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Psych-Rock Icon Roky Erickson Makes Triumphant Return to NYC

Halfway through his April 15th concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, Roky Erickson — the feral voice of the Sixties’ original psychedelic rangers, the 13th Floor Elevators — sang a song of returning: “Splash 1,” a folk-rock ballad co-written by Erickson more than forty years ago and drenched in thick, trippy echo on the Austin, Texas band’s debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. Erickson is no longer the teenage space captain — equal parts Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Buck Rogers — who originally rendered the opening lines like a call to acid mass: “I have seen your face before/I’ve known you all my life.” In the decades since, he has been through a legendary nightmare of drugs, incarceration and mental illness that, as recently as the late ’90s, seemed like it would never end. But it did. Erickson is alive, well and in the midst of an astonishing resurrection, touring outside Texas and California — the Elevators’ second home in ‘66 and ‘67 — for the first time ever. (The Bowery show and a date two nights earlier at Southpaw in Brooklyn marked Erickson’s live New York-area debut). Playing meaty rhythm guitar and armed with the gnarly power-trio muscle of veteran Austin band the Explosives, Erickson sang the chorus of “Splash 1″ at the Bowery with the virile force of a man determined to never go back to darkness: “And now I’m home/To stay.” The packed crowd sang with him too, in adoring welcome. In return, after the show, he sat at a table in front of the stage for almost an hour, signing autographs for fans and thanking each one for coming to see him. Erickson, who turns sixty this year, actually looks younger now — clean-shaven, bright-eyed — than he did in the sporadic and skittish live appearances I saw in Austin in the mid-Nineties. And his voice has lost none of its confrontational lu

Published: 2007-04-17
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Live Shows