Don't Miss Roky Erickson

In my ongoing hunt for Mansonalia, I recently stumbled on a little piece from 2012 written by the arch-drude Julian Cope. Commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the Manson family's incarceration, Cope states that "straight America" was given carte blanche to do away with pesky counterculture thanks to the family's three ring trial, while the greater outrages of war went unexamined. It isn't a new idea, but he adds some enthrallingly pissed-off language to the mix, and an interesting wrinkle.

"Thereafter," Cope writes, "the staring longhair -- Frank Zappa's archetypal hungry freak -- could be justifiably consigned to any state funny farm. Odd behaviour, send them away. In Texas, singer Roky Erickson endured years of shock therapy."

Roky Erickson? Cope makes a good point, even if his chronology is a little suspect. Erickson was already taking electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine in Texas as a way to avoid jail time -- for the crime of possessing a single joint -- while the L.A. police were still wondering what to do and who to blame over those killings up in the hills of the beautiful (read rich) people in Hollywood.

But Erickson was nonetheless a victim of America's dirty war against the '60s. His one certified hit single with Texas band the 13th Floor Elevators, a wild libidinal howl of rage called "You're Gonna Miss Me", will always be worth more than a thousand dry texts or PBS documentaries trying to explain the era. It's no wonder the authorities eventually piled on the starry-eyed 19-year-old kid who wrote and sang that tune.

What's ironic is that Cope does an admirable job of cutting through the false history of Manson but he's a tiny bit responsible for enshrining the mythology that swirled around Erickson. It was a seminal article he wrote for the NME back in the mid-'80s that turned a new generation onto Nuggets and the psychedelic garage underground that Rolling Stone and others had stricken from their record of the '60s. Cope's description of Erickson as some sort of mad and glorious burn-out was a big part of the allure. Thereafter, the 13th Floor Elevators were considered apart from all those other bands. They seemed powerfully spooky.

The truth is sadder and more mundane. Erickson's struggle with schizophrenia, his time as a human guinea pig in a Texas state mental asylum and the fitful years of creativity and squalor that followed were captured in the exceptional 2005 doc, You're Gonna Miss Me. You might want to catch up with the film -- and also Erickson's fine if bedeviled back catalogue as a solo artist, which has just received a deluxe reissue treatment from Light in the Attic Records -- in preparation for his appearance in Vancouver on Nov. 17.

You read that right. Local label La-Ti-Da is flying Erickson and his five-piece band into the Electric Owl for a single performance at its second annual Fall Down/Get Down festival. While the 2005 movie documents his wholly unexpected return to relative good health -- something that was cemented in poignant fashion by the wonderful 2010 album, True Love Cast Out All Evil -- it still seems barely plausible that Roky Erickson is coming here. But it's all true, you hungry freaks. Nab yourself a ticket and you'll never have to miss him again.