Photos by Jason Wolter

​Roky Erickson
Continental Club
October 1, 2011

Roky Erickson, the godfather of Texas psychedelic music and one of the state's most beloved musical figures, has come far since his days of disabling schizophrenia and poor health. Saturday night he roared through an hour of material that spanned his entire catalog as he looked healthy and fairly at ease.
 
Blasting off with "Cold Night for Alligators," one of the anthems of the Blieb Alien years when he wrote songs about aliens, horror-film topics, or science fiction, Erickson wasted little time laying down the law of the evening: Turn it to 11 and let it rock. Hard. He immediately slashed into the edgy warning "Don't Slander Me." So much for warming up the crowd, which was with the 63 year-old Austinite note for note.

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savagesaints.blogspot.com

​"The past is not dead," William Faulkner once said. "It's not even past."

Rob Landes, organist for '60s Houston psych-rockers Fever Tree, found this out a couple of years ago when he discovered some old boxes labeled "Fever Tree Live Session." Inside were some reel-to-reel tapes, but Landes couldn't remember the group ever doing a live recording. The handwriting belonged to Fever Tree's late former manager Scott Holtzman, "so I couldn't call him and ask what they were," he says.

Instead Landes, now a jazz musician, took the tapes to SugarHill Studios, where he was doing some session work. He gave them to the studio's co-owner and chief engineer Andy Bradley, who processed them and told Landes, "I think you've got something really good here."

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Zach Wolfe

​In the Black Lips' recent video for "Go Out and Get It," the Atlanta garage boys are seen on a cruise ship and on some tropical beach surrounded by vacationing bikini-clad hipster gals, all messy hair and sunglasses, sipping drinks like some endless Sunday Funday.

The band will be in town tomorrow night at Fitzgerald's upstairs, with Infinite Apaches, and a new line-up of the resurrected Weird Party in the opening slots.

"Go Out and Get It" comes from the band's upcoming Arabia Mountain, which was helmed by wunderkind producer Mark Ronson, who most recently brought Duran Duran back to their mid-'80s zenith.

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Besides "I Wanna Be Sedated" And "Blitzkrieg Bop"

Dawkeye via Wikipedia

​It was ten years ago today that the world lost their first Ramone, when Joey Ramone succumbed to lymphoma in New York City at the age of 49, one month shy of turning 50.

The iconic punk frontman would lead the Ramones in death as he did in life, with Dee Dee Ramone overdosing in 2002, and the band's resident agitator, Johnny Ramone, losing his valiant fight with prostate cancer in 2004.

Everything about the Ramones - the music, the lyrics, the uniform, the hair, Arturo Vega's art direction - makes the band timeless. They aren't just for punk rockers; they never have been. They are for the losers, the winners, the outcasts, the ugly, the pretty, and especially the insane.

Shock treatment, anyone?

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myspace.com/thekrayolas

​

San Antonio Tex-Mex garage-rockers the Krayolas, who sharpened their political claws on the Little Steven-endorsed "Corrido (Twelve Heads In a Bag)," have set their sights on Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law on the band's new single "1070 (I'm Your Dirty Mexican)."

The Krayolas recorded the glowering, mid-tempo "Mexican," the first song featuring the band's original lineup of Hector Saldana (vocals/bass/organ), his brother David (drums/vocals) and Van Baines (guitar) since debut 45 "All I Do Is Try," last Sunday at San Antonio's Blue Cat Studio. It was getting radio play on Alamo City stations KEDA and KSYM within 12 hours, says Hector Saldana, and is also available on iTunes and streaming on the Krayolas' Web site. Listen to it here.

"I think this is an important issue and felt I couldn't be on the fence," Hector told Rocks Off via email.

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Ed Note: All this week, to celebrate the release of Dr. Roger Wood and Andy Bradley's new book House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios and preview this weekend's related festivities at Sig's Lagoon and the Continental Club, Rocks Off and Lonesome Onry and Mean are looking at the history of the legendary Houston recording compound, decade by decade. Monday, we did the 1940s; Tuesday, the '50s; and today, the '60s

​For Gold Star Studios, the huge wave of country hits of the 1950s went out like the tides as the 1960s arrived. By mid-1961, Gene Thomas had arrived on the scene with his blue-eyed soul hit "Sometimes," which would later be covered by Doug Sahm in the '70s. Bluesman Joe Hinton, part of Don Robey's Duke-Peacock/Back Beat roster, had three hits from Oct. 1963 to Jan. 1965, including a No. 13 with his version of Willie Nelson's "Funny (How Time Slips Away)."

But with the arrival of the Beatles, the pop music industry immediately began to adjust itself to the British Invasion sound. Enter the Ragin' Cajun, Huey P. Meaux, and San Antonio rockers Sir Douglas Quintet. Climbing rapidly to No. 13 in mid-1965, "She's About A Mover" was the first effective Texas shot fired at the Limey invaders, and established the Quintet on the national pop culture scene.

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​Meghan Hendley of Solanae and Marcus Gausepohl from Golden Cities announced another installment of last year's successful "Lost In Space" music festival Monday afternoon. The second Lost In Space is scheduled for April 30 at 6 p.m. on the rooftop area of Midtown coffeehouse and bar Khon's.

The first installment of the event was held back in early December and featured acts like Austin's Weird Weeds and My Education, along with a smattering of Houston bands like Gausepohl and Lance Higdon's Golden Cities, B L A C K I E, Ghost Town Electric, and LIMB.

The event was well-received, with Rocks Off's own Adam P. Newton hailing it as a place for bands that didn't fit into "the traditional Mango's-to-Walter's-to-Mink circuit to perform before an audience that otherwise has never heard their music."

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Photos by Jay Lee

​Society has a duality when it comes to accepting or rejecting the "crazy," depending on their social strata. The rich or hip are deemed to be delightfully eccentric, while the paupers are laughable psych cases on the side of the great thoroughfare of the "sane." When you do anything remotely creative and/or innovative while "insane," it will be hailed as a priceless artifact from your delicate and damaged brain casing. The homeless guy on the corner who makes animals out of plastic bags is just labeled a loser.

Roky Erickson, who packed the Continental Club for the second time in just under eight months Wednesday night, is one of those guys whose work will forever be scarred by the archaic nature of the '60s. The Texas penal system, the nascent nature of the psychiatric community, and misguided medical procedures worked as a power trio to do a number on Erickson. Maybe if he hadn't have been given electroshock therapy to combat his schizophrenia and wasn't sentenced to ten years for possessing a joint soon after, people wouldn't be making a fuss over him. Rusk State Hospital wouldn't have such a notorious name either.

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The mystery of what happened to former Thirteenth Floor Elevators electric-jug player Tommy Hall has been solved. Happily, he seems to be OK, all things considered.

George Ripley, who posted that Hall had been hospitalized Wednesday on the Texas '60s Music Refuge Yahoo! message board, sent Rocks Off an update yesterday evening.

"On or about February 12th, Tommy Hall suffered a heart attack."

Don't worry, it gets better.

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Earlier this afternoon, Rocks Off's friend, former colleague and Dirty Honey DJ Brett Koshkin forwarded us a post from the Texas '60s Music Refuge Yahoo! message board that former Thirteenth Floor Elevators member Tommy Hall, whose warped electric-jug stylings defined the Elevators' sound as much as front man Roky Erickson's hellhound vocals, has been hospitalized in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, that's about all we - or anyone else, it seems, including Hall's family - know at the moment.

The only other thing the message, posted by "Psycherelics," said was that Hall was suffering from an "undisclosed illness." Rocks Off emailed our counterpart in San Francisco, SF Weekly music editor Jennifer Maerz, who wrote a cover story on Hall for the Weekly that the Houston Press reprinted last March. Maerz said she had just received an email from Hall's sister inquiring "where he was or if he was in the hospital."

"They can't find him or confirm anything," she said.

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