Something in the Room · October horror special

The singer behind the 13th Floor Elevators filled The Evil One with creatures from old movies. Getting them onto a record took friends, arguments and a producer willing to keep the tape running.

By Margin Tone

Roky Erickson had a good explanation for the monsters. In 1975, the former singer of the 13th Floor Elevators was starting again with a band called Bleib Alien. The Elevators had brought psychedelic rock to a national audience in the 1960s, with “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and an amplified jug among the guitars. Now Erickson wanted to make something that felt like going to a horror movie. The songs would eventually fill the overlapping records known as Roky Erickson and the Aliens and The Evil One.

Talking to the Austin fanzine Not Fade Away, he reached for Curse of the Demon, the film in which Dana Andrews investigates a suspected supernatural killing. Erickson remembered a hot poker, a laugh, a fiery thing pursuing a man through the woods. He liked “the thrill, the fun of being able to go to a horror movie.” Asked about his new material, he brought up ghosts and gremlins waiting behind a door. “Fun things,” he said.

So much writing about Erickson approaches his songs with his medical history already open on the desk. His own account of the new band gives us an enthusiastic moviegoer, with some ideas about taking his audience along.

His return to music followed a punishing interruption. Arrested for marijuana possession in 1969, Erickson spent years confined at Rusk State Hospital in Texas. He was released in 1972. The Elevators were over, and attempts to revive the band went nowhere lasting. He had to find people who wanted to work on the songs he was writing now.

Doug Sahm, the Texas musician who led the Sir Douglas Quintet, helped get that work onto a record. He produced the 1975 single pairing “Two Headed Dog” with “Starry Eyes.” The pairing put his new monster song beside a love song, an early reminder of how much else he could write. In a later interview, Erickson spoke fondly of Buddy Holly’s gentle singing. He could love Little Richard’s scream and Holly’s ease without having to choose between them.

Billy Miller, who played an electric autoharp, was an important ally. He’d already taken considerable trouble over the new band’s presentation. In a later oral history in Psych Trail Mix, Patrick McGarrigle remembered Miller preparing a set of more than twenty-five songs at short notice for Bleib Alien’s appearance at Austin’s Ritz. Miller also brought a briefcase of lighting charts. He wanted the lights to go out during gaps, keeping the show moving instead of leaving the musicians milling around between numbers.

When Erickson put together a new group in California, he wanted Miller back. Miller later remembered hearing the band over the telephone and thinking it already sounded complete. Then he learned they were determined to add someone anyway. Rather than leave the vacancy to a musician who might spoil it, he joined.

The Aliens gave Erickson’s movie collection a place to go. Their producer, Stu Cook, had come from Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band whose hits had put concise, hard-working rock songs on the radio. Erickson brought him titles that sounded like the bill outside an all-night cinema. The combination had a useful practical question built into it: how to give these creatures a song they could live in.

Creature with the Atom Brain, a favourite he was still naming in a 2009 interview, supplied one song’s title. The 1955 film packs a gangster’s revenge plot together with a scientist’s technique for reviving corpses through atomic energy. The dead can be controlled by spoken commands. It’s an extravagant amount of trouble to fit inside a modest crime picture, and the title alone is a fine invitation to a rock song. The creature arrives with its own explanation, however scientifically unhelpful.

Listen: Roky Erickson, “Creature with the Atom Brain,” from The Evil One.

Miller told music writer Bill Kopp that Cook pushed for the album’s horror theme. There was resistance to “I Walked with a Zombie” from within the band. Miller defended it; Cook decided to keep it. Even among musicians working with Erickson, a song could need someone to stand up for its peculiar idea.

“I Walked with a Zombie” takes the name of Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film and makes a remarkably small statement with it. The lyric keeps returning to the same nocturnal encounter. It offers little of the explanation a listener might expect: who the companion was, where they went, whether anyone should be worried. Calling it a walk gives the impossible creature an ordinary social activity. There’s room for unease in that, and room for a smile. The band’s argument about including it is easy to understand. Its simplicity is the whole proposal.

Listen: Roky Erickson, “I Walked with a Zombie,” from The Evil One.

Cook’s work extended well beyond choosing songs. Erickson’s words changed between performances, and getting the album finished meant finding usable forms within the material. Cook kept recording, knowing that an important performance might arrive without warning. Later, when Will Sheff of Okkervil River produced Erickson, he recognised the working conditions Cook had described: Erickson would give himself to a song, then want to move on. A studio organised around repeating the same number until everyone was satisfied could miss what he was offering.

The sessions were interrupted by another hospital admission in Austin. Manager Craig Luckin told The Quietus that Erickson called him from a hospital pay phone to say he was ready to finish his vocals. Luckin and Cook travelled down with the tapes. Cook recalled putting on a coat and tie to check Erickson out for studio work, then taking him back afterwards. They continued for a week. Erickson had made the call and asked them to bring his work back.

Finishing it also involved decisions he didn’t make in the room. Cook reshaped lyric sequences as he assembled performances. In Kopp’s account of the sessions, Cook remembers wondering how Erickson would react when he heard the results. He had rearranged Erickson’s words as well as choosing between takes.

Getting the finished songs released brought another complication. CBS released a ten-song version in Britain in 1980, generally known as Roky Erickson and the Aliens. The American Evil One, issued by San Francisco’s 415 Records in 1981, shared five tracks with it and substituted five others. Later editions gathered all fifteen. That history explains why a conversation about the record can involve different titles, covers and remembered running orders.

Horror ran through Erickson’s sense of humour, too. Freddie Krc, drummer in the Explosives, who backed him after the Aliens, remembered an awkward encounter. At a San Antonio club, an owner told Erickson he’d been a fan for years. Erickson answered with a threat borrowed, Krc said, from Creature with the Atom Brain. The man was frightened. Krc recognised the movie reference.

The story, told to MAGNET in 2004, gives the encounter its missing context. Erickson was speaking to someone who didn’t know the film. A horror fan had chosen a spectacularly unsuitable moment to quote a favourite, and his bandmate remembered both the fright and its source.

Cook was still glad they’d made the record together. Asked in 2011 whether recording Erickson had been difficult, he called it a professional high point and described him as warm and humorous. He’d recently spoken with Erickson about the records. They still liked the work, and they remembered having fun making it.