VIDEO: Roky's Tour of Austin - Part II of IV

[Will Sheff]

ROKY ERICKSON'S TOUR OF AUSTIN, PART II OF IV UP AT THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE SITE:

http://bit.ly/cK2NXJ

At the start of Part II of my tour around Austin with Roky Erickson, we visit the grounds of Roky’s childhood elementary school, which he hadn’t seen in so long that he told me that the old familiar outline of the first building in which he was schooled looked like an obscure “scribbling” to him.

After we stopped the camera and walked around on the lawn for a little while, Roky’s son Jegar told me that as a child he went to both the same elementary and high school as Roky did. He told his father that he spent some of his younger years living in a house right across the street from the elementary school. Roky – who Jegar barely knew through much of his childhood due to personal problems in Roky’s life – asked, “Is that right?”

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After visiting Roky’s old school, we took a quick ride over to a street corner on West Mary, in the heart of South Austin. We stopped on a street corner outside the old South Austin church –designed to resemble a Franciscan mission – that Roky used a rehearsal space for his first gigging band. It was 1965, and Roky had recently returned from an eye-opening stay in New York. Back in Texas, he gathered together a group of high school friends, his mother Evelyn snagged the church as a rehearsal space, and the newly-christened “Roulettes” brought in their drums and their amplifiers and set to work learning a set of covers by Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles – along with two original songs by Roky, “We Sell Soul” and his signature “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”

Adopting matching uniforms of black and red, the Roulettes soon started booking gigs on the fraternity and sorority-house circuit (a training ground for so many other garage groups of the era) and at the local Austin Y. The shows got wilder and wilder as Roky began experimenting with feedback and noise; soon he scrapped the matching outfits (he told me recently he thought they were “kinda churchy”) and renamed the band The Missing Links. (Later, when locked in the Rusk State Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane, Roky would create a resurrected version of The Missing Links, with the lineup this time populated by inmates – rapists and murderers backing the kid who’d been thrown in prison for possession of a single joint).

The Missing Links were short-lived, though; when a locally-touring band called the Spades lost their lead singer, Roky and a Missing Links guitarist named Elf both defected and joined the more successful group, which Roky would in turn quit to join the 13th Floor Elevators. Later, following the band’s drug bust, the Elevators moved from jug player Tommy Hall’s house – the site of the bust – and again took up rehearsing in this space. (Times having changed, the church-turned-rehearsal-space is now in its latest incarnation – as an expensive South Austin vacation rental.)

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We then drove to Wire Recording, the studio owned and operated by the fantastic producer and engineer Stuart Sullivan. Okkervil River recorded most of The Stage Names at Wire, and it was at Wire 14 years earlier that Stuart recorded Roky’s last album All That May Do My Rhyme, Roky’s first foray into a more rootsy style.

From the very start of the True Love Cast Out All Evil project, I knew I wanted Stuart to be involved. We tracked much of the record at Austin’s Public Hi-Fi studio, but overdubs and mixing were done at Wire, and it was at Wire that I played Roky the final finished product for the first time. (Once in the live room, you can see me try to interest Roky in the outlandish size of a beautiful old RCA 44BX microphone; he was more interested in the Target space heater in the corner.)

*

After leaving Wire, we drove downtown.

Downtown Austin is the oldest part of the city and has long been its music center. Although much of the scene is centered on 6th Street these days – a long stretch of venues and frat shot bars that is the main staging ground for the SXSW music festival – the Austin club scene of the mid 1960s skewed just slightly North, around the parallel streets of San Jacinto and Red River.

Red River’s New Orleans club was an early Austin edifice, dating back to the 19th century, which had fallen into disrepair and by 1966 was operating as a combination Mexican restaurant and piano bar that had begun branching into rock music. After their drug bust, the Elevators’ profile grew but their gig options narrowed, until finally the booker at the New Orleans club decided to take a chance and make some money off audiences eager to glimpse Austin’s rebellious psychedelic celebrities. The Elevators honed their sound at a New Orleans residency, playing a set of covers interspersed with the original compositions that would make up their debut album. At one of their New Orleans shows, they shared the bill with their local musician friend Janis Jopin. In a review of one of the other New Orleans shows, local music critic Jim Langdon re-printed the name the band had invented for their new genre: “Psychedelic Rock.” Langdon’s article is the first known use of that term in print.

In the early 70’s, the New Orleans club was uprooted and moved next door, adjacent to a concert hall. It’s now an auxiliary building on the grounds of a Mexican restaurant called Serrano’s. I’d never been there before, but when Roky and I went they had just set out food hotplates for a private party in the old building that used to be the New Orleans club. At first the people from the restaurant wouldn’t let us in there, but they relented after some wheedling. I love the part of this video where I recount a legendary acid freakout by the band’s first bassist and Roky straight-facedly replies, “I wonder what that’s about.” I also love his undisguised shock and surprise at seeing the location of the original New Orleans club up on the grassy hill next door. Though it’s now been turned into some crappy office buildings, it’s still clearly very recognizable and evocative.

VIDEO: http://bit.ly/cK2NXJ
"TRUE LOVE CAST OUT ALL EVIL:" http://www.truelovecastoutallevil.portm ... s/home.php
PAUL DRUMMOND'S "EYE MIND:" http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Mind-Erickson ... 515&sr=8-1

[makers]

Interesting history about Roky and the scene he grew up in. Nice backstory to the clip as well. After watching a couple interviews and clips with Roky, I wonder how aware he is of his surroundings- especially putting things into their historical or situational context. He appears very sweet and acquiescent (even to the point of responding to questions/ comments with nonsense, apparently just to be in agreement). I imagine that is a result of institutionalization. As a bystander, I hope he's benefitting from this exposure. For I all I know, he's having the time of his life. I hope so.

[Cedric]

In no way do I mean this detrimentally if its untrue, but by my observations he acts like he's done some acid before. What an interesting man though.

[Nalli]

Wish I could be there to watch you playing!!!
I wonder if one day I'll get it...

Brazilian hugs!