Biography of Spooky Rocker Roky Erickson Gets Inside the Myth and Madness

Oral histories generally denote an amorphous "story" its gleaners failed to delineate properly. Not True Love Cast Out All Evil's retelling of Roky Erickson's life. Brian T. Atkinson dominoes his ripping garage rocker through dozens of prodigious sources pulsing a psychedelic tall tale in waves of sound and vision like someone huffing on an amplified kerosene jug.

Beginning at the forewords (Billy Gibbons, Henry Rollins) and loping over his preface, acknowledgments, and a brief timeline of its subject's revolutionary band the 13th Floor Elevators, the ATX music historiographer trampolines off the singer in the prologue – "She needed to get her own name more than [as] a member of the Elevators. She had to be Janis Joplin. I had to be Roky Erickson." – and deposits us in the Fifties living room of the Erickson clan of South Austin. Let that dissolve on your tongue for a moment. Linear rather than elliptical, the sleek yet meaty tome tracing The Songwriting Legacy of Roky Erickson allows most of its respondents a single entry only as it sings through a half-century of groundbreaking history.

"His parents were way bohemian," reveals opener Mike Pankratz, still-gigging father of local drummer extraordinaire Lisa Pankratz. "Their house was wacky. ... Calling them liberal would be an understatement."

"We grew up in a two-bedroom home in Austin," follows up Mikel Erickson, second of three initial brothers. "The house was built in 1947, while my parents were still living in Dallas, which is where Roky was born in July of that year."

Read more: https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2021-12-03/biography-of-spooky-rocker-roky-erickson-gets-inside-the-myth-and-madness/