Sweet Waste From Hell

Early-80s new-wave horror-hard-rock splatter. It took me years of loving this record and wishing it were different, before I realized how great it is, just as it was made.

The basic story can be found online-- Roky (pronounced Rocky apparently, though my whole life I always said "Roke-ey" and no one ever knew who the hell I was talking about so no one ever corrected me-- that's the pre-internet era in a nutshell) was a gleaming star of the bright new psych era in mid-1960s Texas.

He founded the hugely influential Thirteenth Floor Elevators, whose lyrics named this blog and have been an inestimable influence on me (and, more importantly, bazillions of others). He was apparently a self-aware, spiritual dude who liked to push some boundaries with his drug use.

Over the years this has become an "acid made him crazy" story. This may be at least partially true. These things happen. Lots of psychedelics and an unquiet mind can lead bad places.

It appears though that what really pushed things in the wrong direction was that, as a figurehead of a dangerous youth scene, Texas authorities hounded the hell out of him. Eventually he was caught with a single joint. His lawyer arranged for him to go to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, instead of long years in prison. Presumably this sounded like a good idea at the time, but they experimented with him there, using pretty abrasive techniques (electroconvulsive therapy among others) to banish his troublesome personality. He was never quite right afterwards: it seems like all the light turned to pain and negativity. Well, on the cusp of the 1980s that probably made a lot of sense too. I think of demons too, when I think of Ronald Reagan.

By the mid-70s he'd started making music again, and abandoned the relatively gentle trajectory of the Elevators, whose folky music was mostly about mind expansion, for abrasive hard rock based on horror movie themes. This album was one of the products of that time, though it wasn't released until 1980 or so.

Apparently he wasn't in very good shape through most of the intervening years. In 2007 however he started touring again, apparently having gotten enough help from family members to stay focused well enough to rock out. Since these songs are pretty uniformly dark-side, it may be hard to imagine them seeming like a beacon of love and hope. But, hearing him rock the hell out of them at that show was one of the most joyous concert experiences I've ever had.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zzm5xingojm/Roky Erickson & The Aliens- The Evil One.zip

One last thing: Merry Christmas.