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

[Will Sheff]

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

http://bit.ly/9myvrH

(Parts I and II at http://bit.ly/bIJMeC and http://bit.ly/cK2NXJ)

Austin’s long-gone club The Jade Room was one of the first local venues to ever give The 13th Floor Elevators a steady gig. A divey “cocktail lounge,” The Jade Room resembled a derelict Chinese restaurant, complete with red-painted walls and a giant wooden Chinese dragon hung from the ceiling above the dance floor. They sold beers and “set-ups” – juice and tonic water and ice-cubes to mix with bottles of booze clients brought in themselves. These days, there’s an ugly cement parking lot where the Jade Room used to be, just a block North from a large concentration of Texas governmental office buildings. I worked in two of these buildings in the early 2000’s: first doing data entry at the Texas State Auditor’s office and then writing HTML code for the Texas Senate’s website. My band only had enough money to record a short demo, and had been struggling for years to even get a local Austin gig. At the time, I had just heard The 13th Floor Elevators – I had no idea I was working about a block from the club that had launched their careers, or that within the decade I would be making a record with Roky Erickson.

As my day tour around Austin with Roky continued, we piled back in the car and left the depressing old Jade Room parking lot, crossing the famous South Congress “bat bridge” over Town Lake, heading South to Roky’s old high school. We’d been scanning the car radio all afternoon and hadn’t found any songs we liked when suddenly a freak coincidence happened (all his friends will tell you that freak coincidences happen a lot when you’re around Roky) and we randomly flipped to a station that was playing a live version of Roky’s classic song “Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer).” When I heard the DJ’s voice, I realized he was an old friend of mine named John Erler, who I hadn’t talked to in years. I called the station and told John I was in the back of a car with Roky Erickson at that exact moment. I’m not sure he believed me, and he asked to speak with Roky, who was clearly nervous about a sudden impromptu radio appearance but just as clearly tickled by the whole situation. I enjoy the way, in this footage, you can hear the radio lag between what I’m saying and what’s coming over the air.

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Our next stop on Roky’s “This Is Your Life” tour was his old high school (which his son Jegar also attended later). It was at a high school talent show that Roky made his debut fronting a band, the Roulettes. Fittingly enough for Roky first-ever electric show, they covered Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Roky’s friend from the time remember the band being unnervingly loud, with all their amps turned up as loud as they could go. It was shortly after the show that the high school authorities approached Roky to asking him to could cut his long hair and, as Roky says in this video, he in turn “asked if I could go ahead and not do it,” dismissing himself from high school. For some reason, the woman we talked to in this interview doesn’t seem to understand that Roky actually never graduated; her suggestion of digging up an old “graduation photo” earns a wry, indulging nod from him.

VIDEO: http://bit.ly/9myvrH
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