Roky Erickson – The Evil One/Don't Slander Me/Gremlins Have Pictures [reissues]

The trouble with artists like Roky Erickson is that it’s impossible to separate the backstory – excessive drug consumption, stays in a mental institution, shock treatment, documents legally stating Erickson’s Martian heritage - from his output. But unlike, say, Skip Spence or Syd Barrett, the only crazy thing about Erickson’s three eighties solo albums is how together they sound. If, as the sleevenotes suggest, Roky wasn’t exactly mentally present at these albums sessions, you’d never tell from listening. Far from the psychedelic sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Evil One, Don’t Slander Me and Gremlins Have Pictures are ferocious sci-fi rock and roll records of damn fine calibre which, thanks to the great folk at Light In The Attic, are finally available on CD again.

Just a cursory glance at the tracklist shows Erickson’s main preoccupation on 1980′s The Evil One: ‘I Walked With a Zombie’, ‘Night of the Vampire’, ‘Don’t Shake Me Lucifer’. Those titles alone would amply demonstrate his state of mind, but the ravaged, tortured howl he adopts throughout this record says it even more clearly. Yet, these nightmarish scenarios (“If its raining and your running, don’t slip in mud, because if you do you’ll slip in blood…”) are wailed over some of the wildest, most accessible music of his career; ‘Two-Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)’ is Hammer Horror heavy metal and ‘It’s a Cold Night for Alligators’ almost choogles (no doubt inspired by producer Stu Cook’s former career as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bassist). Sure, it’s borderline parodic at times, but the best sci-fi trash always is, and you could gladly file this with your favourite Cramps record as a perfect LP to wheel out come Hallowe’en.

By comparison, Don’t Slander Me is downright normal; it occasionally sounds a little bit of its time (big drums? Tinny synths? Welcome to 1986), and the Big Widdly Solos do get a little bit tiresome after a while, but it’s a robust collection of wigged out garage rawk. ‘Haunt’ is a double-time rock’n’roll rave-up, complete with sock-hop sax, while the Buddy Holly hiccupping ’Nothing in Return’ is one of his most prettily sincere love songs. Slander is relatively shorn of its predecessor’s b-movie fixations, save ‘Burn the Flames’, the album’s astonishing seven-minute haunted basement of a centrepiece, complete with a freaky narrative and some genuinely evil cackling. And then there’s the unfathomably catchy ‘Starry Eyes’; joining The Records in the relatively small power-pop-classics-called-‘Starry Eyes’ club, its taut three minutes ride a classic surf-pop riff into a wave of jangle-pop bliss.

Gremlins Have Pictures mops up most loose ends from the era – live cuts stretching all the way back to 1975 and a few demos thrown in good measure – but it possibly works as a more coherent piece than the other two. ‘John Lawman’ is better known in its Okkervil River-assisted remake from 2010′s comeback True Love Cast Out All Evil, but this rampaging live version comes beamed from 1980, and the frenzied performance hammers home the song’s one lyric (“I kill people all day long, and sing my song – ‘cuz I’m John Lawman!”) even more than the weary Okkervil take. Ditto the live take on The Evil One‘s ‘Night of the Vampire’, which opens the set, on which the doomy minor-key dirge is heightened by Roky’s hilarious Bela Lugosi’s accent he adopts for half the song. Yet, much of the newer material sees Erickson go it alone or, at the very least, dial back the crazy and the volume. It’s entirely likely that on an album, ‘Anthem (I Promise)’ would have been turned into a banshified rock monster (see also: the 90-second demo of ‘Burn the Flames’ that appears here), but the intimate acoustic take here is phenomenal – which, admittedly, makes the line “Lucifer is the mother of witches” sound all the more incongruous. ’Warning (Social and Political Injustices)’, a live cut from 1975, is one of the best Bob Dylan knock-offs ever written, and ‘I Have Always Been Here Before’ shows a tenderness to Roky’s voice in a way that The Evil One and Don’t Slander Me give absolutely no sense of.

While Roky Erickson hardly needs any kind of critical rehabilitation – acid burnouts are immortal to the music press – these reissues are a timely reminder of just how much power he could muster when he put his mind to it. If you want to know as much about the downs as the ups, watch 2005′s troubling You’re Gonna Miss Me documentary. If you just want to hear Roky at his peak, head straight for this trilogy. Just make sure you leave the lights on afterwards.