A Long, Strange Trip
Drug abuse, schizophrenia, family and friends who meant well but did harm, and through it all, undeniable genius. For Roky Erickson, life as one of the most influential Texas rock and rollers of all time has been a long, strange trip and fortunately, it isn't over yet.
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Roky signed a management and publishing contract and seemed to be getting his life in order. But in 1979 Dana, who was tired of Roky not taking his medicine and worried about how his antics were affecting their three-year-old son, Jegar, drove Roky from San Francisco to Austin and left him with Evelyn. Roky was soon discovered by local punk rockers, and he played with avant-weirdos the Re*Cords and then the new-wave band the Explosives. In 1980 he made his first full solo album (its title is a bunch of runic symbols) for CBS in England, where he had a devoted following. He was taking his medicine again, though producer Stu Cook later told an interviewer that Roky didn’t like how it made him shake and wobble. “Roky would often say that he’d rather be nuts …than the way he felt,” said Cook. As soon as Roky started feeling better, he’d go off the medicine and start taking speed and any other drugs his friends gave him. Divorced from Dana, he married a former bartender named Holly Patton, with whom he had a daughter named Cydne in 1984.
But Holly left too, and Roky wound up living with friends. Roky was always surrounded by friends. One of them was Jack Ortman, a fan who had been collecting everything ever written about Roky. In 1986 Ortman released the first of four volumes of Roky scrapbooks—it had more than three hundred pages, a sign of how vast Roky’s influence was. Though CBS rejected a second album, small labels in the U.S. and Europe were releasing various studio and live bootleg albums, many recorded and released by Roky’s friends. In 1987 Roky played his last full show, at Austin’s Ritz Theater, and it too was eventually released as a live album. At the end of the show you can hear Roky calling out to his audience, “Thank you! Thank you! I really enjoyed the show! Thank you for playing tonight!” Inscrutable and lovable, he was a full-blown cult hero.
But there wasn’t much money coming in to support Roky or Evelyn, who had been separated from her husband since 1979 and who had power of attorney over her son. She’d cash his Social Security mental-disability checks and give him $20 every other day for food and cigarettes. She moved him to federally subsidized housing in Del Valle, southeast of Austin. Roky shared a mailbox with two other tenants, including a friend of his. Roky would collect the mail for all three and take it to his friend, who would distribute it. When the friend moved out, Roky continued to collect the mail for all three addresses. Around Christmas a new tenant figured out why she wasn’t getting any mail and called the police, who found it unopened and tacked on the wall near Roky’s front door. Though Roky had clearly not intended to steal her mail, he had committed a federal offense, and this time he was sent to a federal mental institution in Missouri. He eventually wound up back in the Austin State Hospital, where he was given therapy and medicine for sixty days and then released. Roky immediately stopped taking his meds, and visitors to his home would walk in on a bunch of TVs, radios, stereos, and police scanners blaring white noise. Roky called the noisemakers his “electronic friends” for hiding the voices in his head.
As the nineties began it seemed like Roky would finally get some of the recognition he deserved and the money he was owed. On Halloween, 1990, Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye was released by Sire—a nineteen-track compilation of Roky’s songs done by rock stars he had influenced, such as REM and ZZ Top. Several trusts were set up to organize Roky’s finances. Attorneys hired by Evelyn, working pro bono, began a ten-year battle to get back royalties from International Artists; they claimed that though the band had sold many records, members had never received any royalties from label owner Lelan Rogers (who would soon sell the Elevators catalog to Charly Records in England, meaning the attorneys would now have to go after them). Roky began playing in public again at the urging of his friends, first at birthday parties and then at the Austin Music Awards. Unfortunately, he played the same four songs at every appearance. During one performance, when Roky forgot the words to one of his songs, Bill Bentley says, “I realized that he had no business being up there, and I might have helped push him up there.”
Roky made it through the past decade because of a steady group of minders who, along with his mother, took care of him. They’d go to his house, marvel at the noise and mess (in the wake of his mail bust, Roky had become obsessed with getting mail, writing away for every free catalog he could get), take him out to dinner, drive him around, hang out at Evelyn’s—the one place Roky would relax—and marvel at his resilient way of seeing the world. Once, on an election day, Roky, Casey Monahan (the director of the Texas Music Office), and Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey were driving around when Coffey asked Roky if he had voted. “I’m voting right now,” he replied. Most of his minders were music business veterans like Monahan, musicians Owens and Coffey, freelance journalist Rob Patterson, and Emperor Jones label owner Craig Stewart. All seemed to see in Roky qualities that made them fall in love with rock and roll in the first place. As Monahan says, “He’s a guy who’s been screwed so many times but still looks at the world with an innocence completely at odds with his experience.”
In 1993 Monahan, with help from Roky’s brother Sumner, began collecting all of Roky’s songs and poems; two years later they were published as Openers 2. Monahan also got Roky back in the studio again, for the first time in a decade, to record six old songs that were combined with five that were already recorded; the result was All That May Do My Rhyme. Roky’s voice wasn’t as strong as it once was, but it’s a gorgeous album and one on which you can hear his true genius—his love songs. Roky’s melodies will break your heart, from the luminous “Starry Eyes” to the soulful “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” Sumner played tuba on the album and was getting more and more involved in Roky’s life. Like his brother, Sumner had been a teen prodigy, though he had followed a different path. He started playing the tuba in junior high school and was asked to join the prestigious Andre Previn-led Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra when he was only eighteen.
Sumner wanted his brother back on medication, but Evelyn wouldn’t hear of it and neither would Roky. They didn’t trust doctors. Evelyn thought Roky’s friends were the best medicine he could have, and she distrusted anti-psychotic drugs. She told me that Haldol, which Roky had taken in 1968, gave him the shakes and made him walk like a zombie. “You have to be careful,” she says. “These psychotropic drugs should be monitored very seriously. If they’re going to treat your mind, they should look at your whole body. Look at all the people who’ve died because of drugs.” Evelyn’s antipathy to prescription drugs comes partly from Roky’s experience with hallucinogens. Evelyn and Roky didn’t seem to trust dentists either. Roky’s teeth were rotting in his gums, and he was in a lot of pain, but still, remembers Patterson, “He’d say, ‘I’m not going to the dentist!’ And Evelyn would say, ‘Roky, if you don’t want to go to the dentist, that’s okay.’” Evelyn often said that what Roky needed was more people praying for him.
But Roky’s minders think there was more to her refusal. “It was to protect her relationship with Roky,” says Owens, “to protect her control over his life.” There was a degree of madness behind her method, says Monahan: “Every woman Roky has ever been close to was ostracized by Evelyn. The only way for her to keep control was no girlfriend, no prescription drugs, no therapy. She seems to gain her identity from being his caretaker.” Warner Bros. Records executive Bentley disagrees. “I never saw the dark side of Evelyn,” he says. “She tried to cure Roky in so many ways, according to her belief. She might have loved him too much. He was her oldest, the most talented. He was a star, a little God-like creature.”
Besides, Bentley says, picking on Evelyn misses an important point. “It’s easy to say Evelyn told him not to take his meds,” he says. “I think Roky liked the nothingness of his life. There was too much gigging and practicing.” Roky is the king of the lollygaggers, and even as he has attracted people to him, bringing out their best—a sense of wonder, a nurturing instinct, a rush of gratitude that gentle weirdos like him walk among us—he has allowed them to take advantage of him, to turn him on, prop him up, trumpet his resurrection and their place alongside him. Roky, who is smarter, stronger, and more aware than anyone gives him credit for, is his own worst enemy: relentlessly passive. As his old friend Kinney says, looking back on Roky’s life, “Sometimes I think he just didn’t want to get a job, and he’s pulled it off beautifully.”
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