Things started to go wrong for Thirteenth Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson when he was arrested for possession of six marijuana joints in 1969. Faced with statutory imprisonment by the State of Texas, Roky cunningly pleaded insanity on the basis of having taken 300 LSD trips, and so spent three years in Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane on electric shock therapy and Thorazine. In a 1975 interview, he confessed, “I was such a good actor. If you put your mind to it you can really convince people, so you gotta be careful. At the end of three years…I said, ‘I lied, man’, and they said, ‘Yeah, sure you lied’.” Today Roky lives in a rundown shack behind an adult video store in a crack neighbourhood of Austin, Texas, and last month Emperor Jones Records released Never Say Goodbye, a collection of lost solo recordings, with all profits going to his trust fund.

Never Say Goodbye isn’t the first benefit album for Roky Erickson. A decade ago Where The Pyramid Meets the Eye (Sire Records) saw ZZ Top, REM, Primal Scream, Julian Cope, T-Bone Burnett and the Butthole Surfers come together to cover songs by the man all regarded as an influence and an inspiration, and once you are acquainted with Roky you will hear his echoes everywhere. Roky’s utterly sublime I Have Always Been Here Before prefigures Michael Stipe’s plaintive vocals on REM’s Nightswimming or The Wrong Child, and the infant Echo and the Bunnymen stole the Elevators’ sound effects and guitar licks. Television’s live album mysteriously re-titles an uncredited version of the Elevators’ Fire Engine as The Blow Up, and Julian Cope cites their Bull of the Woods album as the greatest record of all time. But the allure of Erickson’s music is inextricably linked to a convoluted life story.

Roky Erickson was born Roger Kynard Erickson in Dallas in 1947, entering the Top 100 at 17 fronting the Spades with You’re Gonna Miss Me. In 1966 he formed the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the world’s first psychedelic band, with beatnik undergraduate Tommy Hall, who brought the bluegrass instrument, the jug, into rock by dropping a microphone into one and banging it. After backing vocalist Janis Joplin headed west with Roky’s stage moves and hellcat vocals, their debut, Psychedelic Sounds, allied the amorphous acid-rock of contemporaries the Grateful Dead or Grace Slick’s Great Society to quasi-spiritual lyrics and an unflagging primal rock’n’roll energy, achieving its most intense peak on Slip Inside This House, from 1967’s follow-up, Easter Everywhere. Their final album, Bull of the Woods, was eclipsed by Roky’s incarceration.

Judged sane and released in 1972, Roky’s subsequent solo career has been derailed by his erratic working methods, his 1982 decision to legally declare himself a Martian, and his 1990 diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and organic brain damage. Sympathisers see the Rusk hospital regime as its root, but Mayo Thompson, founder of Texan contemporaries the Red Krayola, has since admitted diplomatically of Roky’s wholehearted embracing of 1960s drug culture that “the idea of taking acid every day is questionable”. Detractors describe Roky’s post-Elevators work as mired in B-movie imagery, but aliens, zombies and vampires were now as powerful symbols to him as Christian mythology had been before. His mother, Evelyn, explained that “the horror of Rusk had made fantasy easier to deal with”. 1995 saw the release of a charming 1985 session of understated country-folk tunes, All That May Do My Rhyme, while the compilation Gremlins Have Pictures collects the best of the rest, including I Have Always Been Here Before and the stomping Before In the Beginning.

The 14 murky tracks on Never Say Goodbye, six of which were taped by Evelyn Erickson in Rusk in 1971, are fossil imprints of how Roky might have evolved. In contrast, “lost” albums such as Nick Drake’s Tamworth in Arden sessions and Syd Barrett’s Opel sound as if they were never really lost at all, but had just popped to the shops without telling their mums. But battling through the zero fidelity and, stripped of the Elevators’ piledriving beats or the solo recordings’ graveyard twang, Never Say Goodbye reveals Roky as a kind of visionary Buddy Holly, yodelling undeniably pretty tunes that mix economic images and unpretentious cosmic allusions, though the songs can’t stand alone from circumstance. I Pledge Allegiance, a stark paean to liberty and justice, resonates deeply within a maximum security hospital. Something Extra, recorded at home in 1985, is the blueprint of a transcendental garage-rock mantra as powerful as Slip Inside This House, and it’s impossible to avoid trying to dream the song into corporeal form around the trance-like riff and devotional vocal.

Attempting to get Roky to elaborate on the story behind the songs is not easy. In 1995, Rolling Stone’s Don McLeese found Roky in his shack with 30 or so TV sets and radios all tuned in simultaneously to “a rock station, a gospel station, a police scanner, a CB radio, a monster movie on the VCR and white noise static”, while Mojo’s Tom Hibbert watched as local musician King Koffey, of Austin’s Butthole Surfers, made his daily visit to feed Roky’s cat. “Roky has an evolved and sensible attitude about talking about his music,” warned Craig Stewart, of Emperor Jones records, “ie, he won’t do it. And who am I to tell a 52-year-old man that he can’t sleep and watch TV all day? Sanest man in the world, if you ask me. His mom says he’s only as crazy as he wants to be, and I believe it.”

But, amazingly, Roky’s brother Eric was only a few websites away. “Your timing is great,” he wrote, agreeing to answer some simple questions via e-mail. “Roky and my mother came to the house for lunch today, and Roky was in the mood to respond.” And so, here are the authenticated fragments.

Roky is happy with Never Say Goodbye. He remembers his mom making recordings at Rusk “by mutual choice”, forgets if he ever performed any of the songs with the Missing Links, a band he formed inside with fellow inmates, but recalls them playing once in the hospital and once in Rusk city. Today Roky has no pets, apart from “Chug Bugs, the kind that like to stare at you when you eat”, and his preferred viewing is Funday Times cartoon favourite Pinkie and The Brain. He cites Scottish rockers Primal Scream’s radical retooling of Slip Inside This House as his favourite among many covers of his songs.

Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie is moved to an uncharacteristically animated state by the news. “Really? That’s the greatest. Unbelievable! The Thirteenth Floor Elevators doing Slip

Inside This House…it’s like molten lava. Easter Everywhere is a religious record, a holy record, that’s the best thing I could say about it.” Reflecting on the sensationalist stories attached to the infamous recluse, he offers something of a conclusion. “Roky talks about vampires and says he’s a Martian to stop people asking him about things he doesn’t want to talk about. People say he’s mad, but maybe he’s just got a sense of humour.” *

Roky Erickson, Never Say Goodbye, Emperor Jones, ej26cd;
Roky Erickson Trust Fund,
Rick Triplett Esq,
Graves, Dougherty, Hearon and Moody,
515 Congress Av,
Suite 2300,
Austin, TX 78701, US