what a human being who is segregated, pointed at and dissected in spirit has inside, can be wonderful but also terrible.

In rock, the most famous case is undoubtedly that of Syd Barrett, the “crazy diamond” of the immortal “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, the song his Pink Floyd dedicated to him after giving him the boot, genuinely exasperated by the all-too-volatile state of his psyche, which no longer allowed him to hold his own on stage. It was 1968 when Barrett was forced to leave the band he had founded; two years later he withdrew into private life. It was more of a seclusion, really, a stepping out of a world that he, unlike so-called normal people, simply didn’t see the same way. He is said to have lived in a windowless room, cut off from light, rarely going out. Before disappearing from the scene and surrendering himself, while still alive, to the myth of the mad, unruly genius, Barrett, despite being in a state of thoroughly precarious mental stability, managed to record two memorable albums, both from 1970: “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett”, for which he was given free rein. He could play whatever he wanted, just guitar and voice, and David Gilmour, Richard Wright and drummer Jerry Shirley would later work on those rudimentary recordings, handling the arrangements and overdubbing the other instrumental parts.

During the recording sessions Barrett displayed the typical symptoms of alogia (he would often answer his bandmates’ questions with words and phrases bearing no relation whatsoever to the topic at hand), but, in spite of his mental distress, he still managed to pair the odd, illogical associations surfacing from the depths of his mind with melodies candidly disgorged from the soul. It was probably surrealist automatic writing in its purest form, a spontaneous and necessary release of whatever reigns hidden in the unconscious. To put it in Freudian terms, Barrett was pure Id: irrational, amoral impulses in their raw state; a virgin instinctual expression that unleashed an innate melodic and poetic talent but, now that the fire of reason had begun to dim, wasn’t always able to take on a complete, coherent shape.

A fate similar to Syd Barrett’s befell Alexander “Skip” Spence, guitarist first with Quicksilver Messenger Service, then drummer on the Jefferson Airplane’s debut, “Take Off”, and finally the immovable linchpin of Moby Grape – at least until one night in 1968, high on LSD, he tried to take out drummer Don Stevenson and fellow guitarist Jerry Miller with an axe. After that incident, Spence was diagnosed with schizophrenia and Moby Grape cut him loose. A long convalescence followed in the psychiatric ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital Centre, where he was treated with Thorazine. He came out after six months, carrying with him untold suffering and notes for songs he wanted to record. Producer David Rubinson stepped in, took him to Columbia Studios, switched on the tape machines and left him alone, face to face with his own demons. Skip Spence recorded the twelve songs of “Oar” (1969) in complete solitude and total independence. Forty-four minutes that amount to a lucid portrait of madness, like the monomaniacs painted by Gericault, but with one crucial difference: “Oar” is a self-portrait lived in the flesh, a point-of-no-return odyssey through the blackest seas of the mind.

Rounding out this family tree of “burnt-out minds” are Peter Green and Roky Erickson. Their brains, too, were short-circuited by drugs and bad luck. Green, guru of psychedelic blues in Fleetwood Mac, left the band in 1970, after showing the first signs of the psychic instability that would, as the Seventies wore on, send him shuttling between clinics and psychiatric hospitals, where he would be diagnosed with a mild form of schizophrenia treated with electroshock therapy. Before beginning this ordeal, the British guitarist released, in December 1970, “The End Of The Game“: a snapshot taken from the edge of the precipice, the instant before the plunge.

Electroshock therapy also casts its dark shadow over the biography of Roky Erickson, revered patriarch of the psychedelic tribe with his 13th Floor Elevators, whom he left for good in 1968, as his problems with drugs and the law (he was arrested for marijuana possession) had become increasingly frequent. He was declared mentally unfit and managed to avoid prison, but it was a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire. And in this instance the fire wasn't merely metaphorical, since the court ordered that he be "treated" with electroshock therapy. Erickson was first sent to a psychiatric hospital in Houston, then confined to Rusk State Hospital, where he underwent a treatment straight out of "A Clockwork Orange". His health certainly did not improve; if anything, over time his behaviour grew increasingly eccentric: he started speaking gibberish - an invented language similar to the theatrical practice of grammelot - and claiming to be in contact with Martians.

His eccentricities vaguely recall those of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, an eccentric sculptor who lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, whom art historian Rudolf Wittkower called "a troubled madman" and whom one of his contemporaries even dubbed a "ghost-seer". Accounts from the time attest that Messerschmidt was indeed convinced he was persecuted by the spirit of proportion, which tormented him through whole nights with bodily torments. The German artist claimed that, to break this spell and drive away the ghosts, every evening he had to stand in front of a mirror and pinch himself, so as to induce on his own face the bizarre grimaces enshrined in his "character heads": busts depicting every kind of facial expression, from vacant mirth to grotesque physical pain.

The strange events Messerschmidt claimed to have experienced supposedly took place in the house on the Danube where he lived in a sort of self-imposed exile, having suffered in 1771 the humiliation of being dismissed from his academic teaching post precisely because of his health problems. Given the isolation the sculptor was forced into, perhaps Dubuffet's words apply to him in hindsight: "It is when a man is alone, when he is very bored and cannot rely on any kind of distraction or joy from outside, on any sort of celebration, that the conditions most conducive to the need to fashion, by his own means, without help and for himself alone, a theatre of celebrations and enchantments arise."

These are words that certainly apply to the Roky Erickson who, between February and March 1971, shut away with his acoustic guitar in a room at Rusk State Hospital, built his own personal theatre of enchantments and tremors, fairies and monsters, beauty and anguish. A handful of songs that were only released in 1999, along with other under-the-radar recordings, under the title "Never Say Goodbye". Melodies as fragile as the mind that wrote them, snapshots stolen from a wandering soul whose visions owed less to his own unsound mind than to a purity of gaze that no psychic disturbance could ever have clouded.

Among the six songs recorded in that hospital/prison, the tenderest and most luminous is this "I Love The Living You", a love song that sounds like an attempt at escape: "⟦Q1⟧". A simple line, not even particularly poetic at first glance. But what are those petals waiting for, sitting there on the flowers all day long? Someone who simply stops to notice their colours or their scent? Someone who comes to pick them? Wasn't Erickson himself a petal waiting for time to give back to him the beauty he'd been denied? While he lay there rotting in a cramped hovel under the pretence of receiving care, he was missing out on the small, wondrous things of the world - the ones free men no longer even notice.

The vocal is faint, seeming to break, like the chirp of a bird that has lost track of its flock. The guitar sound is dirty, the audio quality bordering on shoddy. It's not a problem - after all, the 13th Floor Elevators had been high priests not only of psychedelic music but also of garage rock and lo-fi aesthetics, that is, low fidelity in sound reproduction. But here we're beyond aesthetic choices, well past any stylistic conjecture. The voice of the soul needs no technical trickery nor intellectual flourishes. And Erickson's voice in "I Love The Living You" radiates the grace of someone who may well have gambled away every last neuron at the casino of LSD, but never sold off a single beat of his own heart: "⟦Q2⟧". Ordinary words that would occur to anyone, yet that hardly anyone would actually say. People are usually too busy admiring their own reflection in the sea of trivialities around them to bother thanking the person they love simply for being who they are: "⟦Q3⟧".

Perhaps the truly mad ones are us, the sane people, incapable - to borrow Coleridge's phrase - of that momentary suspension of disbelief, who renounce, in the name of some warped idea of reason, what our eyes feel and our ears see. A man who served out his own damnation with a guitar in his hands and the petals of an impossible love in his soul cannot be mad. Roky Erickson really did talk to aliens. And maybe to angels too.